Sustainable museums: a new paradigm for the 21st century from the perspective of museum professionals and visitors

One of the most important basic functions of museums is to preserve the cultural resources of a community, not only for the present but also for future generations. In recent years, the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have constantly come to the attention of researchers and practitioners and museums are no exception to this process. Well-managed museums not only ensure their own sustainability, but also play an important role in the sustainable economic development of different urban regions (Gustafsson and Ijla 2017) and directly influences the development of cultural tourism in a given region as well. Despite the obvious links between museums and sustainability, not much research has explored how museums fit into sustainability, and how can they become sustainable. Based on this, the main research question of my study is: How can a sustainable museum be defined based on the mission statements of European contemporary art museums and according to the value preferences of museum professionals and museum visitors? To answer the research question, the phenomenon of sustainable museums needs to be analyzed from different aspects. Qualitative research methods are applied in the dissertation: systematic literature research, content analysis, critical discourse analysis, Q-method and grounded theory based on interviews. The main scientific contribution of my dissertation are the followings: (1) Identifying 15 key sustainability thematic roles of the museums The research complements the empirical literature on sustainable museums and contributes to broadening the theoretical background. The mission of museums in this context has not been examined before. The research has shed light on the value preferences that define museums and around which they can develop sustainable strategies. (2) Identifying the objectives and roles along which different practices exist in CEE and non-CEE countries. The novelty of the research is that there has been no research on museum sustainability specifically in the ...