Two Narratives of Intergenerational Sustainability

Abstract

This article recognizes that institutional survival alone is an important, but ultimately insufficient, goal for public and non-profit organizations. Instead, the article approaches organizational sustainability as a two-level concept that includes both institutional survival, as a baseline for sustainability, and intergenerational or longer term sustainability, understood as the ability of public institutions to persist and fulfill their purpose in the long run. The article is based on the findings of research conducted on a variety of public and non-profit cultural organizations, including museums, music and performing arts, and literature. However, the case of museums is used to illustrate two narratives of intergenerational sustainability: institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness. The article notes that these narratives co-exist, although at times they contradict each other. It is the task of museum managers to reconcile the tensions embedded in these narratives via sustainable management practices. The broader implication of the study is that truly long-term sustainability, which secures the rights of future generations, requires sustainable stewardship today, and organizational sustainability should be viewed not as an outcome but rather as a process and an ethic.

Keywords

institutional survival intergenerational sustainability institutional resilience institutional distinctiveness sustainable thinking

Introduction

Sustainability in public administration and other disciplines is often used interchangeably with the term “sustainable development,” understood as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED],1987). Although the concept of sustainability itself is constantly evolving, most sustainability scholars recognize the symbiotic relationship between three imperatives of sustainable development: environmental, economic, and socio-political (Adams, 2006; Budd, Lovrich, Pierce, & Chamberlain, 2008; Dale, 2001; Edwards & Onyx, 2007; Fiorino, 2010; Nurse, 2006; Saha & Paterson, 2008; Wang, Hawkins, Lebredo, & Berman, 2012). However, despite the recognition of the three dimensions of sustainability (Fiorino, 2010), many scholars emphasize its environmental dimension. Indeed, Fiorino himself claims that the environmental dimension of sustainability should serve as the unifying concept for the future development of public administration as a discipline. This emphasis on environmental sustainability is a common theme across many disciplines.

Some scholars argue that it is critical to recognize culture as the fourth pillar of sustainability (Haley, 2008; Matarasso, 2001; Moldavanova, 2013, 2014; Nurse, 2006; Packalén, 2010; Throsby, 1995, 2005; Tubadji, 2010). For example, David Throsby (1995, 2005) unifies cultural and economic systems under his framework of “culturally sustainable development.” This article builds on previous scholarship on cultural sustainability, arguing that, although concern for sustainability is inherent in cultural institutions, it is not as clearly emphasized in the scholarship as environmental sustainability.

At the organizational level, sustainability is often equated with immediate institutional survival, and is focused on short-term survival, as opposed to considering longer term intergenerational aspect of sustainability (Catron, 1996; Frederickson, 2010; Throsby, 2005). This partially results from the practical difficulty of thinking beyond current generations, but it is also a result of the influence of a strategic management paradigm that was adopted by public and non-profit organizations from the private sector (Bryson, 2004; Koteen, 1997). Strategic management strategies seek to help organizations to serve their public purposes by improving decision making, enhancing organizational effectiveness, and accommodating the needs of stakeholders (Bryson, 2004; Varbanova, 2013), and has proven to be a very effective tool for achieving institutional competitiveness and survival, particularly during recessions.

This article recognizes that institutional survival is an important—though ultimately insufficient—organizational goal; instead the article conceives of organizational sustainability as a two-level concept that includes both institutional survival, as a baseline for sustainability, and intergenerational or longer term sustainability, understood as the ability of public institutions to persist and fulfill their missions in the long run. This understanding is consistent with a normative view of sustainability that treats sustainability as a form of intergenerational equity, and implies that future generations should be treated as a priority (Parfit, 1984), or at least given as much consideration as current generations (Barry, 1997; Catron, 1996; Tremmel, 2009).

The article seeks to shed light on the concept of intergenerational sustainability and to explain how this theoretical construct manifests itself in the day-to-day practices of public and non-profit organizations. As such, the article seeks to answer two questions: (a) What are the main long-term sustainability strategies, developed by public and non-profit organizations, that allow transforming immediate institutional survival into longer term sustainability? and (b) What strategies ensure the commitment of organizations to future generations? The study does not seek to test hypotheses regarding intergenerational sustainability, as there is no existing theory that would provide sufficient grounds for developing adequate hypotheses. Rather, it seeks to refine and extend the existing literature on sustainability and strategic public management. It also aims to develop a framework for intergenerational sustainability by identifying and describing mechanisms and strategies, adopted by managers of public and non-profit organizations, that maintain and enhance intergenerational sustainability.

The article is based on findings derived from research conducted on a variety of public and non-profit cultural organizations, including museums, music and performing arts, and literature. However, the case of museums is used to illustrate the interplay of the two interconnected narratives of intergenerational sustainability that emerged from this research and to show how these two narratives foster organizational survival and sustainability. Museums were chosen because they are institutions that are specifically created to ensure the accumulation and transfer of cultural capital from current to future generations. Moreover, as this study shows, regardless of their form of ownership (public, private, or university-affiliated), contemporary museums necessarily engage in a wide range of strategies that ensure their social relevance, while also helping them to remain distinct and unique. These goals are crucial for any public or non-profit organization that cares about both its immediate impact on society and a longer term intergenerational sustainability. The lessons learned from examining the sustainable administration of museums are thus directly relevant to other public and non-profit organizations.

