Multiple Organizational Identities Of U.S. Art Museums

Abstract

The dissertation investigates whether having multiple organizational identities, as opposed to a pure organizational identity, leads to positive audience evaluations in the field of U.S. art museums. To this end, I constructed a longitudinal dataset of U.S. art museums for a 12year period from 1999 to 2010 using three different archival sources: the Official Museum Directory (OMD), the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), and two art periodicals. There are three core findings. First, market intermediaries tend to reject exhibits in multipleidentity art museums because the evaluative nature of their work drives them to focus on a narrow set of candidates. Second, direct consumers favor art museums possessing multiple identities as they are on a lookout for a broad set of candidates that can meet their desire for gratifying leisure activities. Third, while market mediators' recommendations increase consumer demand in general, consumers for multiple-identity museums are negatively influenced by mediators' recommendations as they are apt to view the critics' reviews as a signal of the organization's increased commitment to a particular identity, which may be understood as going against their preference for diverse identities.