HOW DO STAFF MEMBERS AT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CENTRES CONSIDER THE IMPACT OF SPONSORS ON THE SCEINTIFIC CONTENT OF EXHIBITIONS?
Helene Sørensen, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark
Eva Davidsson, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
Sponsors and donors have become increasingly important for exhibition construction during the latest decades. It seems, however, as this risk bringing consequences on the choice of exhibition content and design when it comes to traditional museums such as natural history museums, art museums or historical museums. But in what ways may sponsors impact exhibition content and design at science and technology centres? This study seeks to explore how staff members consider the impact of sponsors and donors on exhibit content and design. The data collection involves a survey, interviews and a focus group interview with staff members, who work with planning and constructing new exhibitions at their science and technology centre. The results suggest that sponsors may interfere in exhibition construction both directly and indirectly. This means that sponsors could put explicit demands when it comes to the choice of scientific content and design and thereby interfere directly. Indirect impact, on the other hand, refers to implicit demands of sponsors where staff members take into account for what they believe are views of the sponsors through self-censorship.
Introduction
Sponsors and donors have become increasingly important for exhibition construction during the latest decades. Alexander (1996) analysed annual reports from 30 different art museums in the US and found that those museums have become more dependent on external funding during the 70ies and 80ies. McPherson (1997) argues that the need of external financial support has gradually increased due to the pressure on museums from ministries and governments for self sufficiency. On a local museum, Macdonald (2002) describes the need for the staff members in her study to acquire sponsorship since external resources were prerequisites for making an exhibition possible. A consequence of this development, McPherson (2006) argues, is that museums increasingly have become tourist attractions and cultural service is viewed predominantly as economic rather than as social entities. Another consequence is a changing role of museum staff which gradually has become more diverse as marketing has become part of the job requirements for staff with other preoccupations.
Yet another consequence of the need for sponsorship can be seen in the content of exhibitions. Macdonald (2002) reveals that sponsors may interfere with what is to be presented, as they are able to persuade staff members to accept a particular topic through mobilising a rhetoric of the facts. Also Gieryn (1998) describes the impact of sponsors when studying the difficulty in constructing and presenting a controversial historical exhibition. He concludes that the both curators and different stakeholders urge for a balanced exhibition where the visitors are not steered towards one or a few of many available interpretations of historical events. However he shows that balanced exhibitions have different interpretations to different groups involved. This means that when curators want to include ambiguous or controversial interpretations of historical events, they risk being considered as creators of an unbalanced exhibition by stakeholders or different interest groups.
However, this discussion refers predominantly to traditional museums such as historical museums, art museums or natural history museums, but in what ways does it correspond to the economic situation of science and technology centres (STC)? The purpose of this study is to explore how staff members consider the impact of sponsors on the scientific content of an exhibition.
The Study
This study is part of a larger project which aims to explore how science is constituted in exhibitions. During this project, data has been collected successively and consist of questionnaires, sent to staff members at 30 different STCs, interviews with responsible staff for designing and creating new exhibitions and participant observation at one STC during a phase of planning a new exhibition. In order to come closer to how the staff members perceived sponsors’ impacts on the exhibition, a focus group interview was carried out. The intension was to highlight and explore the research question for this study, which is:
- In what ways do staff members at STCs experience an influence from sponsors on the constitution of science in exhibitions?
But to be able to explore this research question more thoroughly, all phases of data collection, questionnaire, interviews, participant observation and the focus group interview are included in the analysis. The questions in the questionnaire were analysed through descriptive statistics. The interviews, the participant observations and the focus group interview were analysed in two-phase analysis (Patton, 2002). In the first phase, all situations in which the staff members discussed economic issues in relation to the content of the exhibitions were identified. In this phase, it seemed like the respondents referred to two different ways in which sponsors affect the construction of exhibitions:
- Sponsors’ direct impact on how science is constituted in exhibitions
- Sponsors’ indirect impact on how science is constituted in exhibitions
The second phase sought to verify and specify these two categories. The data material was interpreted by two independent coders in order to increase the reliability of the analysis.