Museums as Intergenerationally Sustainable Institutions

From the very beginning, museums have served as institutions of intergenerational memory by ensuring the preservation of historically significant and socially meaningful objects. However, only after the museum has established itself as a truly public institution was it able to serve the interests of the public at large, whether currently living or yet to be born. By ensuring the accumulation, transformation, preservation and growth of cultural and social values, as well as their transmission to future generations, museums serve as one of the best examples of what John Rawls (1971) calls intergenerational “just institutions.” Moreover, by offering a diverse range of cultural experiences and a plurality of ideas, as well as by attempting to reach various social groups, the best contemporary museum institutions inherently pursue an ethic of sustainability.

Indeed, museums are perhaps among the most accessible cultural institutions. According to the American Association of Museums, there are approximately 15,000 museums in the United States, which translate into one museum for every 16,500 Americans (Genoways & Ireland, 2003). The public significance of museums is also demonstrated by the sheer number of people who visit them: American museums average approximately 865 million visits per year, exceeding the yearly attendance at all professional sporting events (Genoways & Ireland, 2003). There is also convincing evidence of public involvement in the life of museums: One in 480 Americans more than 18 years old is a museum volunteer.

Despite their intergenerational significance, however, museums have always needed to justify their existence to cope with the problems of being under-rated, under-funded, and under-appreciated (Conn, 2010). In recent years, for example, many museums have been unable to survive a tough recessionary economy. Examples include Florida’s Gulf Coast Museum of Art, the Bead Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Other museums, including the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the University of Connecticut’s Benton Museum of Art, and the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum in Virginia City, have seriously considered either selling major works from their collections or loaning works of art to private galleries (Nazarov, 2011; Pollock, 2009). Still other museums have been forced to merge their collections with those of other museums to survive (Nazarov, 2011). Despite the difficulties that museums face, many have nevertheless been successful in maintaining their status and significance for current and future generations, making museums a good case for the study of intergenerational sustainability.

Methodological Approach

The choice to study cultural organizations was motivated by the fact that it is within the domain of arts and humanities that we often find institutions that were specifically created to safeguard culture for future generations. Moreover, contemporary arts organizations exist in the same social, political, and economic context as other public institutions, and they are increasingly tasked with doing what any public institution in a democratic society is expected to do—fulfill a public purpose (Wyszomirski, 2002). While different cultural organizations experience sector-specific sustainability issues, the propositions generated in this article reflect the universal concerns of all public organizations that seek to be intergenerationally meaningful.

The framework presented in this article is based on a larger study, which analyzed three groups of cultural institutions: art museums, literature, and music and performing arts. However, specific quotes and examples in this article are derived from museums only. The organizations included in the larger study are located in seven states in the United States, and the sample includes both university-affiliated and freestanding cultural organizations. The total number of cultural organizations examined was 19, within which 30 interviews were conducted (Appendix A). The number of organizations and interviews in the larger study is distributed approximately evenly among three types of cultural organizations, including 11 interviews collected from six museums. As this study is interested in institutions that have endured in the long term, the sample deliberately focused on organizations that are at least 35 years old, which is the average age distance between two consecutive generations.

As there was no specific theory in place that would allow for the formulation and testing of hypotheses, this study used a grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 1990, 2008; Dunne, 2011; Glaser, 1978; McGhee, Marland, & Atkinson, 2007) to investigate the concept of intergenerational sustainability. The study’s methodology combined historical analysis, semi-structured elite interviews, document analysis, and participant observations. To understand the general context of institutional transformations, the study also reviewed examples of innovative sustainability strategies within the arts sector more generally, as well as discussions of such strategies in the media, and on professional websites and blogs.

It is important to note that, rather than always being used to generate cohesive theories, the grounded theory approach has also been used by researchers as a means of generating new insights into their objects of study (Lansisalmi, Peiro, & Kivimaki, 2004). This article follows on this tradition and seeks to develop a framework of intergenerational sustainability through refinement and extension of the existing theoretical frameworks (Snow, Morrill, & Anderson, 2003). Thus, the result of this study is not meant to be a strictly formulated “new theory,” but rather a more nuanced vision of how public institutions achieve intergenerational sustainability.

The field research component of this study was primarily composed of elite interviews with top and middle managers of the selected institutions. The idea of the elite interview is that in-depth knowledge of the topic is acquired from selected group of people who are experts on the topic (Beamer, 2002; Dexter, 1970, 2006; Odendahl & Shaw, 2002). The purpose of such interviews is to better understand the topic from the perspective of the interviewees, and to identify and analyze patterns and relationships among concepts, rather than analyzing frequencies (King, 2004). The interviews were based on a combination of closed (factual) and open (value) questions, which allowed subjects to explore the relationship between particular sustainability strategies and core institutional values.

The re-framing of research questions and categories in this study depended on data gathered from interviewees, as is common for grounded theory (Strauss, 1987). Specific categories for analysis emerged by exploring similar themes and asking similar questions of different organizations. The study used open coding method (Corbin & Strauss, 1990), and prior to using the software (ATLAS.ti), the data were read and categorized into codes. The codes were combined into categories (e.g., “social and community relevance,” “structural adaptability,” etc.) that emerged by creating a hierarchy of codes on the basis of semantic and substantive co-occurrence.¹ Relevant categories were subsequently combined into general themes (two narratives of intergenerational sustainability²). Ultimately, the same themes, categories and codes were used during the analysis of each group of cultural institutions.

