management – NVSQ Blog

Photo of Baldarelli’s visit to Omero Museum Ancona-Italy (2024)

Maria-Gabriella Baldarelli¹, Eleonora Cardillo²

¹University of Bologna (Italy), ²University of Catania (Italy)

Rethinking the Role of Cultural Institutions in Times of Uncertainty

The current state of the art presents situations of profound uncertainty for the future due to climate change and war conditions that generate a widespread feeling of fear. Therefore, the need is to rethink the role of public and private organizations and the meaning of creating networks that can lead to positive and hopeful circuits.

Part of the literature positions art as an important antidote to fear. Furthermore, we question the problems of resilience in cultural institutions trying to discover the dynamics that allow the continuation of the use of art works, identifying dimensions that can support it. To try to participate in this debate is important to contribute to investigating relationships between new technologies and fruition management in cultural institutions in order to promote inclusion for a more sustainable society. Cultural institutions, such as museums, play an essential role in generating social inclusion in order to push a broader cultural change.

Technology, Inclusion, and Vulnerability

New technologies are playing an important role in this topic, because the relationships among social integration and technologies are crucial, in order to make the community sensitive regarding vulnerable people with special needs and for the creation of a new paradigm of sustainability.

Furthermore, many research works are mainly focused on the role of technological innovations in supporting inclusion without specifying the type of “vulnerability”, which instead is very important in making products, including the cultural ones, shared and usable.

Moreover, literature involved digitalization in the context of museums in general, but the aspects concerning inclusion and the possibility, through digitalization, of promoting a broad-spectrum of cultural change are less considered.

Mark Hager, Arizona State University

A friend re-posted a meme to her Facebook this afternoon. I guess it resonates with people, since it shows as shared 27,000 times:

This meme is fun because it winks at people who don’t remember to water their plants. “It’s not your fault,” says the wink. “It’s the impossible environment that this poor plant found itself in.” Thing is, failures to water aside, environmental shifts are sometimes the entire explanation for what happens to a plant. Even if you are diligent at watering, the plant is in trouble if a tornado takes out your house.

That makes sense, right? But somehow we seem to forget this when we study and try to explain the behavior of organizations. That’s my read, anyway: These days, scholars tend to focus on the strategic decisions of managers rather than the environments they operate in. This is odd given how nonprofits have struggled through the pandemic, many of which did not have what it takes to thrive in that fast-paced environment.

Tag: management

Strategic Management Only Goes So Far…