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Pack Behavior: Conflict And Communication In The Dogs Group Exhibition Design Team

1671 Words7 Pages

Katie Fernandez
MSTD 6104: Managing People and Projects
Professor Lauren Telchin-Katz
October 30, 2017

MSTD 6104: Case Study

(Un)Pack Behavior: Conflict and Communication in the Dogs Group Exhibition Design Team

According to business management theorist Paul Drucker, “One of the great strengths of a non-profit organization is that people don’t work for a living, they work for a cause,” (1990: 150). This statement is true for museum professionals. We believe deeply in the mission of museum work. Teamwork is the structure and application of this idealism. It is inherent to the entirety of the museum: leadership, individual departments, highly specialized project teams, volunteers, and the surrounding community. Sociologist Charlotte P. Lee (2007) applies community of practice theory in her research on teamwork in museums and explores what conflict looks like in the field. Her specific case is an Exhibition Design team that is responsible for a traveling exhibition about canines, called the Dogs Group, for an anonymous but real natural history museum (Lee 2007: 187). This report will note her findings; including what team structure best describes her research participants; an alternative structure that could have …show more content…

If that were the case, then their first decision as a team would not be the selection of the team members or whether to include external consultants, but instead, how the team would be structured and operate. From Lee’s (2007) communities of practice research and Morris’s (2017) specialty team model, it is clear that the team structure consisted of several communities of practice that were based on each individual’s belonging or not belonging to the museum, their professional specialization, and more abstract identifications within museum studies, such as academic versus

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