Deaccessioning as a Long-Term Organizational Strategy

This case study of the 2023 deaccession of three Cézanne-paintings from the Swiss Museum Langmatt’s collection supplements the deaccessioning discourse with the strategic management perspective. The research question of whether the deaccessions can be interpreted as the operative manifestation of a long-term organizational survival strategy is addressed with a qualitative mixed-methods-approach combining data from two semi-structured expert interviews with document analysis. In the theoretical part, the researcher proposes the term operationally motivated deaccessioning to describe the investigated form of deaccessioning. The analysis considers three perspectives: the internal (museum director), external (ICOM) and cultural policy perspective (canton Aargau’s Head of Culture Department). Analogous to the principle of a SWOT analysis, the data is examined for information on the museum’s identity and environment as well as on the deaccessioning process itself to determine whether the deaccessions were embedded in a wider strategic context. Although ICOM's ethics-centered argumentation, designed for universal applicability, is hard to grasp with strategic management’s focus on unique organizational circumstances, the data suggests that the sale of paintings was indeed part of an organizational survival strategy. This finding results in the hypothesis of a general correlation between a specific type of deaccessioning and the main organizational strategy. The paper concludes with the proposal of a new typology, which organizes types of deaccessioning in relation to both strategic and ethical considerations.