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?