LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool
Free willeronderzoek op het randje
I recently visited the Friesmuseum in Leeuwarden, Friesland, during the weekend. I had the chance to spend many hours over the course of two days just looking around and observing. I also had the chance to remain in the museum when it already closed its doors to the public at 17:00 and all the visitors left. I wasn’t looking around or observing artworks. I was mainly observing the visitors and workers of the museum and learning their behavioral patterns. For example, I found it interesting that many of the visitors, whether young or old, visit the museum in couple formations. Sometimes a couple of parents also brought their young adolescent kids with them on what looked like a ‘dagje at the museum’. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that I visited the museum during the weekend when the normative social unit of the ‘family’ or ‘couple’ have time off work. Nevertheless, it is still interesting that those visitors off work chose to go together, as a couple, or as a small family ‘unit’, to the museum. They could be going elsewhere, or they could part ways, but for them, the elsewhere of the museum seemed to be the somewhere to go to. There also seemed to be a desire to be ‘educated’ by the museum, or educate the possible perils of art to one’s offspring as an inter-generational lesson.
I was also observing how the museum as a public institution was organized and how the work floor, so to speak, was functioning rather smoothly. I accredit this firstly to the significantly large space the bodies of both workers and visitors could move around in. The grandeur space of the art institution in this case, in the northern province of The Netherlands, seemed like a necessary refuge, or, given this couple formation pattern, like a modern Noah’s Ark. Secondly, a lot of the museum working staff seemed relatively motivated and happy to fulfil their role. Accompanying the salary workers were, as always in Dutch museums, the volunteer staff, also known as vrijwilligers – which freely translates into English as Free-Willers. A recent global study1 of vrijwilliger retention concludes, unsurprisingly, that the factors that contribute to free-willer/ volunteer retention are quite similar to retention of paid staff, such as dissatisfaction with management, lack of autonomy and work overload. As a global phenomena, volunteer ‘work’ which is equivalent to 61 million full-time workers is in decline, so it is quite beneficial for the economy to better understand the will of the free-willer, concludes the study.
In any case, the existence of free willers and the ‘unfree-willers’ together on the work floor, suggests that one group of people do it out of free will while others do it for a living. Additionally, observing the museum visitors who were visiting the museum on their day off work, alongside a group of freelance artworld professionals (artists and their collaborators) who, as part of what they do for a living is educating the public on the perils of art, also made me question where does free will lie within education.
Who’s will is free in the educational setting, where academic performance is increasingly demanded on almost any existing level while the value of academic freedom seems to be at risk? We see the prevalence of performance-studies at work, in the child’s expected academic performance in class, or the teacher or lecturer’s job performance, or the manager or program director’s own performance as program manager or director, or even the educational institution’s own performance as an educational institution amongst many others, on a national, or international level, and the list goes on and on. The academic performance matrix begs the question of what lies outside the framing of this matrix, which is, I suggest, a will free of the need to perform, or in other words, someone who per-forms as a living (human being), rather than for a living. Problematically, –as in the case of the vrijwilliger and the un-free willers, or the artists and the public on the same work floor–, the fact that those who perform for a living and those who perform as a living, are situated on the same work floor, gives rise to doubts and questions which might become common in both groups, as they both engage in a dual-performance or game of chicken of who is really educating/ being educated and who is only playing pretend.
LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT - De Haagse Hogeschool 