Making money in museums: what’s appropriate? Negotiating commercial pressures and professional values in a context of austerity

Previous research has highlighted the importance of professional values and non-economic motivations in cultural services, and how these norms may conflict with commercial pressure to generate revenue. Most studies have focused on managerial decisions around museum or exhibition sponsorship, rather than how front-line professionals are negotiating these tensions and defining norms of appropriate behaviour. We draw on interviews with museum staff in six English local authority areas to examine the activities they are adopting to generate income, and identify how professional ethics influenced these choices. By applying the idea of ‘appropriateness’ from neoinstitutional theory, we show how staff sought to balance commercial drivers with professional values, despite the lack of a clear ‘code book’ to specify ‘appropriate’ income-generating activity in a cultural services context. We found that although commercial imperatives challenged professional norms, they did not replace them: instead, museum staff developed three strategies to preserve and sustain non-economic values in the context of commercial pressures: repurposing museum spaces for commercial events; distancing their institutions from activities that were not aligned with their values but nonetheless generated income; and prioritising free access to certain groups of visitors or to particular events. We suggest that commercial pressures are having a substantial impact on museum services and professionals, and they are likely to become an increasingly important area of academic debate and practitioner concern. Examining the decisions museum staff take when negotiating these challenges reveals important insights about how the institutional norms and professional values of public sector museum work are changing.