Sorry, my mistake. What you have in mind, I guess, is to use
accreditation as a carrot/stick to induce/coerce museums into
improving employee relations.
Accreditation in higher education - program, institution - is
different from the kind you mean. Yet there are commonalities.
All of it is a mechanism of social control. Accreditation has
both formal and informal sanctions. In some cases it is the
absence (or withholding) that is determinative; that is to say,
an entity simply does not function without it. I am less
familiar with the particulars of non-academic accreditation,
and will be very interested to see what you find. Hospitals, I
believe, have an accrediting body (in the non-academic kind of
institutional accreditation I believe that the source or basis
of authority is a kind of "social contract"; it used to be that
way in HE too, but more recently the FedGov got into the
business of "recognizing" accrediting bodies, a sort of
superordinate accrediting of the accreditors). I believe that
police depts are accredited, as are fire departments, and
mental institutions. There some in some of these types that
continue functioning, thank you, without the blessing of
accreditation. Do they loose anything, except possibly
prestige? Do (say) doctors shun a hospital if it is not
accredited? Are they denied funds by some sources? In other
words, is denial of/loss of accreditation by a museum of AAM
accreditation any credible threat? Is there any reason why the
board (which is the legal entity always) should actually give a
BRA about accreditation? Would they, like Descartes who, when
asked if he wished desert, replied 'I think not,' vanish? Or
could they continue to do museum just as before?