ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the urban cultural armature and the national and municipal organisational distribution of labour strongly influence how museums represent the nation and its place in the world, and also limit the extent to which museums can change what they do. Boston plays a very particular role in the national museological landscape in the United States, just as the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) plays a unique role in Boston's organisational field. The urban cultural armature and the institutional distribution of labour contribute to path dependency. A citys economic and political genealogy and its early position in the geopolitical hierarchy also shape the kinds of cultural institutions it creates and how they reflect the nation and the world. Cities and nations also have deeply rooted ways of dealing with difference what we might call diversity management regimes that respond to and shape what cultural institutions do.
