On 13 May 2014, representatives of the Netherlands Open Air Museum and the Dutch Petroleum Company (nam – Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij) unveiled the latest addition to the public museum: the pumpjack brk-10. After they ceremoniously pressed the start button, brk-10 swung back into action. Not to pump oil as it had done between 1983 and 2013 just north of Rotterdam, but to nod for eternity as a heritage object celebrating the Dutch post-war gas and oil boom. After the ceremony, the museum’s director Willem Bijleveld contextualised this piece of rusty industrial heritage, wedged between two Dutch farmsteads from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. According to Bijleveld, the pumpjack epitomises the Dutch welfare state and post-war modernisation. Ultimately, ‘[b]ecause of pumpjacks, and the exploration of gas and oil, we are extremely prosperous in the Netherlands’.² The nam, a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, not only donated the pumpjack, but also provided €80,000 for its installation and exploitation costs, and for the development of educational projects for the period 2012-2022.³

Over the past four decades, critical examinations of the (mis)uses of the past have ensured that today, museums and cultural heritage are understood as political artefacts, culturally assembled over time through a complex web of power relations.⁴ Building on those timely contributions that outlined how heritage was used as an instrument in nineteenth and twentieth-century statecraft, most contemporary research continues to explore heritage-making and the politics of museums along the same lines: both are seen as products of the state that are primarily geared at constituting national identities and governing populations. The different explorations of the politics of heritage in the Netherlands are no exception. Dutch research continues to view the state and nationalism as the main protagonist and structuring agenda. This is the case in this journal, in academic teaching on heritage, and in the politics of historical culture.⁵

In the humanities and social sciences, discussions about methodological nationalism, defined as the tendency to use the nation state and its borders as the dominant unit of analysis, impact the approaches to the study of heritage and memory politics.⁶ In this article we propose to expand these discussions about the methodological issues in studying heritage and museums beyond a focus on scale alone. For those fields of study that explore the politics of history, we argue that there are similar methodological issues with the tendency to foreground the state as the main mobiliser of the past and nationalism as the accompanying agenda. Simply put, studies that explore the power relations that texture heritage and memory making have a tendency to focus primarily on the actions of the state and nationalist agendas. Within heritage studies, non-state players have received limited consideration at best.⁷ This lack of attention in Europe stands in sharp contrast with early warnings from the United States where, since the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), American museums were increasingly becoming part of a ‘corporate sponsored history machine’ that provided national audiences with historical views that aligned with the corporate sector’s interests.⁸ A notable exception in European research are the criticisms directed at the influx of oil money in the art sector. This came into the limelight in the aftermath of the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Following this disaster, several scholars and activists noticed how ‘big oil’ had become an active cultural player in mobilising art museums such as the Tate to construct a favourable image.⁹

In this paper, we go beyond merely drawing attention to the significant impact of non-state players in the Dutch heritage and memory field. By exploring the dynamics underlying corporate patronage and the socioeconomic climate in which museums have become compelled to ask for financial gifts, we aim to increase literacy about the intricacies of corporate influence. By making the tactics and mechanisms of corporate players visible, we encourage critical reflection on their indirect impact on the narrations of history in the public sphere.

Since antiquity, corporate patrons and philanthropists have always sponsored the arts and culture. Austerity and neoliberal reforms following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, however, have accelerated the withdrawal of the state from the cultural sector in Europe. Cash-strapped museums and public heritage institutions consequently became more dependent on private funding.¹⁰ Yet, as the examples in this article highlight, the processes of neoliberalisation and privatisation in the cultural sector are far from a zero-sum game of less state and more corporations, because the taxpayer remains the most important contributor by far.¹¹ In addition, policy interventions promoting neoliberal self-reliance and unrealistic visitor number quotas have pushed public heritage institutions, in search of extra funding to balance their budget, into the arms of corporate players.

The lack of transparency and documentation about corporate sponsorship complicates a sector-wide analysis of the Dutch museum landscape. For this article we therefore had to combine insights and data from three Dutch museums to theorise the impact of corporate patronage on a broader level. We selected museums with a clear historical profile: the Netherlands Open Air Museum, National Museum Boerhaave and the Drents Museum. These three museums have all received support from the two biggest Dutch hydrocarbon players, namely the nam and Shell. All three museums can be categorised as ‘public knowledge institutions’ since all of them are funded by state or regional governments.¹² In democratic states, public museums are generally perceived by the public as part of the public sphere, meaning that they are considered neutral sites of expert discourse and democracy.¹³ Consequently, the messages and histories they produce hold authority and impact the national public.

