The Museum Directors and the Creativity : Institutions, Creativity, Negotiation Positions and Path Dependency at the Swedish National Maritime Museums

Museums are important for maintaining trust and tolerance in society and their importance has in-creased as more and more people visit museums. Twenty-five million visits were made to museums in Sweden in 2014. The issue of creative idea generation in terms of exhibition projects is central to the museum's impact and success, and to its relevance to an increasingly complex audience. In order to download their collections with new content and stories, museums have to develop their vision of creative idea generation and be better at taking a creative approach to the exhibition topic. This is difficult because museums have an inherent resistance to change because they are controlled by their institutions, here in the sense of self-imposed rules, conventions and traditions of how something is done. Within institutional theory, one uses the term Path Dependency. There are constant negotiations within institutions between the different roles with varying strong or weak ne-gotiating positions. Museum directors have strong negotiating positions and are therefore key play-ers in the creation of exhibitions. By illustrating how museum directors perceive their role in relation to exhibits, it is possible to change the institutions. Qualitative semi-structured interviews have thus been conducted with all five museum directors who have been or are active in the Swedish National Maritime Museums in the period 2004-2013. The investigation has shown that the organization and the director general at an overall level estab-lish the framework for museum directors' ability to exercise their role and their negotiating position. One result is that museum directors have strong negotiating positions in certain distinct areas, but that there are also areas that are unclear to them, which prevents them from fully exploiting their negotiation position. One such area is the commissioning of exhibitions, especially in relation to the artistic creative processes and design. The conclusion from the result is that the commissioner’s role must be defined much more clearly. Another important conclusion is that museum directors must approach the question of what creative idea generation is and how it works