INSTITUTIONAL ISOMORPHISM IN GLOBAL MUSEUM QUALITY ASSURANCE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FIVE ACCREDITATION SYSTEMS
Keywords:
Institutional isomorphism, Museum accreditation, Quality assurance, Cultural heritage governance, Comparative case study, Policy diffusion, ConvergenceAbstract
Museum accreditation has become a global instrument for defining institutional quality, yet the systems that administer it operate in radically different political economies. This study asks why accreditation systems embedded in such different states have come to resemble one another, through which mechanisms that resemblance was produced, and where it stops. Drawing on the theory of institutional isomorphism, it conducts a structured, focused comparison of five major systems: the American Alliance of Museums accreditation programme, the Arts Council England Accreditation Scheme, the International Council of Museums, the Chinese national museum grading system, and the Japanese public-interest certification regime. Each system is profiled against a common template and then compared across the three isomorphic mechanisms of coercive, mimetic, and normative pressure. The analysis finds strong convergence across all five systems on the vocabulary of the good museum, on standards-based evaluation, on periodic review, and on a shared professional ethics. Convergence is driven by coercive pressure where accreditation gates public funding, as in England and China; by mimetic borrowing from the prestigious American model; and by normative diffusion of the scripts authored by the international council. Convergence is not total, however. The two East Asian cases adopt international forms while routing them through distinctive national logics, so that shared architecture serves different ends. The paper argues for a convergence-with-decoupling thesis and proposes translation as a complement to the three classic mechanisms, capturing how globally shared forms are reshaped as they cross into national institutional settings.References
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