Suchergebnisse

The new UK policy framework for museums aims to reconfigure their social role and organizational identity. Central to this process are the Government's generic concepts of social exclusion/inclusion incorporated into museum policies to make museums more socially responsible and responsive through their contribution to tackling social exclusion. Based on accounts, views and experiences of a cross-section of staff from two science museums and two science centres in the UK, this article examines the ways in which the concepts of social exclusion/inclusion are mediated and configured in museum professionals' perceptions, interpretations and practices. I argue that the concepts of social inclusion/exclusion do not map onto organizational actors' interpretations and experiences in the way envisaged and demanded by the policies. I also highlight some of the unintended consequences and tensions that can arise in the course of museums' and museum professionals' attempts to balance the social inclusion role with other demands and pressures.

Coleman's concept of social capital has acquired an eminent place within various regions of the current sociological imagination as well as in policy discourses. Yet, it is founded on some very questionable premises. This article starts by reconstructing and assessing the problem – theoretical and empirical – that Coleman's social capital sought to respond to. Then it examines the sociological thrust of social capital to show how Coleman's formulation of the concept is caught up in some irreconcilable tensions, some logical problems with ideological implications, and some conceptual blurriness and silences around structures of inequality and the ways in which these structures causally mediate many aspects of what Coleman gathers under the name of social capital. It also shows how social capital is premised on a mix of communitarian, culturalist and familial axioms within a normative vision for suburban milieus where social capital features as a constitutive marker of territory.