For each museum, we studied how changing funding structures impacted its institutional organisation, identity, and the (historical) narratives it conveys to the public. First, we inventoried the annual financial reports of each museum, analysed details about corporate gifts, and tabularised and compared changes in the yearly budget. Secondly, on the basis of these reports, we charted the evolution in temporary exhibitions. We scrutinised exhibitions featuring themes or objects connected to the oil and gas sector. Thirdly, we interviewed representatives of each museum on site. We spoke to curators, who were often trained as historians, and representatives of the financial or fund-raising departments. As we did not want to affect relationships with specific corporate patrons, we did not explore specific cases but discussed general funding practices. The names of our informants have been anonymised in this paper.

The Drents Museum has archived most of its correspondence and designs of older exhibitions, enabling us to study early exhibitions sponsored by the hydrocarbon industry. For the other two museums it was very difficult to find information about collaborations with private partners anywhere in their records. Interlocutors told us that correspondence was rarely archived and that contracts between the museum and their patrons were private. We are grateful that the staff of the Netherlands Open Air Museum and the Drents Museum made time to speak to us about corporate funding. National Museum Boerhaave stated that, since 2011, they have diversified their income away from the state and are now ‘doing a really good job’.¹⁴ They saw little purpose in discussing the changed funding climate and thus refused to be interviewed.

The so-called maecenas, be it a corporate or private patron, has historically played an important role in the Dutch arts and culture sector.⁴⁵ However, following the Second World War, the government became the dominant player in the field, and by the early 2000s the tradition of private gifting and corporate philanthropy had lost its significance. Even during the 1980s and 1990s, when neoliberal logic centring around ideas of self-sufficiency and less state intervention became important abroad, the Dutch museum sector remained a sector that was primarily funded by the government.⁴⁶

Although influential non-governmental foundations like the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds raised their profile throughout the 1990s and became increasingly important, it was not until the 2010s that private gifting became of cardinal significance.⁴⁷ In 2011, vvd politician and then undersecretary for culture Halbe Zijlstra, presented a new policy for the financing of the cultural sector. The most striking aspect of his policy was, without a doubt, the drastic reduction of 200 million euros a year in funding for various cultural organisations, heritage sites, and museums.⁴⁸ On top of these austerity measures, Zijlstra urged for a radical change in the way in which the cultural sector saw its relations with the state and taxpayers. Zijlstra deplored the strong dependency on governmental resources and encouraged the cultural sector to tap into the opportunities for gifts and sponsorships by individuals and businesses. He proposed that the government would stimulate a ‘culture of giving’ among businesses, while simultaneously stimulating a ‘culture of asking’ among cultural institutions.⁴⁹

Perhaps the most consequential impact of this new policy was not the reduction in funding. Rather, the new policy was intrinsically geared at normalising a new morality amongst cultural workers. Through changing the funding criteria, a new logic was promoted in the Dutch cultural sector centring around ‘cultural entrepreneurship’. Already under previous administrations since the 1990s, museums were encouraged to act more like enterprises.⁵⁰ Still, quality was the main concern in deciding whether to award an organisation state funding. From 2013 onwards, new funding criteria centred around public outreach (that is visitor numbers), cultural entrepreneurship (that is, the capacity to generate independent income), education, and self-reliance. Museums had to become and act like businesses. Importantly, self-reliance entailed that each institution had to generate a minimum of 17.5 per cent of independent income of its total budget. What’s more, to remain eligible for institutional funding by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, this independent income had to increase by at least 1 per cent a year.⁵¹

In the Netherlands, cultural institutions aiming for long-term institutional funding from the Dutch government, need to submit a portfolio of their activities and plans to the independent Council for Culture (Raad voor Cultuur). Visitor numbers, entrepreneurship, and the magical 17.5 per cent of independent income especially, have become the deciding factors in the 2010s. National Museum Boerhaave is illustrative in this respect. In their 2017-2020 evaluation, the dramatic rise in visitor numbers as well as their collaboration with Shell were lauded as best practices and reason enough for extending state support.⁵²