This study is a dynamic interaction between an empirical inquiry and existing literature on sustainability, decision making, and strategic management in public and non-profit organizations. This literature was used to develop initial insights about intergenerational sustainability and a preliminary interview protocol. Once the coding process was completed, the researcher referred back to the literature to reflexively compare the findings with existing frameworks, to validate conclusions drawn from the data, and to highlight the study’s contributions. This “middle approach” to grounded theory and engagement with the literature has been used in previous scholarship (Dunne, 2011; McGhee et al., 2007). It allows the researcher to avoid the use of a preconceived set of coding categories, as well as for the construction of meaningful and theoretically grounded interview questions.

Like any inductive research, this study is not without limitations. Grounded theory as an inductive methodology poses particular challenges for generalizing research findings from small-scale investigations to larger sets of organizations. This method is also prone to potential bias inherent in reliance on one researcher as the primary analyst and creator of categories (Lansisalmi et al., 2004). To minimize these limitations, the study chose to ground research questions and methodology through consultations with experts, preceding the interviews; through triangulation of multiple research methods; and by diversifying the choice of organizations included in the study—both geographically and in terms of their institutional forms.

Two Narratives of Intergenerational Sustainability

The study identified two narratives associated with the intergenerational sustainability of cultural institutions: an institutional resilience narrative and an institutional distinctiveness narrative. In the long run, these narratives together serve as the basis for the intergenerational sustainability of organizations. Although the resilience narrative is important for ensuring the survival of different types of organizations and systems (including environmental, health and safety, disaster mitigation, and high-reliability systems), the distinctiveness narrative is particularly prominent in the public and non-profit cultural organizations, because their survival as well as intergenerational sustainability would be impossible without the unique and distinct character that each of these organizations seeks to establish, and indeed the unique value that cultural organizations contribute to society.

In a sustainable organization, the two narratives constitute a duality, both complimenting and contradicting one another. Together, the resilience and distinctiveness narratives produce what has been described by Astley and Van de Ven (1983) as the “strategy/natural selection” dichotomy. For instance, distinctiveness allows an organization to occupy a unique institutional niche, which ensures its survival in the process of natural selection; at the same time, proactive strategic choices by institutional managers can also result in sustainable organizations. The natural selection paradigm has been developed by scholars of organizational ecology (Amburgey & Rao, 1996; Carroll, 1984; Hannan & Freeman, 1989), and implies that organizations have limited capacity to adapt their internal structure to changing environments, and their chances of survival are determined by how well they “fit” into specific niches.³ The notion of strategic choice, meanwhile, is embedded in the strategic management literature (Brown, 2010; Koteen, 1997; Varbanova, 2013); it recognizes the importance of adaptive organizational change. Thus, while natural selection implies that organizations are at the mercy of their environments, strategic choice recognizes the proactive role of organizational managers in fostering organizational change. These two frameworks are relevant to the two narratives discussed in this article.

Together, institutional resilience and distinctiveness lead to the formation of institutional capital, which helps formalized organizations to survive and sustain. Sustainability capital functions like a bank savings account: When money is tight and the times are hard, organizations can spend some of their capital to bounce back after environmental shocks, or they can choose to use such capital for investment in the future and exploration of new paths. Organizational capital may exist in many forms: financial (operational funds, endowments, etc.), physical (actual museum buildings and collections), virtual (websites and digital collections), human (artists, museum management and staff capacity, community of museum donors and friends), and intangible (a museum’s value for society).

However, although the institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness narratives are both necessary for institutional survival and sustainability, there is also a tension between them. The pressure for reinvention and an overemphasis on maximizing productivity inherent in the New Public Management doctrine (Berman, 2006; Osborne & Gaebler, 1993), combined with the erosion of boundaries between the public and private sectors, have posed a particularly difficult challenge for cultural organizations. Moreover, declining public support for the arts and increasing competition for resources and audiences have led to greater emphasis on marketing, which at times overshadow the professional considerations of museum managers (Anderson, 2004; Kotler & Andreasen, 1996).

Evidence of this emphasis on marketing can be found in the commercialization of the sector as a whole, which distracts museums from their core aesthetic mission, thus threatening the distinctiveness of the museum as an institution. An example might be the conducting of entertainment-like shows in museums. While such shows frequently bring more visitors through the door, in the long run, they may bring museums into direct competition with the entertainment industry, a competition museums stand to lose. In other words, not all resilience strategies are necessarily sustainable. Oftentimes, it is a manager’s task to reconcile the resilience and distinctiveness narratives and to make decisions that are ultimately more favorable to future generations. The following sections of the article will explore the two narratives in more depth.

Institutional Resilience Narrative

Institutional resilience is understood here as “the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back” (Wildavsky, 1988, p. 77), the capacity that incorporates “both the ability of a system to persist despite disruptions and the ability to regenerate and maintain existing organization” (Gunderson & Pritchard, 2002, p. 4). Although there are several notable studies of resilience, particularly in the areas of environmental policy, safety, and health (Gunderson & Pritchard, 2002; Walker & Salt, 2006; Wildavsky, 1988), empirical research on resilient organizations is quite rare, and there is no clear understanding of what exactly “resilience” is or how it is achieved (Boin & van Eeten, 2013). Furthermore, the resilience scholarship is only beginning to emerge in studies of the arts.

Like Wildavsky (1988), this research concludes that, due to lack of information about the future, long-term planning strategies (risk aversion) are less important for cultural organizations resilience strategies (immediate system responses and risk taking). This observation is also consistent with James G. March’s (1994) decision theory, which maintains that successful managers take risks in different ways than rational choice theory would suggest: Managers take risks based on own previous experiences, and they tend to be confident in their ability to control the external environment. In March’s (1994) words, “Although great designers produce exceptional designs only a few times in a lifetime, every failure of a great designer to produce a great design is experienced as a surprise” (p. 37). In many ways, successful museum managers approach risky situations with confidence, just like great designers do; they act boldly and astutely in the face of uncertainty.

