Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
Smithsonian Institution
Identity preserved in perpetuity
The Smithsonian is the world's largest museum and research complex, built on the mandate to preserve for public access the full record of human achievement and natural history. Its 19 museums, 21 libraries, and 9 research centers hold 155 million objects. The identity-orientation is expressed in the specificity of what it preserves: the Wright Brothers' Flyer, the Apollo 11 capsule, Julia Child's kitchen, the original Star-Spangled Banner. The institution treats the objects of human experience as worth preserving and understanding in relation to the identities that produced them.
Smithsonian Institution
Identity preserved in perpetuity
The Smithsonian is the world's largest museum and research complex, built on the mandate to preserve for public access the full record of human achievement and natural history. Its 19 museums, 21 libraries, and 9 research centers hold 155 million objects. The identity-orientation is expressed in the specificity of what it preserves: the Wright Brothers' Flyer, the Apollo 11 capsule, Julia Child's kitchen, the original Star-Spangled Banner. The institution treats the objects of human experience as worth preserving and understanding in relation to the identities that produced them.
Free admission to the most significant collection of American cultural objects in existence. Research producing foundational contributions to anthropology, astrophysics, and natural history. A preservation mandate keeping the record of who we have been accessible to anyone regardless of income.
The tension between a mandate to represent American identity and the political environment in which that identity is contested. Exhibitions canceled or modified under Congressional pressure, demonstrating that an institution whose funding runs through Congress operates with constrained editorial independence.
The 1995 Enola Gay exhibition controversy, in which the Smithsonian's attempt to present the atomic bombing in historical context was forced into revision by Congressional and veterans' pressure, demonstrating the limits of institutional identity-preservation under political constraint.