This changed funding structure and undergirding morality drastically altered the cultural field in the Netherlands. Whereas in the period 2009-2012, 179 institutions were funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, under the new policy (2013-2016) only 82 cultural players received national support. Although this policy concerns institutions receiving public funding from the national government only, these stringent criteria served as inspiration for the provinces and municipalities that similarly slashed their cultural budgets. Larger institutions and established museums were able to meet these challenging criteria, but many smaller institutions closed down or were absorbed into large organisations. An analysis of the museums’ annual budgets included in this study shows that the Netherlands Open Air Museum and the Drents Museum even received more funding than the years prior to the budget reorganisation (graphs 1 to 4). At the same time, the medium-sized National Museum Boerhaave struggled to maintain its financial position.⁵³

At first glance it seems that public funding for the remaining institutions increased, but if one evaluates the funding criteria, it is clear that the available money is earmarked with ambitious requirements. During our interviews, curators and representatives of the financial departments of the Netherlands Open Air Museum and the Drents Museum underlined that the main impact of the new funding structure lays in the more stringent evaluation criteria which emphasise the importance of self-reliance, a balanced budget, and overambitious visitor numbers. A freelance fundraiser told us: ‘Government subsidies are meant to finance the primary goals of a museum (i.e. conservation and presentation of the collection), but not sufficient to pursue our ambitions. Yet we need to realise those ambitions to be eligible for future (other) subsidies and funds’.⁵⁴ As a result, so-called ‘blockbuster exhibitions’, high-profile exhibitions on popular topics attracting tens of thousands of visitors, have become a necessity for any museum that wants to fulfil its visitor and return-on-investment quota.⁵⁵

Blockbuster exhibitions originated in the late 1980s, when the first and second Lubbers cabinet enacted a careful reorganisation of the Dutch museum sector.⁵⁶ Since Zijlstra, blockbusters proliferated and have become an everyday reality for most museums.⁵⁷ Because visitor numbers have become of key importance, both for the evaluation and for the independently generated income requirement, museums are intrinsically competing for visitors. This forces them to pull out all the stops for every blockbuster. As indicated by a curator we interviewed, if one wants to contend in the highly competitive blockbuster landscape, a ‘cherry on the cake’ like an innovative multimedia application is absolutely imperative.⁵⁸ Such features drive up the costs of an exhibition even more. As a result, the competition that is inherent to the blockbuster mentality has further ballooned the budgets of many institutions.

National grants, ticket sales, and special funding frameworks for the organisation of temporary exhibitions are insufficient to finance expensive blockbusters. In order to break even, generate the all-important 17.5 per cent independent income, or even limit the losses below a certain threshold, a so-called ‘team development’, staffed with corporate relationship managers, has become a cornerstone of most museums’ organisational structure since the 2010s. The members of these teams are mainly charged with acquiring funding, ‘asking’ for corporate sponsorships, and maintaining good relations with funders. As a curator told us: ‘Now we have a separate team development. This department has become bigger and more important, because external funding has become more important to us’.⁵⁹ These departments also have a say in the exhibitions themselves to ensure they appeal to audiences, current partners, and potential donors alike. A fundraiser told us: ‘The financial staff is part of the design process from the start. Usually, the curators get to decide on the content, but this is a point of contention. The financial department can choose to highlight a different part of the subject or exhibition’.⁶⁰

Despite the growing importance of corporate gifting to museums, it is incredibly difficult to document the exact extent of corporate funding in the total annual budget. Whereas governmental sources are generally justified in detail in the annual budget, sponsorships from non-governmental partners are not explicated, nor are they detailed on the website of the museums or in the catalogues associated with exhibitions. Because of this lack of transparency, we were forced to evaluate the financial impact of corporate players in a more indirect way using the available sources like annual budgets, newspaper statements by corporations or museums, and the museum exhibitions themselves.

In the case of the pumpjack in the Netherlands Open Air Museum, the nam donated €80,000 for its exploitation for the following ten years. On a total budget of at least €12,000,000 that year, the financial influence of the nam is clearly limited. This stands in stark contrast with the strong visibility of the company in the museum’s permanent exhibition. Although National Museum Boerhaave is relatively opaque when it comes to the extent of sponsorship by Shell for the ‘Hidden forces’ exhibition, the average contribution of all corporate sponsors in the five years leading up to 2017 (when the new permanent exhibition was opened) was between 1.5 and 4 per cent of the total budget (table 1c). Evidently both National Museum Boerhaave and the Netherlands Open Air Museum provided players from the energy sector with a generous forum to promote their views on fossil fuels.

