Potentializing Values in Museum Entrepreneurship : On Board the Swedish Naval Museum

Museums in Sweden are found to be more and more mission-laden, as they gradually evolve from a custodian role to a visitor-focused socio-cultural institution. In their efforts to live up to their newly acquired role, more and more museums are prompted to inject entrepreneurial mindset and practices into their activity, leading to a nascent interest from the academic field in the possibility offered by entrepreneurship in the context of museums. We identify museums as a unique context motivated by the values and desires of the museum workers, whilst arguing that research on museum entrepreneurship has so far neglected the social aspect of these museum workers. Instead, the popular discourse has generally favored functionalism and positivism. As such, we propose to explore and potentialize an alternative view of entrepreneurship in museums that places the people, along with their values and desires, at its core. To that end, we conduct a case study with the Naval Museum, a governmental museum located in Karlskrona, Sweden. Through an iterative abductive approach inspired by grounded theory method, we shed light on several potentials and phenomena emerging from a combination of the museum workers’ values and the unique context of the Naval Museum. After performing a metamorphosis analysis inspired by Weiskopf and Steyaert, we give birth to child-museum-entrepreneurship, a concept unburdened of preconceptions. We then infuse it with Hjorth’s public entrepreneurship theory and discover a new form of becoming of museum entrepreneurship, potentializing its existence and power of re-creation and opening the door towards a human-centered museum entrepreneurship