A Delicate Balance: Museums and the Market‐place

‘Museums must succumb to the inevitable, in moving towards a more businesslike model for their operations and revenue, without losing sight of conservation and connoisseurship.’ So concludes Victoria D. Alexander after examining the effects of private and corporate philanthropy on museums and their implications for museum management and objectives, which must reconcile the demands of an increasingly exacting public with the constraints of steadily shrinking government funding. The author is the Foundation Fund Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Museums and Money: The Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarship and Management (Indiana University Press).