As this research shows, the resilience of cultural organizations cannot be reduced to merely seeking system efficiency. Rather, similar to other fields, resilience is both about the capacity of the system “to deal with shocks and disturbances” and to use “such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation” (Krasny, Lundholm, & Plummer, 2011, p. vii). This study finds that institutional resilience can be described as adaptability, flexibility and change, innovation, capitalizing on failure, and turning challenges into opportunities. At an organizational level, institutional resilience results from two factors: structural adaptability and ability of museums to achieve social and community relevance (Table 1), which will be discussed in turn.

Table 1.

Two Narratives of Intergenerational Sustainability.

Institutional resilience narrative
Structural adaptability	Capitalizing on institutional structure
	Institutional change
	Institutional hybrids
Social and community relevance	Public–private partnerships
	Interdisciplinary focus
	Utilizing technology and social media
	Diversifying and expanding community outreach
Institutional distinctiveness narrative
Capitalizing on institutional uniqueness and distinctiveness	Staying true to the core mission
	Occupying unique institutional niche
	Promoting and cultivating socially important values
	Shifting toward semi-instrumental role
	Distinct value of museum learning

Structural adaptability

The first factor that matters for cultural organizations’ institutional resilience is structural adaptability. Structural adaptability implies institutional flexibility in dealing with external events and pressures through adaptation and change, as opposed to path dependency (Pierson, 2000), which prioritizes the role of prior events in determining the institutional future. In this study, institutional variations in sustainability strategies in the arts sector were explored via a comparison of the differences between freestanding and university-affiliated organizations. Such a comparison is valuable because of the different systems of governance and funding patterns that these two types of museums have. The advantages and disadvantages of these institutional structures, as they pertain to long-term sustainability, are summarized in Appendix B.

The freestanding non-profit model has a number of advantages as compared with university-affiliated institutions, which is consistent with the non-profit literature, which emphasizes the resilience of the non-profit model (Frumkin, 2002; Ott, 2001; Salamon, 2003). These advantages include greater managerial autonomy and flexibility, greater institutional adaptability, and easier responsiveness to change. These factors become particularly important during times of turbulence, when the ability of an institution to adjust and reformat matters greatly. Non-profit organizations can take advantage of their connections with local communities, greater proximity to their stakeholders, and access to broader funding opportunities. This enhances their prospects for survival and serves as a foundation for the future.

On the contrary, university-affiliated institutions also have a number of crucial advantages. Universities, for example, often serve as buffers from external shocks to arts organizations by providing crucial baseline funding, which sustains arts organizations through hard times and provides access to quality human resources and built-in audiences. Other important advantages of university affiliation include access to technology and innovation, access to research and development, new ideas, a positive impact on organizational image, numerous opportunities for interdisciplinary and collaborative projects with other university divisions, and much less emphasis on commercial strategies than is prevalent in freestanding museums.

As this study finds, both freestanding non-profit and university-affiliated museums can fall prey to mission drift, each in its own way. For example, in attempting to cope with the pressures of a competitive environment and address the consequences of economic recession, non-profit arts organizations are increasingly reliant on the adoption of cross-sectoral strategies, such as a stronger customer-based orientation, incorporating entertainment-like forms of art production, increasing emphasis on marketing at the expense of aesthetics, and so on. However, commercialization is something that arts organizations need to manage carefully if they hope to maintain their institutional distinctiveness and avoid simply becoming another form of popular entertainment.

By contrast, mission drift in the world of university-affiliated museums often takes the form of the subordination of their missions to the goals of the larger institution. Thus, the primary goal of a university is education, and in many cases, university-affiliated museums tend to justify their existence by adopting this goal as their own. Although there is nothing wrong with an educational mission, in some cases the aesthetic mission can suffer. Museums tend to integrate into university-wide projects, and therefore spend a great deal of effort competing for grants and serving as a source of additional revenues for university research, which can detract from their core mission.

This study therefore suggests that institutional structure does not by itself determine resilience. Instead, institutional resilience is achieved when organizational managers make decisions considering the peculiarities of particular structures and when the structures themselves adapt. Interviewees were asked to compare which institutional form, in their opinion, would be the most resilient in the long term. Although answers varied, the general consensus was that different institutional forms have unique advantages for building institutional resilience. Most interviewees also agreed that, in the long run, the institutions that would be able to persist would be the ones that successfully developed some sort of hybrid institutional structure that combines different institutional patterns. One example of such hybridity is the adoption of cross-sectoral strategies by museums to strengthen their funding base and enhance institutional resilience. Thus, although universities still serve as their primary stakeholders, university-affiliated museums have begun to engage in more public outreach. Freestanding private and local community museums, by contrast, sometimes try to become more “academic” and sophisticated in their programs.

As museums move toward more hybridized and balanced models, the very definition of a museum as an institution begins to change. Institutions are increasingly being re-conceptualized as a set of relationships, a “constellation of people and ideas” (Museum Director 3, September 2011), rather than particular structures, rules, and routines. Increasingly, the “publicness” of museums is defined less by their forms of ownership, funding sources, or the degree of influence by political authority (Bozeman, 2007), and more by the extent of their actual engagement with a diverse public. Hence, there is a reason to believe that one hundred years from now, it will matter less which building hosts museum collections; it will matter more which groups or populations a museum is able to reach, what kinds of relationships it is able to build, and what messages it is able to communicate to its publics.

