Museums, Money, and Markets: Crisis and Attention-based Imitation in US Art Museums 2007-2011

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of one type of exogenous shock, the US economic crisis in 2008, on organizational imitation, specifically the adoption of market practices in American art museums. It explains how economic crisis reshaped the imitative strategies of decision makers facing external challenges. Using data from the population of American art museums (a sample of 501(c)(3) operating charities of NTEE (The National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities) code A51 “art museums”), we demonstrate that market practice adoption of the nonprofit organizations was accelerated by the economic crisis not only because it directly undermined the resource base of art museums but also because it reshaped how decision makers tried to resolve external challenges. Revisiting the institutional logics and organizational attention perspectives for organizations under extreme uncertainty, this study theorizes how exogenous shock delimits organizational cognition and alters problem-solving search behavior, thus accelerating heuristic inter-organizational imitation. With empirical evidence of US art museums under economic crisis, we show that a shock can temporarily upset resource environment and change of organizations’ reference group to seek for solutions through “Attention-based imitation”: from leader to peer organizations, from physically distant to close organizations, and from non-direct connection to direct connection.