POSTHIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 016

Can an institution’s eyes and ears remain voiceless?

A posthierarchical analysis of Ugnė Tulaitė and Juozas Ruzgys’s conversation with Karilė Mozerytė, volunteer coordinator at the MO Museum

Terms marked with ? are explained without leaving the article.

MO volunteers see what the administration cannot see from its offices: visitors’ immediate reactions, discomfort, curiosity, and moments of misunderstanding. Yet if this experience only travels upward while the decision comes back down, the institution becomes more responsive but not yet posthierarchical.

A community that sees the museum up close

Ugnė Tulaitė and Juozas Ruzgys’s conversation with Karilė Mozerytė, the MO Museum’s coordinator of visitor experience and visual communication, is more than an invitation to volunteer. It reveals a small but significant part of a cultural institution’s structure: the everyday connection between the museum experience designed by the administration and the people who encounter it in the exhibition hall.

The MO volunteer community includes people from twelve to eighty years old. They look after spaces, communicate with visitors, work at the information desk, assist at events, with children, in archives and databases, take photographs, and, once prepared, can become volunteer guides. Volunteering lasts for a six-month season, so the selection process looks not only for a formal need to complete community-service hours, but also for inner motivation and readiness to belong to a community.

The article’s core is concentrated in one metaphor: volunteers are the museum’s “eyes and ears”. The administration creates exhibitions and visitor experiences, while volunteers see how people receive them and pass on feedback. This metaphor reveals both the model’s greatest strength and its institutional limit.

Context: a cultural institution between participation and work

A contemporary museum is no longer merely a repository where professionals select objects and the public quietly views them. A museum seeks to be a place of education, encounter, discussion, and belonging. A volunteer therefore occupies a distinctive position: neither merely a visitor nor an ordinary employee. At the same time, the volunteer helps the institution function, learns, builds relationships, and experiences at close range how the museum’s intentions work in reality.

This intermediate position creates both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is that volunteers can connect the institution with very different social groups. The risk is that the language of community may conceal regular work that is necessary to the institution and should therefore be paid. The authors of the conversation do not avoid this tension: they ask directly where volunteering ends and unpaid work begins. It is an important question that cultural institutions should not leave to goodwill alone.

Yet there is a third question, one raised less often. Even if volunteering is meaningful to both sides and does not replace salaried staff, what power does the knowledge accumulated by volunteers have within the institution? Do volunteers merely pass information to those who decide, or can they participate in decidement?

What the conversation shows particularly well

Where the conversation’s argument ends and posthierarchical analysis begins

Being an institution’s eyes and ears does not yet mean having a voice in deciding where the institution should go.

The posthierarchical shift: not passing experience on, but bringing it into decidement

The metaphor of “eyes and ears” gives volunteers a cognitive function, yet the deciding “mind” remains elsewhere. Volunteers notice, listen, and report. The administration receives the information, selects and interprets it, and then decides what to change. This may be a responsive, professional, and benevolent hierarchy, but its centre remains unchanged.

Posthierarchy does not mean that volunteers should vote on every artwork, replace curators, or take over the administration of the museum. Different decisions require different competences and responsibilities. But a position should not automatically confer a monopoly over deciding which experience matters, which problem deserves attention, and which alternative will be considered at all.

The real change would therefore begin not with another survey but with shared decidement. Volunteers’ observations would become not raw material for the centre but a starting point for jointly formulating the problem. Administrators, curators, educators, artists, volunteers, and visitors could see one another’s proposals, evaluate them, and test whether an individual observation reveals a broader pattern.

Feedback is not yet shared governance

Feedback is usually incorporated only after the most important boundaries have already been set: the exhibition has been created, the visitor journey designed, volunteer roles defined, and the survey questions formulated by the institution itself. A participant can say how a decision works but often cannot change the question that decision was intended to answer.

Individual accounts also have unequal visibility. A forcefully expressed opinion, a frequently repeated complaint, or an observation made by someone close to the coordinator may seem more important than a quiet but systemically significant signal. The hierarchical centre inevitably becomes a filter: even when acting in good faith, it decides what to hear, how to group it, and what to prioritise.

A collective intelligence environment would avoid two extremes: neither would the loudest single opinion become the museum’s direction, nor would the administration alone decide which opinion to treat as meaningful. Participants could evaluate proposals under conditions of accountable anonymity, while the system would reveal not only an average but also agreement, polarisation, and the structure of different groups’ experiences.

