An end to performance management?

The publicly funded museum sector in England has undergone a considerable degree of policy-driven changes since the late 1990s. These have redefined and widened the range of activities society expects of museums and restructured their mode of governance around a regime of performance management. The aim was presumably to make museums more accountable, efficient, entrepreneurial and responsive to customer needs.

Against this backdrop, and based on accounts gathered via interviews with 44 museum staff from nine museums and four professional/policy-making bodies, research sought to understand and map the effects of performance management, both intended and unintended, on museum work and the organisational culture of publicly funded museums in England. The regime of performance management, in principle, aims to create comparability of performance within public sector organisations. However, the findings suggest that there is hardly anything that could be described as a uniform way of relating to performance management.

A large amount of energy and resource is diverted into the frequent information-gathering that render its cost-effectiveness and usability questionable

Variations are primarily shaped by the museum’s size and source of funding. As non-statutory organisations (that are therefore vulnerable to budget cuts), local authority museums seek to justify their existence primarily in terms of feeding into the social policy agendas of the local authorities. It has become a vital feature of museum work to constantly advocate the importance of their contribution to the delivery of core statutory services. This stands in stark contrast to the much higher degree of autonomy retained by ‘the big nationals’, where performance management takes a ‘light-touch’ and ‘notional’ form.

The nationals’ case against sector-wide comparable measures has been made in terms of the uniqueness of individual museums within the UK and internationally. On the other hand, in both local and national museums, policy-driven performance management could provide a transferrable model for museum organisations. This is often appropriated as an internal technique of organisational management, to inform evaluation and strategy, without necessarily bringing the whole organisation in line with the script of performance management. This is the case, for example, with measuring visitor numbers.

While some form of evaluating performance can be seen as legitimate and necessary, there have been some significant unintended effects that have in some cases prompted critique and even resistance, especially from national museums. A large amount of energy and resource is diverted into the frequent information-gathering that render its cost-effectiveness and usability questionable. It has also been criticised for its quantitative bias and its inability to accommodate qualitative dimensions. Further, the performance management regime could work against the organisational integration of the various divisions within the museum by inducing unnecessary competition. Different ways of relating to one performance indicator can fragment a museum’s work into competing operational enclaves.

The one-sided, policy-driven preoccupation with measurable public-facing outputs also tends to overshadow, and fails to give due recognition to the behind-the-scenes process, as well as sidelining those collections that are seen as the linchpin of the museum’s unique organisational identity. Performance management tends to favour and prioritise measurable outputs that may not be sufficiently linked to these key collections.

Other areas that the performance management regime fails to take on board include the crucially important volunteering and professional development opportunities offered within the museum sector, which are critically important for the sector's sustainability.

There are now clear signs that the policy commitment to performance management has undergone a rethink, following a period of over a decade when it had been all the rage in museum policies in England. The discontent around performance management has prompted a critique, spearheaded by the art world and mainly from a qualitative perspective, on the grounds that the experience of art is too subtle and singular to capture through counting surface-level numerical indicators within managerialist timeframes that say little about the quality of experience.

In policy circles, the debate was reshaped by the McMaster Review, based on consultation with a broad range of players in the cultural and arts sector. The review recommended developing a culture of self-assessment, in conjunction with peer review techniques, where professional judgment occupies centre-stage.

There have been some limited experiments with tagging a peer review element to the regime of performance management, although it is not clear to what extent this will loosen the grip of local authorities’ way of dealing with local museums, especially in the current environment of austerity cuts. With the transference of the Museums Libraries and Archives’ role into the stewardship of Arts Council England, the move towards a peer review model appears set to continue and perhaps to become more mainstreamed. In any case, the attempt to accommodate a peer review element implies the recognition that professional judgment and expertise have an indispensable role to play in assessing and enhancing museum work and museum professionalism.

Anwar Tlili is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education & Professional Studies, King’s College London.
www.kcl.ac.uk

Comment from Deborah Bull

A recent report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, Enriching Britain: Culture Creativity and Growth highlighted that only 13% of museum-goers are from lower socio-economic groups. This recognises that successive governments’ commitment to free entry have failed in their intended aim to make museums more inclusive.

Anwar’s research is important in helping us explore possible solutions to this challenge. It shows how the relatively recent move towards peer-reviewed models of performance management, which work with and for both the museum and its local communities, could help create replicable models of public engagement that reach all areas of society.

It is here that higher education can add real value to the arts and culture sector, both by ensuring that the sector has access to robust research, through tools like CultureCase, and by working with museums in new and innovative ways to help to deliver real and systemic change.

Deborah Bull is Director of Cultural Partnerships, King’s College London.
www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural

This article is a summary of research prepared for CultureCase, a new resource from King’s College London to provide the sector with access to academic standard research. A copy of the full academic article is available here.