Social and community relevance

Following on this insight, we see that the critical element of arts organizations’ institutional resilience is increasing their ability to establish their social and community relevance. Museums have increasingly realized that greater relevance will eventually result in more stable funding, stronger public and private support, more powerful boards of directors, and loyal groups of visitors and friends. The attempt by museums to enhance their social and community relevance reflects the important role of cultural organizations as social, economic, and cultural actors, whose day-to-day activity translates into tangible social and economic contributions (Rushton & Landesman, 2013).

As identified in this study, museums achieve greater social and community relevance by building public–private partnerships, expanding and diversifying community outreach, utilizing technology and social media, and implementing interdisciplinary projects. Museum managers interviewed for this study viewed the effective combination of these practices as the most comprehensive approach for building the institutional resilience of their organizations.

Museums increasingly engage in various public–private partnerships, which allow them to obtain the resources they need to pursue their programmatic goals; meanwhile, their partners derive numerous other benefits from such collaborations. The resilience strategy of engaging in public–private partnerships is similar to the dynamic described by collective action theory, which implies that the productive interaction of multiple actors is likely to increase the resilience of individual organizations engaged in partnerships (Astley & Van de Ven, 1983). For instance, when a private energy corporation funded summer art classes for children at the Lawrence Art Center (Lawrence, KS), its motivation went beyond direct financial gain or mere publicity. The company stood to benefit in other, more indirect ways as well. According to the director of the Arts Center, “They make wind turbines for wind energy in Kansas City, and they are believing that the type of employees they want are thinking in the way we teach people to think here” (Arts Center Director, September 2011). In other words, the private partner in this project expects to benefit from the art classes indirectly and in the long term by fostering the kind of creative thinking that they value in their employees.

Many museums have realized that merely having quality works of art on display is like talking in the language of a previous century. In their drive to be socially relevant and up-to-date, museums are increasingly using social media and adopting technology (digitizing their collections, creating user-friendly museum websites, hosting online forums). This helps museums to achieve greater relevance, particularly, in their work with younger people. Managers interviewed for this study do not always expect an immediate payoff in investing scarce resources for brand new technologies; however, they do see it as an invaluable investment in the future.

In an effort to increase social and community relevance, museum practices have also become more interdisciplinary. Although it is important for museum managers not to step too far from their cultural mission, some museums go out of their comfort zone by taking part in unconventional projects. For example, the Watkins Community Museum in Lawrence, KS, which is primarily focused on the preservation of local history, and which works primarily with older audiences, decided to engage in an active collaboration with local public schools, initiating several innovative projects with local environmental activists. According to the museum director, this program is a part of their new resilience-building strategy (Museum Director 2, March 2012). In the language of sustainability, the Watkins Museum is attempting to achieve greater social relevance by engaging with a wider set of social issues than it had traditionally, as well as expanding its outreach to younger audiences. In the end, such strategies are intended to ensure the museum’s continuing social and community relevance.

Over the course of the past century, museums became public forums, rather than remaining sacred temples, by shifting their primary mission from collecting art to becoming institutions engaged in interpretation, public engagement, and education. Modern museums invest significant resources in community outreach programs, which often engage the public in very non-traditional ways. One example is the Lunder Conservation Center, established by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Lunder Center is the first art conservation facility that allows the public to have a behind-the-scenes look at the work of art preservation. Processes as important to museums’ mission as conservation and preservation, which have historically been kept behind closed doors, are now being opened to the public. This shift from collection-driven institutions to visitor-centered organizations is an indication of a major paradigm shift within the museum world (Anderson, 2004). Under the old paradigm, museums were static, protective, and focused on the past; the new paradigm is much more forward looking and welcoming, and aware that enticing the public to visit the institution is one of the keys to long-term survival.

Another important variable we can use to assess sustainability in museums is their commitment to social equity, which manifests itself in public education practices, such as flexible admission policies for the general public and need-based scholarships for arts classes. Museum scholarships are often offered on the basis of the economic need of a family, rather than on a particular child’s skills. Therefore, although modern museums are often forced to increase admission fees to offset budget shortfalls, there is nevertheless still room for egalitarian ethical principles. This trend is evidenced by the practice of not only ensuring equal access to all but also providing additional opportunities to those in need (Rawls, 1971). By ensuring more comprehensive outreach and serving diverse groups of the public, museums serve the public interest in general. Moreover, by striving to be equitable, museums also invest in intergenerational equity. Young people who attend art classes on a scholarship, and who would not be able to do so otherwise, might eventually become parents and grandparents who will bring their children to the museum. Such investments are essential for the long-term sustainability of museums.

Institutional Distinctiveness Narrative

The second narrative of intergenerational sustainability is the institutional distinctiveness narrative. The purpose of this narrative is enhancing sustainability by promoting the institutional distinctiveness of the sector as a whole, as well as that of particular museum organizations (Table 1). Institutional distinctiveness implies that organizations identify unique institutional niches and direct their focus toward occupying those niches, as well as staying true to their missions and establishing the value of a particular art form or a particular organization for society without reducing it to a commodity or a mere source of economic capital. The commitment of managers to constantly keeping institutional purpose in mind while making operational decisions is a key for the distinctiveness narrative, as described below:

I think that the rooms [in 100 years from now] are different, the decision-making processes are different, the challenges are different, but it seems to me there is one thing that you can depend on, and that is the proximity to mission as you enact every moment. (Museum Director 3, September 2011)

Compared with the institutional resilience narrative that is often voiced in museum strategic plans, the institutional distinctiveness narrative is much less explicit. It is rooted in the interpretive institutional and managerial order, rather than in specific programmatic documents, statutes, or other formalized routines. Moreover, while the institutional resilience narrative is a common and widely recognized survival strategy in many public domains, the second narrative of intergenerational sustainability, institutional distinctiveness, is less common. As this research shows, however, it is particularly important for the long-term durability of museums.

