Patterns of Purpose: U.S. Science Museum Mission Statements Reflecting Field-Wide Institutional Logics (Poster 4)

• In Event: Past, Present, and Futures: Intentional Dreaming With Early-Career Researchers About Museum Education and Research

Abstract

In 2019, ICOM sparked considerable controversy with their proposed new definition of museums (Mairesse, 2020) with some critics decrying the proposal as exaggerating museums’ role as social actors (Fraser, 2019; Brown & Mairesse, 2018) while others noted the “progressive” visions reflected modern museology (Soares, 2021). New research methods developed for “big data” - such as web scraping and natural language processing (NLP) - open the door to investigating field-wide phenomena through analysis of small scale actions. This study looks at an institutional utterance - the mission statement, which serves as the official statement of an organization’s purpose and is used to direct strategic action (Anderson, 2019) - to understand how the museum field collectively frames purpose.

Theoretical background
Institutional logics - or shared field-wide norms of work (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008) - drive practices and routines at individual organizations, but organizational fields can hold multiple competing institutional logics simultaneously (DiMaggio, 1991). Existing institutional logics in the museum field include preservation/collections focus, education/visitor focus, and equity/social action focus (Gurian, 2010; Feinstein & Meshoulam, 2014; Pringle, 2022). I join others who have examined museum mission statements (data sets ranging from 22 to 140; Newton, 2020; Paulus, 2010; Sadowski et al., 2022), specifically asking: what institutional logics are present in US science museum mission statements?

Methods and Data
The mission statement dataset was generated by manually searching Association of Science Technology Centers’ (ASTC’s) member organization websites for mission statements, resulting in 312 mission statements from 380 organizations. I used the tidytext R package to examine word prevalence and the quanteda R package to create and apply custom dictionaries to the mission statement text. Three individual dictionaries were created based on the prior literature on museum institutional logics.

Results
Looking at overall prevalence of lemmatized words across US science and technology museum mission statements, “inspire” was the most common, followed by “science”, then “learn” (see Figure 4a). Looking closer at “inspire” via bigrams, the most common phrase was “[institution-name] inspire”, indicating the “inspire” is often used as the primary verb following the museum’s name.
For words identified in each of the dictionaries, Educate and Content words were overwhelmingly more common than Preserve or Activist words (see Figure 4b). Further, of the institutional logics dictionaries, only Educate words were present in the majority of mission statements (see Figure 4c). Additionally, Activist words are slightly more common than Preserve words.

Significance
US science museums overwhelmingly frame their purpose as “inspiring” within an educational sphere and embrace social action purposes slightly more than collection preservation purposes. However, these patterns may reflect something particular about science museums or US-based institutions, meaning a wider data is necessary for further research. This type of “big data” analysis can be extended to larger data sets with additional variables, indicating their utility for understanding field-wide phenomena.

Author

• Megan Goeke, University of Minnesota