The Drents Museum has been collaborating with the nam for over four decades now. The museum staff is aware of this long-standing relationship. A curator told us: ‘We have been working with the nam for a long period of time. The nam is a trusted partner of the cultural sector in Drenthe’.⁶¹ Although exact details remain vague and it is unclear what the nam contributes, during the years when the permanent exhibition was changed (especially the 1997 and the 2017 updates) it contributed significantly to the annual budget. The corporate funding of the museum was especially high in the 1990s. One would expect that sizable corporate funding results in a stronger impact of the patron, an evolution international literature suggests as well.⁶² However, in the case of the Drents Museum, it seems that a larger financial contribution does not necessarily translate into a stronger reproduction of the funder’s vision.

Our interviews and the financial reports of the institutions clearly indicate that corporate sponsorship has become more important for the museum sector. The Zijlstra policy geared at cultivating a neoliberal morality was extremely successful due to the financial incentive it entailed. Although corporate sponsorship has been slowly increasing since the 2010s, compared to the overall budgets of museums it is remarkably limited. Nonetheless, since these corporate funds are absolutely essential in financing the indispensable additional innovative features of blockbuster exhibitions, or are desperately needed to reach the threshold of 17.5 per cent independently generated income, they significantly prescribe the rules of the game.

Compared to global examples in which energy companies often present themselves as major contributors to the total budget of museums, in the Dutch museum sector minor investments result in a disproportionate impact because of the specific funding structure.⁶³ Since the investments of the energy corporations are significantly lower than the actual costs of the exhibitions in which they are favourably represented, the remaining costs – which are significant compared to international examples – are carried by public and other private funds. Albeit indirectly, the tax payer funds the pr efforts of energy corporations.

Commenting on the corporate patronage in the United Kingdom, Victoria Alexander encourages us to read patronage in the museum sector through the lens of Maussian ‘gift exchange’.⁶⁴ The French sociologist Marcel Mauss argued that gifting between people or groups consists of a three-phased cycle of giving, receiving, and the obligation to reciprocate.⁶⁵ Mutuality is encoded within this transactional dynamic: the receiver needs to compensate. Although this reciprocity is not explicitly defined during the gifting, according to Mauss it is socially encoded in the endowment by the giver. Thus, the nature of the return by the receiver is assembled by them through an interplay between the nature of the gift and an interpretation of the needs and context of the giver. In the case of philanthropy, this means that even if the patron does not explicitly ask for a favour in return to the sponsor contract, the receiver still tends to reciprocate to ensure future gifts.

Alexander argues that corporate players understand this dynamic. The reason why certain industries set up this cycle of gift exchange with museums is because of the respectability of certain cultural institutions. Being associated with these institutions generates reflected glory, which ultimately boosts their self-esteem and brand value. Ultimately, they seek to raise the corporation’s profile through its involvement in a sector broadly conceived as apolitical and charitable.⁶⁶ This analysis presents corporate patronage in the museum and heritage sector as a type of ‘culture washing’, which is aimed at assembling the corporation not merely as a profit-driven institution in society but as a socially and culturally engaged ‘good citizen’. Through sponsoring, the corporation gains a platform from the museum to raise their profile.

At the same time, growing interest from anthropologists in cultural sponsorship encourages us to see corporate donations as part of their corporate social responsibility (csr) portfolio. Using csr initiatives, as vast literature argues, big industries attempt to structure the social and political environment in which they operate.⁶⁷ csr is intrinsically political. It is used to normalise certain discourses about economic development and environmentalism. In such a reading, the goal of corporate philanthropy transcends the trope of image management alone, as it is equally about constructing a more favourable understanding of a given industry on the ground. Various examples show that energy and mining conglomerates are especially invested in museums and heritage sites, since they can be strategically employed as cultural technologies to manage the domestic and geopolitical fields of practice in which they operate.⁶⁸

Museums are very powerful in this effort since they are perceived by society as embodying objectivity and value-free messaging. Commenting on the corporate involvement in the cultural sector in the United States and Germany, Mark Rectanus encourages us to conceive the involvement of corporate players in museums as a strategic ‘attempt to rewrite social histories of technologies as well as institutional histories’.⁶⁹ So, image management, as well as producing and normalising apt discourses in the public sphere, are central aims of corporate patronage. Such discourses can be seen in the energy-sponsored exhibitions in the Netherlands Open Air Museum, National Museum Boerhaave, and to a lesser extent the Drents Museum. Through historical narration, Shell and the nam become embedded within the national narrative. Their technology and industrial activity is positioned as part of historical progress, and contemporary environmental impact is nuanced by drawing attention to specific historically-located benefits, namely the welfare state and the agricultural industry.

