The Great Sustainability Challenge: How Visitor Studies Can Save Cultural Institutions in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT Sustainability will be the great challenge for many cultural institutions in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Changing patterns of government, corporate, and individual support, new demographics, and new ways of creating, preserving, and sharing information are all challenging the sustainability of museums and other cultural institutions. In 2001 a meeting of science museum leaders in Bristol identified 3 distinct but interacting dimensions to sustainability: financial, intellectual, and social. Financial crises are the most obvious threats to the survival of institutions, but intellectual and social weaknesses can be equally dangerous and can make a temporary financial problem fatal. Visitor studies have the potential to provide crucial understandings that cultural institutions will need to build new, more sustainable models than the ones which served the previous century. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Carol Enseki, Ross Loomis, Karine Lepeuple, Mary Ellen Munley, Cary Tisdale, and all of my fellow participants from the Bristol University meeting for their ideas, comments, and conversations which have helped shape this article. Notes 1After this article was written Mary Ellen Munley pointed out to me that Mark Moore's analysis of sustainability for government agencies (CitationMoore, 1995) also identified three dimensions of sustainability. Comparing Moore's analysis with the one here is instructive and demonstrates significant variances between critical issues for cultural institutions and those for government agencies. Moore's dimensions are different from the ones in this article in part because most government functions have complex, overlapping command structures, in contrast to the simple hierarchical structure of museums and most cultural organizations. In addition, government agencies have single or narrowly limited possible sources of funds, whereas cultural organizations typically have a broad multiplicity of funding sources.