Comrades! Tractor production has increased for the tenth successive year…

Or, Living in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

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I attended a meeting today about developing a “quality assurance framework” for museums. The essential driver for this being that if we don’t develop one ourselves, we will have one imposed anyway by the Scottish Executive. As Peter Stott commented, we need yet another set of measurements and forms to fill in like we need a hole in the head. My reply was that, given that we can’t avoid the hole, we are being offered the opportunity to influence its dimensions. But once we move beyond the concrete things measured by Accreditation and the VisitScotland quality scheme, and the process-measuring of things like IiP, we enter territory that is inevitably subjective and difficult, if not impossible really, to measure. How do you measure the value of a cultural experience? How do you quantify it? How do you compare such experiences, and meaningfully evaluate them against more concrete measures? Collecting evidence is all very well, but like with web stats, useless if you don’t really know what the evidence means. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where we spend more and more of time time doing just this - measuring what we do, instead of doing what we measure. And of course we are being measured against not what the public, our visitors and other users may want, but rather against a set of ambitions which are essentially political and social.

Now, it may be my deep-dyed libertarian cynicism, but whenever I hear the phrase ‘continuous improvement’ it makes me feel as though I have fallen into a kind of nightmare of top-down, Stalinist dirigisme; where aims, objectives and targets are set centrally, rather than locally, with little respect for difference; where figures are collected and paraded to show how things are always getting better, when everyone knows that really things are getting harder day by day; where the same (or a smaller) ration of butter is being spread over ever more slices of bread; where the daily struggle to keep going is hidden behind a sort of happy, clappy, gung-ho public enthusiasm as we all wave our flags and engage in our mass arithmetical calisthenics; and where local government has become merely the implementation arm of an all-powerful central government apparat, infected with an overwhelming managerialist hubris.

No, hang on - I’m not dreaming…

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

One Response to “Comrades! Tractor production has increased for the tenth successive year…”

  1. Museum Blogs - museum and exhibit blog directory » Blog Archive » Comrades! Tractor production has increased for the tenth successive year… Says:

    [...] I attended a meeting today about developing a “quality assurance framework” for museums. The essential driver for this being that if we don’t develop one ourselves, we will have one imposed anyway by the Scottish Executive. As Peter Stott commented, we need yet another… [...]