Since 2012, raising public understanding on the importance of the hydrocarbon industry has been one of the sector’s key goals. Showing themselves aware of the changing societal perception of the gas sector, the ‘Top Team Energy’ (a collaboration between the major players in the Dutch energy and gas sector), approached a polling company to measure the public support for gas in the Netherlands in 2011.⁷⁰ This research indicated that support for this sector had dwindled because of the Groningen earthquakes. To counter this increasingly critical public perception, the Dutch gas sector designed a marketing strategy to influence public discourse.

A key deliverable of the plan was to create ‘energy literacy’ in Dutch society. For the period 2012-2016 a total of €16.1 million was reserved for educational deliverables, funding cultural projects, redacted columns in the popular press and so on. Although the concept of ‘energy literacy’ is never explicitly defined in the strategy plan, it is clear that the concept centres around promoting an interpretative framework that encourages people to read about and recognise ‘the facts’ about, and positive sides of gas.⁷¹ These ‘facts’ include gas’ environmental benefits, its contribution to the Dutch economy, and its necessity for the national energy supply. It is believed that this energy literacy helps counter the growing ecological literacy and environmentalism, undermining public support for hydrocarbons.

The narratives studied above clearly overlap with the strategy of cultivating energy literacy. This overlap, both in timing and content, however, does not mean that the exhibitions discussed in this article are direct products of the pr offices of the gas industry. Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult to trace how exhibitions are made, since internal documentation about the development of exhibitions was not available to us. That being said, interviews with curators, taken together with the impressive archive of the Drents Museum about the 1997 Geo-Explorer exhibition, signal how curators operate independently from the corporation and define the design and content of exhibitions.

In our interviews, museum representatives emphasised that they would have moral objections to direct company orders. This is also something that frequently comes up in the interpersonal communication preserved in the archive of the Geo-Explorer exhibition. The liaison officer of the nam assisting with the development of the exhibition would promote content following corporate discourses. The officer’s suggestions were continuously redacted and countered by the curators. When comparing the content supplied by the nam for Geo-Explorer and the final product, the agency of the curators becomes very apparent.⁷²

At the same time, as both the interviewees and archival materials indicate, exhibitions might be developed by the museum, but in the end, power relations between the patron and receiver propel the receiver to further some pro-corporate narratives to keep major donators close. The fact that representatives of major corporate patrons are part of the supervisory board of the studied museums further complicates the position of curators. A former Shell commissar, for instance, sits on the supervisory board of the Netherlands Open Air Museum.

Ossifying a good relationship is of key importance since museums rarely seek ad-hoc collaboration. Long-term sponsorship is more desirable in a sector where stability is imperative. This means that in the cycle of reciprocity the receiver must return the gift, so museum curators need to maintain a favourable relationship with their patrons. As indicated above, in some of the museums the ‘team development’ ensures that there is enough reciprocity.

Although there are great benefits to exploring philanthropy in the museum sector using a Maussian lens, modern patronage in the Dutch cultural field is not restricted to the tripartite giving-receiving-reciprocating. Since the implementation of the Zijlstra policy, museums are forced to ask for gifts even more than they already were during previous years. Although this act of soliciting for patronage has not been theorised at length, Alexander briefly points out how this transforms the power relations within the gift-giving cycle. Apart from providing the corporation with even more legitimacy, it forces the receiver to profoundly ascribe to the needs of the giver and to ‘take on, at least at the surface level, the cultural beliefs of the giver’.⁷³ Consequently, as soon as the receiver asks for sponsorship, their agency is restricted, and the reciprocation is restructured in favour of the giver even more.