The boundary between volunteering and paid work is a question of institutional architecture

Whether an activity is genuinely volunteering depends not only on a person’s goodwill or on the sense of community, knowledge, and contacts they gain. If a task is performed regularly, according to a set schedule, is necessary to the museum’s everyday operation, and replaces work that would otherwise be done by an employee, it approaches a paid professional function. The language of community does not remove the question of remuneration.

In a posthierarchical institution, this boundary would not be set by the administration alone. Before the season, employees and volunteers would use collective decidement to assess the map of activities. They would distinguish learning, civic contribution, and freely chosen assistance from permanent professional functions. The actual time devoted to an activity, the responsibility involved, the museum’s dependence on that activity, and the possibility of giving it up without adverse consequences would all be assessed.

The boundary, once set, would not be final. In a collective intelligence environment, employees, volunteers, visitors, and others interested in the museum’s success could propose reviewing it when new arguments, experiences, or ideas emerge. If an activity previously regarded as voluntary becomes regular, necessary to the institution, or replaces a professional function, its status and remuneration must be reconsidered.

At the same time, remuneration for work necessary to the museum must be distinguished from a reward for voluntary contribution to collective decidement. Volunteers, museum visitors, and others interested in its success may be rewarded with museum publications, other valuable items, event tickets, gifts, or cash prizes.

The collective intelligence platform accounts for each participant’s contribution: the substantive proposals they submit and their ability, through evaluating other ideas, to help the group recognise the most valuable solutions. The points accumulated in a project make it possible to determine transparently who made the largest contribution, who ranked second, and how the remaining contributions compare. Such a reward recognises participation in the shared search for a solution but does not replace remuneration for a professional function.

Posthierarchy cannot mean giving people more responsibility without also providing the opportunity to participate in decidement, the resources they need, and remuneration for work on which the institution depends.

This would protect both volunteers and the idea of volunteering itself. Voluntary contribution would remain free, meaningful, and supplementary to the museum’s work instead of becoming its cheap labour.

Competence remains, but status no longer decides in advance

Museum decisions are not all alike. Conserving an artwork requires specialist knowledge; staff schedules require responsibility for organising work; visitor experience requires both professional research and everyday contact; and strategic direction requires a broader understanding of the public value the institution creates. Posthierarchy therefore does not propose mechanically equalising every voice.

It proposes separating competence from position. A long-serving volunteer may be better than a new administrator at recognising recurring visitor difficulties. A young visitor may notice a barrier in digital communication that an experienced curator does not see. A curator may justify a decision through knowledge of art history and exhibition dramaturgy. Each contribution should be evaluated by its content and its capacity to help the group recognise the most valuable solution, not by the contributor’s place in the organisational chart.

Accountable anonymity would temporarily separate a proposal from the author’s status. At the same time, the system would preserve accountability: it would account for the participant’s contribution and, over time, show whose evaluations most often resonate with what the group ultimately recognises as most valuable.

From helping the museum to co-creating the museum

The MO volunteering model already contains several elements important to posthierarchy: interaction between generations, recognition of volunteers’ abilities, the gathering of experiential knowledge, and mentoring through which part of everyday care is transferred to the community. A transition to shared decidement would therefore not require dismantling what already works. It would extend a movement already under way.

Such a project would not make the whole museum posthierarchical in a single season. It would, however, change the volunteer’s position. A volunteer would no longer be merely someone who helps deliver an already designed experience and reports on it to the administration. They would become one of the people able to help determine what kind of experience is worth creating.

flowchart TD
          A["Administration creates exhibitions and visitor experiences"] --> B["Volunteers interact with visitors"]
          B --> C["Observe experiences and provide feedback"]
          C --> D{"How are solutions sought?"}
          D -->|"Within the administration"| E["The centre selects problems and alternatives itself"]
          D -->|"Through collective decidement"| F["Volunteers, employees, creators, and visitors formulate problems"]
          F --> G["Alternatives are created and evaluated under accountable anonymity"]
          G --> H["The system presents the collective evaluation of alternatives"]
          H --> I["Managers make the final decision"]
          I --> J["Test results may begin a new cycle"]
          classDef conventional fill:#f3f1ec,stroke:#9b978f,color:#25261f
          classDef post fill:#fff8f4,stroke:#a93b2b,color:#25261f,stroke-width:2px
          class A,B,C,D,E,I,J conventional
          class F,G,H post