Sustainable museums maintain their institutional distinctiveness by capitalizing on the values that they promote to their current and future publics. This implies an important adaptive change in museums’ purpose, toward an emphasis on the semi-instrumental role of the arts (i.e., the broader significance of the arts as a source of societal values, including sustainable thinking), as opposed to preferring either a purely intrinsic (art as an idea and a value in and of itself) or a purely instrumental (art as a developmental tool) orientation (Moldavanova, 2013).

Evidence of museums’ inclination toward a semi-instrumental role is found in their missions, which emphasize the use of art as a means of fostering transformative thinking. This means including museums in broader social discourses, including the discourse on sustainability. For example, the new mission statement of the Colorado University Art Museum, adopted in 2010, argues that part of the museum’s mission is to explore the transformative power of art and inspire critical dialogue, and to promote greater understanding of art and societal issues within a global and historical context. Thus, it is clear that the museum sees itself as both a vital part of the community and a distinctive institution that offers something that no other public organization does.

These priorities are embodied in the kinds of exhibits that museums offer. An increasing number of museum exhibitions, for instance, are designed to educate people about environmental sustainability. These exhibitions cover topics such as global climate change, environmental awareness, sustainable clothing and food, and the preservation of natural resources. For example, an exhibition at the Spencer Art Museum (Lawrence, KS), titled “An Introduction to Trees and Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature and Culture,” encouraged visitors to rethink their answers to questions such as the following: What is our responsibility to other species on our planet? What do “natural” and “unnatural” mean? and What does it mean to be ecologically aware (Goddard, 2010)? This exhibition indicates the potential for a unified aesthetics of natural and artistic beauty for stimulating critical thinking about long-term sustainability.

Increasingly, museums engage in exhibitions that highlight the relationship between culture and the social and political dimensions of sustainability. For example, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art arranged an exhibition called “BIODOME: An Experiment in Diversity,” which included the projects of four artists of various backgrounds, who created a series of art works that addressed the concerns and hopes expressed by the local community (Museum Education Director 3, August 2011). The idea behind the project was that “in a natural setting, a healthy ecosystem is characterized by considerable biodiversity, where a high level of varied life forms indicates greater health” (“BIODOME: An Experiment in Diversity,” 2011). The exhibition implicitly argues that similar principles of diversity and tolerance are also critical in sustainable societies.

Museums’ ability to promote knowledge, cultural, and social values and to contribute to the multidimensional social discourse is the product of the distinct instrumental value of museum learning that has long been recognized in the literature (Falk & Dierking, 2000; Genoways, 2006; Packer, 2006; Packer & Ballantyne, 2002). However, aside from describing the particularities of “free-choice leaning” in an object-based environment (Falk & Dierking, 2000), no serious connection has been made between unique, experience-based museum learning and museums’ sustainability. By contrast, this study finds that unique museum learning is one key to the institutional distinctiveness of museums.

The value of museum learning stems from the fact that museums are places where beauty and human aspirations can be learned through direct experience, rather than from books or in traditional lectures. Experience-based learning is particularly important for instilling values, and although specific values are not always mentioned explicitly in museum mission statements, they are nevertheless embedded within them and are reflected in the ways that museum managers understand the purpose of their institutions. One museum manager describes the role of museums in instilling humanistic values and shaping people’s choices in the following way:

I want to know what art has to say to you about your life, about your environmental conditions . . . So when your grandchildren come to the art museum, they will say, “That’s very interesting; in 2011 the ice sheets were still melting, and here’s the sense of loss and longing that human beings felt about that” . . . What the art can do is say, “Why does it matter if they’re melting even more? Why does it matter for human beings?” So it’s not really to solve the problems . . . but it is to cause a revelation in an artist, a scientist, a humanist that will allow us to say, “This is a problem we need to work on, this is a problem we cannot fix, here’s where I want to devote my life.” (Museum Director 3, September 2011)

Unlike traditional learning, which is based on cognitive experience, logic, and rationality, the learning model offered by museums is based on emotional perception, experimentation, interaction, and the personal experience of creativity. The ability of the arts to evoke creativity, to teach people to look at their lives and societies in a critical way, and to re-examine social stereotypes is particularly valuable for thinking about the future.

As this study shows, the educational obligation of museums allows them to shape personal choices by cultivating active and informed citizens. Educating responsible citizens, who are capable of making wise policy choices, is part of the unwritten, and often unspoken, mission of modern museums. Moreover, the function of public education, which is the most institutionalized and direct form of museums’ impact on future generations, is itself crucial for the long-term sustainability of museums themselves, as described by one of the interviewees:

My sense of it is that the education classes, especially, made the museum almost iconic for the regional community. There are generations of people from around regional area—now third, fourth generations have taken summer classes, public education classes. And for them, the museum is iconic. And it has achieved, I guess we can call it “generational branding”—one generation informing the next . . . That is why there would be such an outcry if someone decided to shut it down, even though it is just a small part of other systems . . . I think the public education program really invested the museum into the consciousness of the public now and over generations. (Museum Director 1, June 2011)

The distinctiveness of museum-based learning is often attributed to the power of museum objects. Although the emphasis on object-based epistemology has declined (Conn, 2010), museum managers interviewed for this study still regard objects as powerful contributors to museum learning, and the role of objects shifted from storage and exhibition to stimulating a dialogue between art and people. Managers interviewed for this study believe that a sustainable museum should be capable of finding a balance between object-based epistemology and communication. Objects also serve to distinguish museums from more popular institutions, thus enforcing the distinctiveness narrative.