This difference between voluntary and solicited gifts becomes apparent in the examples in this study too. In the case of the Drents Museum, archival materials show that it was the nam who approached the museum to develop an exhibition about its core business. This financial partnership continues to this day. Although the beliefs of the nam are still subtly interwoven in the exhibitions’ narrative, both in the Geo-Explorer and the more recent exhibitions for children, the discourse is much more nuanced and less laudatory in spite of substantial corporate support. While the Drents Museum received gifts, the representatives of the Netherlands Open Air Museum stressed that asking for gifts has become an extremely important task for them in the Dutch post-Zijlstra landscape. Although National Museum Boerhaave refused collaboration, internal pr material points to a climate where the museum actively solicits for gifts from Shell and other multinationals.⁷⁴ When exploring the energy discourse at the Netherlands Open Air Museum and National Museum Boerhaave, one can discern a drastically different narrative when compared to the Drents Museum: the former are much more directly in line with the needs and interests of the energy industry.

Only better access to sponsorship contracts and a greater overall transparency into corporate sponsored exhibitions will provide us with detailed insights into the divergent dynamics between voluntary and solicited gifts. Nevertheless, a contextual reading of the disparate representations of the hydrocarbon sector in the museums discussed here, points to a different relationship between the patron and the beneficiary. The difference between asking and receiving might encode unique power relations in philanthropic gifts, which likely explains more pro-corporate narratives. At the same time, collaborating with the energy sector for so many years has provided the Drents Museum with more institutional experience to mitigate corporate pressure.

In the Netherlands, up to the late 2000s, private involvement in the museum and heritage sector was limited. The advent of austerity-driven policies in 2011 promoting corporate philanthropy changed this. Although the contributions from corporate players are relatively small when compared to state funding, their impact is especially poignant due to the changed funding criteria. Because it is imperative to finance costly ‘blockbusters’ and to reach the 17.5 per cent benchmark of independently generated income, every euro from a corporate partner is extremely valuable.

Clearly, not every euro in a museum’s budget is equal. Corporate sponsors are more powerful, despite making relatively limited financial contributions. Because of these power structures, non-state players have a profound impact on how the past is represented in Dutch public-funded museums. This article explored how strategic investments by Shell and the nam resulted in museum exhibitions that favourably represent the increasingly contested Dutch gas industry. Themes like national modernisation and the deep historical entanglements of the fossil fuel industry were foregrounded in a historical exhibition to the detriment of environmental narratives. Eventually, the tax-payer indirectly funds these pro-hydrocarbon narratives, since corporate support is often too small to cover all the expenses of the temporary or permanent exhibitions in which they take centre stage.

Besides exploring the link between funding structures and representational practices, an important goal of this study was to trace the sociocultural dynamics and power relations elicited by corporate philanthropy. Although insight into the decision-making processes is complicated by a lack of transparency, it is evident that museum exhibitions are not designed by the corporations themselves. Curators at museums maintain agency and can counter corporate propaganda. Archival materials and interviews show that curators are aware of the politics of corporate funding and have little interest in being an extension of the corporation. The indirect effects of corporate funding can be better understood when analysed through a Maussian lens. In a political climate where state funding is increasingly earmarked and competition is fierce, corporate funding becomes more and more valuable. This seems to restrict the agency of the museum, ultimately ensuring that the needs of the funder become explicitly interwoven in the narrative of the exhibition.

Moreover, our findings suggest that not all museums engage with corporate funding in the same way. The Drents Museum seemed to produce a more nuanced narrative concerning gas extraction and consumption, despite receiving a larger financial contribution. On the other hand, the Netherlands Open Air Museum and National Museum Boerhaave do emulate the ‘energy literacy’ discourse of the oil and gas sector profoundly. We hypothesise that this discrepancy can be explained by the difference in the type of gift. In the case of the Drents Museum the nam approached the museum first to provide funding. The other two museums received the gifts in a period where soliciting for financial support had become the dominant mode of seeking patronage. Thus, the difference between voluntary and solicited gifts impacts the nature of reciprocation.

The interpretations in this study are speculative and will remain so due to the limited amount of data available in the public records. It is a heartfelt hope of the authors that the findings of this study will be challenged and reevaluated. The authors found it disturbingly difficult to get a hold of information in the public domain. This is problematic since all three museums are still predominantly funded by taxpayers. We believe greater transparency is a first important step towards increased accountability. This will also encourage, rather than tamp down, future research because of a lack of data.

Further research will enable us to start conversations about best practices and rules of engagement. Corporate sponsorship has always been a key element of the museum sector and during times when neoliberal logics texture the bedrock of contemporary society it is expected that philanthropy will become even more important for the heritage and museum sector.