Results
The analysis of the questionnaire revealed the fact that STCs, to a large extent, are dependent on external financial resources. 68% (45 of 66) of the respondents said that there were sponsors for their latest exhibition. 23 % (15 of 66) argued that there were no sponsors and 9% (6 of 66) did not answer the question. The following questions concern only those respondents who said that there were sponsors involved in their latest exhibition. The sponsors seemed to be engaged in the work of constructing the exhibitions in different and sometimes several ways. About 2/3 (31 of 45) of the respondents stated that they received economic support to be able to construct the exhibition. Also about 2/3 (34 of 45) received support as the sponsors contributed material for the exhibition and 2/3 (31 of 45) stated that the sponsors contributed with scientific knowledge. One-fifth of the respondents argued that the sponsors contributed in other ways, but those were not specified.
Sponsors’ Direct Impact on How Science Is Constituted In Exhibitions
During the interviews some respondents discussed incidents where the sponsors had had an influence on what and also how the content should be presented. In these cases, the sponsors were a part of the team that planned the exhibitions and/or the sponsors supported the exhibition on different conditions. For example, one respondent expressed that an exhibition about healthy living was sponsored by the ministry of health with the condition that only what is commonly accepted as scientific knowledge about health and nutrition should be displayed in the exhibition. This means, for example, that it was not possible to scrutinize pseudo scientific health advices in relation to scientific knowledge. Another example of how a sponsor interferes with the content of the exhibition is provided in Excerpt 1 where Edith, an exhibit designer, discusses a cell phone exhibition and recount for an episode where a sponsor interrogates in what was presented.
Excerpt 1
Interviewer / Were there different opinions about displaying different models of explanations?Edith / [emphasising that this is her view] Well you can choose one system or otherwise you say that these systems exist and then you account for both.
Interviewer / Mm…
Edith / I think that is the most natural
Interviewer / Right… in general, do you believe such areas are excluded or…
Edith / I don’t think so…
Interviewer / No…
Edith / That is a little bit exiting […] personally I believe that it is much more fun if there are…
Interviewer / Yes…
Edith / But, sure it can… I can tell when I worked with another exhibition about cell phones I had lectures about this radiation thing and that was not fun…
Interviewer / Mm…
Edith / As this large company had sponsored the whole exhibition and they were not pleased and they had viewpoints on the content even when we had a researcher who commented on radiation…
Interviewer / Okay…
Edith / And there we were forced to make some changes
Interviewer / So this company demanded that you should change things in your exhibition…
Edith / Yes they did…
Edith discusses an episode where the sponsor explicitly demanded that an explanatory model concerning the relation between cell phones and radiation should be left out. This meant, she argues, that they had to change the content of the exhibition in order to oblige the sponsor’s demands. She does not mention why the sponsor made this demand, but it is possible to believe that one reason was that the sponsor thought of discussions about radiation as negative publicity in relation to their company’s products. Her experience concerning how a sponsor actively interrogates about the scientific content of the exhibition might not be unique since the results from the questionnaire reveal that about 1/3 of the staff members, who had sponsors to their latest exhibition, said that the sponsors interfered in what should be displayed in their exhibitions.
Sponsors’ Indirect Impact onHow Science Is Constituted in Exhibitions
From the analysis of the participant observation and the focus-group interview, it seemed as the sponsors also had an impact on the content of the exhibition without explicitly making demands as they did in the occations of direct impact. The focus-group participants were asked whether they had experienced direct impact from the sponsors and their discussion is highlighted in Excerpt 2.
Excerpt 2
Interviewer / Now you have given me examples of exhibits which you have chosen yourselves not to display, but have you found that the sponsors have asked questions and said that “we don’t want you to show this”?Steve / No, I don’t think so actually, have we?
Mary / Not what I can remember…
Sally / But, perhaps we’ve done it ourselves?
Steve / Self-censorship…
Sally / I don’t know if I have any examples, but sometimes we say that this won’t work when we have these sponsors, don’t we?