From Strategic Management to Sustainable Thinking

Strategic management, as “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it” (Bryson, 2004, p. 6), helps organizations to develop a decision-making framework that allows managers to think and act strategically, thus enhancing the prospects for organizational survival. Likewise, the two narratives of intergenerational sustainability outlined above are not just abstract concepts but also have a concrete management aspect. A closer examination of the similarities with and differences between the two narratives and the strategic management literature, which addresses the problem of alignment and coherence among management practices (Brown, 2010; Koteen, 1997; Varbanova, 2013), is therefore necessary.

Between the two narratives of intergenerational sustainability, strategic management most directly resonates with the resilience narrative, which seeks to improve the strategic positioning of a given organization through the building of partnerships, adoption of technology, and so on. However, strategic management takes into account data regarding the internal and external organizational environment, and often aims to produce measurable outcomes that increase an organization’s competitive advantage (Brown, 2010). The sustainability paradigm, however, does have a direct way of quantifying long-term inputs and outputs. Instead, the resilience narrative presupposes increase in the sustainability capital of organizations via greater social and community relevance, and structural adaptation. The idea of differentiation, which at first glance appears similar to the distinctiveness narrative, is also present in the strategic management literature, as it is important for organizations to distinguish themselves to gain a competitive advantage and secure stable funding (Brown, 2010). Arguably, however, the differentiation strategies described in the strategic management literature are ultimately strategies for ensuring short- or medium-term institutional survival. This is different from the distinctiveness narrative, which seeks to maintain an institutional legacy across generations by promoting particular kinds of values in society more generally.

In conventional terms, then, the focus of strategic thinking is on achieving results. Strategic thinking asks, “What is my mission, and what are my goals? What steps do I need to take to accomplish these goals? How do I effectively use internal and external resources for maximizing outputs and outcomes?” Sustainable thinking, however, transcends this logic. Instead of seeking results, sustainable thinking asks, “What is important for my organization, and what kind of legacy would it to leave for the future? What are its core values, and what would it take to preserve them?” In other words, strategic and sustainable thinking are different, albeit connected, ideas. Indeed, sustainability often builds on strategic thinking.

The following quote illustrates the connection between short- and long-term thinking, between being strategic about creating a value for the community, and producing a powerful and long-lasting emotional impact on several generations:

I don’t think we are here to add to their life economically, we are here to add to their sense of stewardship, sense of citizenship in a larger environment in which we are all part. And if can reach the public with a sense of responsibility . . . if they start appreciating that, then I think our chances are improved that they will be more responsible citizens . . . And if that’s the case, it increases the chances of museums having a longer life. I am not being prescriptive here, for some people it might be short-term, for some people it might be long-term. We want to turn people on, whether it is to turn on a kid, or an adult, or a family. (Museum Director 1, June 2011)

Strategic thinking improves the chances for organizational survival—a necessity for intergenerational sustainability—and it often becomes a baseline for sustainable thinking. By contrast, sustainable thinking allows for the reconciling of the two narratives of sustainability, and sustainable decisions over time translate into sustainability capital, which can be conceived of as an unseen endowment that sustains museums in the long term and vouchsafe the needs of future generations.

In many respects, thinking in the long term implies making the right choices, right now. According to one museum manager, any kind of intergenerational impact would be impossible without understanding what concerns people today:

The things that we make, the issues that we address, the things that we find important, shape the community in the future. So we find ways to connect that and bring different aspects of the community, or explore different issues that are of importance for us right now. (Museum Director 2, March 2012)

Museums’ ability to stand the test of time is ultimately the product of incremental choices made by museum managers, and evidence of sustainability in the art world is found primarily in the realm of sustainable thinking and sustainable acting, rather than in simply declaring sustainability as a formal goal and including it in policy documents. Museum managers acknowledge the limitations of formal strategic plans, and they instead demonstrate their long-term commitments on a very pragmatic level. As one interview participant explained,

. . . we usually have strategic plans for 5 years, but I believe in strategic doing, not strategic planning. Strategic planning is fine in an ideal world, but the world is not ideal. You end up running a place by taking advantage of opportunities that were never imagined in a strategic plan, and having to deal with crises that no strategic plan could foresee . . . (Museum Director 1, June 2011)

This observation is consistent with observations found in the strategic management literature, regarding the limitations of strategic planning, which is sometimes used as a formal tool designed to fulfill donors’ requirements rather than provide tangible benefits to organizations (Varbanova, 2013). Strategic managers are often forced to go beyond formal plans by becoming entrepreneurs (Fitzgibbon, 2001; Phillips, 2011), capable of performing “economic as well as sociocultural activity, based on innovations, exploitation of opportunities, and risk-taking behavior” (Varbanova, 2013, p. 17). However, this kind of strategic thinking does not fully explain how public organizations achieve intergenerational sustainability.

