In 2014, the Italian Minister of Culture implemented a reform in the organization of the Ministry; at the basis of the reform was the idea to reorganize the presence of national government in charge of heritage management at the local level. In particular, the reform introduced the organizational configuration of autonomous museums. Autonomous museums have scientific, financial, administrative, and organizational autonomy and are provided with new management bodies: a director with improved powers, a board of trustees, a scientific committee, a board of auditors. The reform established that autonomous museums oversee valorization activities, disrupting a tradition and a narrative of management of state-owned heritage built around preservation. Valorization is a notion that includes all activities different from preservation, that have the aim to allow accessibility to cultural heritage, promotion and dissemination of knowledge. Nowadays, these represent a significant part of the activities expected from a museum to fulfil its social and cultural calling. Therefore, the research aims to investigate how museums have leveraged the autonomy received to increase value opportunities for a broad variety of stakeholders. We advance previous studies by exploring the differences between autonomous museums based on their status before the reform and the responsibility that the director has towards other regional state museums. Additionally, we account for the second biggest novelty of the reform, namely the introduction in the governance system of the board of directors by exploring the role of diversity in affecting the valorization choices of the museums. From a methodological point of view, the study collected secondary data for the first twenty autonomous museums, created by law in 2014-2015, from the census studies by the Italian Institute of Statistics on museums and cultural institutions, and selected and organized them to reflect the key dimensions of value creation. We use seemingly unrelated regression to explore how the diversity across the newly formed autonomous museums affect their valorization strategy. 2 From a policy point of view, the research shows how it is fundamental to address the issue of autonomy in a more comprehensive way, highlighting the fact that the value created by autonomous museums is multidimensional and nuanced, while it has been too-often linked with performance measurements focused on visitors and ticket sales and a rhetoric merely of economic value.

Ten years after: value creation in Italian autonomous state museums.

Monti A.;
2024-01-01

Abstract

In 2014, the Italian Minister of Culture implemented a reform in the organization of the Ministry; at the basis of the reform was the idea to reorganize the presence of national government in charge of heritage management at the local level. In particular, the reform introduced the organizational configuration of autonomous museums. Autonomous museums have scientific, financial, administrative, and organizational autonomy and are provided with new management bodies: a director with improved powers, a board of trustees, a scientific committee, a board of auditors. The reform established that autonomous museums oversee valorization activities, disrupting a tradition and a narrative of management of state-owned heritage built around preservation. Valorization is a notion that includes all activities different from preservation, that have the aim to allow accessibility to cultural heritage, promotion and dissemination of knowledge. Nowadays, these represent a significant part of the activities expected from a museum to fulfil its social and cultural calling. Therefore, the research aims to investigate how museums have leveraged the autonomy received to increase value opportunities for a broad variety of stakeholders. We advance previous studies by exploring the differences between autonomous museums based on their status before the reform and the responsibility that the director has towards other regional state museums. Additionally, we account for the second biggest novelty of the reform, namely the introduction in the governance system of the board of directors by exploring the role of diversity in affecting the valorization choices of the museums. From a methodological point of view, the study collected secondary data for the first twenty autonomous museums, created by law in 2014-2015, from the census studies by the Italian Institute of Statistics on museums and cultural institutions, and selected and organized them to reflect the key dimensions of value creation. We use seemingly unrelated regression to explore how the diversity across the newly formed autonomous museums affect their valorization strategy. 2 From a policy point of view, the research shows how it is fundamental to address the issue of autonomy in a more comprehensive way, highlighting the fact that the value created by autonomous museums is multidimensional and nuanced, while it has been too-often linked with performance measurements focused on visitors and ticket sales and a rhetoric merely of economic value.
2024
978-2-9602195-6-2
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11567/1224433
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