Mary / Well…
Tom / In the healthful living exhibition we actually had a discussion about what is right and wrong and we concluded that we would follow the official standpoints concerning health. Because we could have done something about alternative treatment and…
Mary / And other theories about…
Tom / … we actually chose not to display this for this reason…
Interviewer / Was it the Ministry that sponsored?
Sally / No, it wasn’t like they sponsored without demand
Mary / They donated a great amount of money, but it was something we…
Tom / Self-censorship in that way…
Sally / Yes we have self-censorship
Tom / That discussion we had then…
[…]
Steve / I think, when talking about censorship… it sounds dangerous when you call it censorship. But you could call it guiding principles or whatever… guiding positions. We are to some extent… we have some responsibility for what we are doing and being responsible, I believe first and foremost, I mean the responsibility for the scientific content […] But if you ask Larry [a colleague] he would per default argue that it is self-censorship due to political reasons. And I’ve heard others who say so. I’ve heard it…
Mary / Due to political reasons?
Steve / It’s several years ago now, but
Mary / What do you mean by political reasons?
Steve / Yes, yes, people say that at our STC they are forced to compromise for commercial reasons in what they do. Yes, I’ve heard people say that.
The respondents are asked whether they could recall any situation where a sponsor actively interfered with the content and design of an exhibition. None of the staff members could, but they instead reflected upon whether they had changed the content on their own initiative due to present sponsors. Steve directly labels this self-censorship and they together try to come up with an example or an episode to highlight this phenomenon. Tom suggests that this happened in the healthful living exhibition where they decided to only display official standpoints concerning these issues. However Sally seems to object when saying that they did not sponsor the exhibition without demands on the content and the design. But the others argue that that was self-censorship and Sally agrees. Steve seems then doubtful in labelling this phenomena self-censorship and claims that most important is responsibility for the scientific content. Finally Steve says that there are others who say that they need to compromise and he relates this to self-censorship.
The discussion among staff members indicates that they seem to feel that they need to consider the sponsors’ profiles, what they believe the sponsors would agree on and adjust the content of the exhibition in ways that will satisfy the sponsors. This means that the involvement of sponsors risks leading to situation where the staff members are restricted in their choices of what to display in exhibitions.
Discussion
As seen in the previous background discussion as well as in the result description from the questionnaire, sponsors and donors are, in many cases, crucial for the work at museums and STCs. In fact, several STCs and museums are dependent on financial contribution of sponsors. However, the cooperation between sponsors and the staff members who construct the exhibitions also risks clashes and differences of opinions concerning what and how the scientific content is to be displayed. This can be seen from the results of this study as the respondents, who in the questionnaire stated that they used sponsors in their latest exhibition, experienced interference from sponsors concerning the content and the design of their exhibitions. However the results also reveal that the issue about sponsors’ and donors’ impact on exhibitions is more complex as they may influence the exhibitions in different ways, indirectly and directly. Indirect impact refers to implicit demands where staff members account for what they believe are views of the sponsors as it is expressed in the discussion about self-censorship. Direct impact, on the other hand, refers to sponsors’ of being visible in the exhibition or demands concerning the content of the exhibitions.But what consequences does this bring concerning the constitution of science in exhibitions?
According to Macdonald (1998) there seem to be a trend towards homogenisation of exhibitions, where it is difficult to put specific demands. This is also explicit in this study, where one respondent argues that it is difficult to display controversial issues, while being dependent on external financing.Such a trend risks leading to a cultural lessening, where minority interests will find it increasingly hard to get financial support in a competitive market. This means that when governmental support recedes, there is an increasing reliance on benevolence from others.
The results presented in this paper are more thorough discussed in the article:
Davidsson, E. & Sørensen, H. (submitted) Economic interests and science exhibitions – A study of how sponsors may affect exhibition contents.
References
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Macdonald, S. (1998). Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibitions, an introduction to the politics of display. In S. Macdonald (Ed.)The politics of display, museums, science, culture. (pp. 1-24). UK, London: Routledge.
Macdonald, S. 2002. Behind the Scenes At the ScienceMuseum.Oxford, UK: Berg.
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