Part of why Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology succeeded was that it was one of the Boundary Objects in its story.
It was a token in a status war with the East Coast. This actually annoyed Annie Montague Alexander, who was the rich person who paid for the museum and was, in effect, its Chief Operating Officer in its early years. In a letter to Grinnell, she fumed about how all the trustees seemed to care about was “hey, look, we’ve got this well-funded museum that’s better than East Coast museums” and not at all about what the Museum was actually *doing* *for* *science*.
Grinnell’s response was basically to ask Alexander not to insist that the trustees attach the same meaning to the Museum as he and she did. To paraphrase: “**They don’t need to be convinced to value what we value; what matters is that what they value is *compatible* with what we value.**”