BETWEEN DISCIPLINARY IDENTITY AND PROFESSIONAL TITLE: ART-HISTORICAL JURISDICTION IN EIGHT SERBIAN MUSEUMS UNDER THE 2021 MUSEUM ACT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35120/sciencej0503383sKeywords:
art history, museum professions, professional jurisdiction, occupational closure, SerbiaAbstract
This article examines how disciplinary expertise acquires formal professional authority when the corresponding academic discipline is absent from a statutory hierarchy of occupational titles. It analyses the position of art-historical expertise in Serbia’s museum system under the 2021 Law on Museum Activity. The study applies qualitative document analysis to the Law, two implementing rulebooks and operative organisation and job-classification acts from eight museums selected through maximum-variation purposive sampling. The documents were coded across seven dimensions: statutory title, disciplinary designation, organisational embedding, collection anchoring, qualification closure, task jurisdiction and continuity across higher professional grades. The national framework defines curator as a basic professional title and senior curator and museum adviser as higher titles, but reserves neither the professional examination nor these titles for art-history graduates. Institutional acts nevertheless produce different forms of disciplinary recognition: seven museums use an art-historical designation, four establish an art-history department, five connect the analysed post with an art, fine-art or applied-art collection, and four prescribe an exclusively art-historical qualification. The comparison demonstrates that an explicit art-historian designation may coexist with non-exclusive disciplinary entry, while substantial collection-specific authority may be assigned through generic curatorial titles. Drawing on Abbott’s theory of jurisdiction and Fourcade’s distinction between nested and state-centred professional structures, the article introduces vertically distributed jurisdiction as a configuration in which occupational recognition is regulated nationally, while disciplinary eligibility and object accountability are specified institutionally. The findings demonstrate that disciplinary designation is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence of formal jurisdiction and support the explicit alignment of statutory grade, qualification and collection responsibility.
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