As this study observed, museum managers devise strategies that vouchsafe the interests of future generations, but they sometimes do so unconsciously; it is instead a personal sense of what is right and what is ethical that guides their everyday work. This sense of appropriateness allows museum managers to reconcile the tensions embedded in the two narratives of intergenerational sustainability. Consistent with the decision making framework of March & Olsen (1989), managers of sustainable museums do not simply act as rational strategic planners when considering the longer term sustainability; they instead try to make sense of contemporary environmental and institutional contexts, while still making decisions with practical implications for future generations.

Moreover, although a formal commitment to future generations is not always explicitly declared in institutional missions and strategic plans, such a commitment is nevertheless a guiding principle for managerial decisions. As one manager explained it,

I don’t know what will happen in 30 years. I hope that . . . it is less expensive for families to be here; that we never have to say “no” to someone who would like their children to be in a class here because of money . . . at the end of the financial downturn we want to still be here and still be standing, and to provide the experiences and performance and visual arts that make us human. (Arts Center Director, September 2011)

Several more distinctions between strategic and sustainable thinking are worth discussing here. First, both sustainable thinking and strategic thinking imply the presence of a certain mind-set, and the ability of managers to think beyond short-term time horizons and adjust the course of actions initially defined in the strategic plan (Bryson, 2004). However, as compared with the paradigm of intergenerational sustainability, strategic management is much more concerned with near-term outcomes. The process of strategic management mainly focuses on the present, while considering the vision of a desired future, and it typically involves planning only for several years ahead rather than thinking in terms of future generations (Varbanova, 2013).

Second, the practice of strategic management in museums requires developing a more or less exact assessment of organizational capacities, resources, and expected societal impacts (Bryson, 2004; Varbanova, 2013). At the same time, it is quite challenging to quantify the value of museum experiences and assess precisely the impact that museum organizations have on society, particularly speaking the language of tangible outcomes. Even qualitative indicators of arts’ performance are problematic (Varbanova, 2013). Therefore, sustainable thinking is less about the performance indicators and more about the mission.

Third, as compared with sustainable thinking, strategic management is much more results oriented and practical. It focuses on the dynamic interaction of internal organizational capacities and external environments, and it seeks to take advantages of opportunities for advancement, growth, and development. Sustainability, however, is not about growth or maximizing returns⁴; it is more about institutional purpose, values, and responsibility, rather than performance per se. In addition, an important element of strategic management is strong client orientation (Koteen, 1997), where the needs of a client are often put above the consideration of an institution itself. However, such an orientation is problematic for cultural organizations that rely on distinctiveness for their sustainability. In fact, sustainable thinking, as a philosophy, is ultimately about the ability of institutions to pursue the public interest, as evidenced by museums’ commitment to social equity.

Finally, in the face of future uncertainties, sustainability implies the presence of an ethical imperative—a concern for the rights and welfare of future generations—embedded in both organizational routines and managerial practices. Being intergenerationally sustainable means not only being effective but also being equitable toward future generations. The sustainability imperative is concerned with the legacy of public institutions, and how modern-day policies and actions affect the ability of public institutions to carry out their purpose across generations. Therefore, we can think of sustainable thinking by museum managers as a process that extends strategic management by bringing it to the new level.

Concluding Observations: Sustainable Thinking That Matters

The examination of museum administration reveals that the significance of museums clearly goes beyond mere cultural preservation. By pursuing strategies that allow them to continue in their role as sustainable stewards of the cultural heritage, museums are, in essence, working today to protect the rights and interests of future generations.

First, museums achieve remarkable institutional resilience by being adaptable and responsive to resilience pressures: They are dynamic, rather than static, and they are innovative, rather than conservative. Such structural adaptability is quite distinct from the path dependency argument advanced in studies of institutional politics (Pierson, 2000). Sustainable museums enhance their social and community relevance by building public–private partnerships, expanding and diversifying their public outreach, utilizing technology and social media, and engaging in interdisciplinary projects. Second, museums build their capital for sustainability by preserving and cultivating their institutional distinctiveness. This includes evolving institutional missions, the inclusion of museums into broader societal sustainability discourses, and the promotion of particular values to their current and, by extension, future publics.

Both of the narratives discussed in this study are important for intergenerational sustainability; however, reconciling institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness produces a tension that managers deal with on a day-to-day basis. The key to the long-term sustainability of institutions is the ability of managers to act sustainably by making wise, incremental decisions, similar to the incremental decision making described by Charles E. Lindblom (1959) or the logic of appropriateness developed by March and Olsen (1989). This special kind of managerial rationality—what can be called sustainable thinking—allows for the reconciling of the two narratives. Regardless of institutional form or legal status, sustainable organizations systematically seek for ways of broadening the scope of their public, thus serving the needs of both current and future generations. The broader social implications are clear: Truly long-term sustainability that secures the rights of future generations requires sustainable stewardship today.

This study has discussed some propositions and suggested a framework for intergenerational sustainability; however, additional empirical research is needed to test the effectiveness of the strategies described here. Future research is needed to determine the conditions under which the elements of institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness result in both immediate institutional survival and longer term sustainability. Another important direction for future research will be to explore in greater depth the relationship between the two narratives of intergenerational sustainability: What happens when these two narratives are in competition, and under which conditions one or the other becomes more important.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank George H. Frederickson, Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson, Lawrence Scaff, Brady Baybeck, Vincent Artman, and the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The author would also like to acknowledge managers who participated in the study for their time and invaluable contributions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Alisa Moldavanova (PhD, University of Kansas) is an assistant professor of public administration in the Political Science Department at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Her research interests include sustainability and intergenerational justice, organization theory, public and nonprofit management, public administration theory, and public service ethics.

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