Managing Cultural Heritage

An International Research Perspective

Luca Zan, Sara Bonini Baraldi, Maria Lusiani, Daniel Shoup, Paolo Ferri, Federica Onofri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317101796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Since the 1990s, heritage studies has emerged as a distinct academic field, and practices and rhetoric drawn from mainstream corporate management and strategic planning have become widespread. Based on extensive research, this book is an in-depth investigation of management practices rather than policies, based on a variety of case studies from around the world.

The authors take the issue of management in heritage seriously, but also take into account the role of other disciplines within heritage organizations. In particular, they focus on sustainability in terms of financial resources, human resources, knowledge management, and the relationship with the audience and communities of scholars. The book opens with a methodological introduction that discusses what it means to do research on management, and why international comparative research is essential. The body of the text engages issues of heritage and management through five distinct analytical lenses: management and the process of change, institutional settings and business models, change and planning, the Heritage Chain, and the space between policy and practice. Each of these five sections includes a chapter introducing the analytical framework and possible implications, followed by case histories from China, Italy, Malta, Turkey, and Peru. The book ends with a chapter of concluding reflections.

1

International Perspectives on Management and Cultural Heritage

Luca Zan

Based on 15 years of fieldwork done by a group of scholars at the GIOCA Research Centre, Department of Management, University of Bologna, this book investigates the issue of managing cultural heritage from an international perspective. The book is an in-depth investigation of practices rather than policies in managing heritage, based on a variety of case studies from around the world that presents the wide variety of contexts, situations and solutions that occur at diverse heritage sites in managerial and organizational terms. We tend to investigate organizational processes within individual entities, whilst attempting both to avoid the disciplinary arrogance that sometimes characterizes management studies and to take into account the role of disciplinary perspectives in the life of these organizations. In particular, we focus on sustainability in terms of financial resources, human resources, knowledge management and the relationship with the audience and communities of scholars.

Heritage as a field of research and collective action has emerged only in the last 40 years, spurred by the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Though conservation began as the touchstone discipline of the field, the highly interdisciplinary nature of heritage has brought in a wide diversity of perspectives that has sometimes posed challenges to mutual understanding. Since the 1990s, heritage studies have emerged as a distinct academic field (for example, Cleere, 1989; Kreps, 2003; de la Torre and MacLean, 2005; Leask and Fyall, 2005; Silberman, 2006; Smith et al., 2010); in parallel, practices and rhetoric drawn from mainstream corporate management and strategic planning have become widespread. Whilst many fields have become ‘managerialized’ in recent decades, there are distinct traditions of planning and management studies within several fields, including business, organizational studies, urban planning and industrial engineering. Discussions of ‘management’ rarely pay serious attention to the intellectual heritage of these different disciplinary traditions, creating grounds for confusion. This is further compounded when new disciplines, such as archaeology and conservation, begin to use generic notions of ‘management’ within their own professional discourses. The lack of real dialogue between the heritage disciplines and scholars of management and organization has led to misunderstandings and neglect of crucial issues for understanding organizations and outcomes on both sides.

Our research is predominantly ‘micro’, largely characterized by fieldwork, with attention to practices in the organization of activities and organizational practices. A sort of obsession with international comparison, particularly outside the Anglo-Saxon context, is our usual point of departure. This chapter will position our research, which is placed at some distance from many of the dominant approaches in the heritage debate, both in Italy and internationally.

The (Partial) Hegemony of Administrative Law

Indeed, the lack of international comparison in the sector is a striking phenomenon. A sort of localism or parochialism seems to dominate, creating a tendency to look at issues within a particular country as if they were unique and special. For instance, one cannot refer to ‘cultural goods’ (beni culturali) without referring to the Italian administrative law and its pervasive impact on most attempts at change within the sector.

On the other hand, in all of our international research we very rarely met ‘civil servants’ who behave like Italian museum directors, who tend to quote articles and clauses of laws much more than management concepts. Very often the Administrative Director of an Italian museum has a degree in law, without basic training in accounting, not to say management concepts.¹ However, from another perspective one could see this as a sort of local ‘accident’, in a world that in one way or another faces similar questions with solutions that are more or less similarly articulated.

This book will not talk that much about individual administrative laws, though it does refer to the most important norms and laws that have a direct impact on the life of the organizations under investigation; in any case, we do not take the law as management, but just as one of the many element affecting it. All in all, it is the peculiarity of administrative traditions that matters: what a particular tradition “leaves out” of the picture, more than the ways in which it structures the issue. Here an interesting paradox emerges. The dominant role of administrative law has huge impacts on how managerial issues are dealt with in civil law countries. However this dominant position is just local. At the worldwide level – in the whole debate on heritage management – such aspects are totally ignored, in a literature dominated by the Anglo Saxon view, which in turn tends to underestimate the impacts of law driven processes outside the context of common law countries.

For this reason the book will not talk that much about Italy, though most of the authors are Italians. We do discuss Pompeii 10 years after an administrative reform attempt, in a chapter that undertakes a sort of ‘administrative mourning’ (Zan, 2013a) that needs to be reckoned with, if we want to avoid past mistakes. In addition, we will refer to Bologna as 2000 European Capital of Culture, the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza and an analysis of policy in the performing arts sector. But these are seen as examples than can be analysed form a truly comparative point of view. We do believe that understanding in depth what is happening in other parts of the world is essential to understanding the specific features of one’s own system (in our case, Italy). This will also highlight to what extent the need for change is shared all over the world, or is the result of the peculiar features of our own administrative system (and law).

For a Critique of Cultural Economics: Towards an Ethnography of Administrations

Though humanists have trouble in understanding differences between economists and management experts, our approach rooted in the tradition of management studies is significantly different from cultural economics. However, enlarging economic discourse around heritage is possible, and can take very different paths, depending on the ways in which economics and economic meanings are conceived (Polanyi, 1977). As applied economists, closer to business economics and administrative science, we tend to talk about meanings, rather than values. Unlike other disciplinary areas within the heritage field, in economic discourse there is a serious risk that as soon as you use the term ‘value’, a mainstream economist will try to measure something, well before the ‘meaning’ itself is qualified and reconstructed. To paraphrase a famous saying, economics is too important to be left to economists!

In this regard, the abstract, acontextual and ahistorical reasoning of neoclassical economics tends to show up within cultural economics as well, and the issue of measuring the ‘value’ of heritage as a central focus of the analysis, or the notion of ‘cultural capital’ (for a criticism see Ritenour, 2003). A literature review of mainstream cultural economics and its ‘addiction’ to a rational choice epistemology is out of the scope of this chapter (cf. Hutter and Rizzo, 1997; Klamer, 2003; Throsby, 2001, 2002; for an early discussion see Mason, 1999; Avrami et al., 2000; Rypkema et al., 2011). Sometimes the impression is that such forms of economic discourse are self-referential, tautological to some extent: they are useful to ‘prove’ legitimacy when policymaking is using this specific lens.²

Suffice it to point out our preference here for a more pragmatic – de la Torre (2002:4) would say ‘more useful’ – view of economic meanings. One crucial example, for instance, is the difference between investment and current costs (and revenues), which in our view is more important than the notion of cultural capital itself. Indeed the lack of proportion between capital and both investments and running costs in the art and heritage field makes the whole issue of capital lose its relevance. Think of the Mona Lisa, for instance, and its immense market value. But who thinks about this (potential) financial value when caring for, protecting and presenting the painting? Or, where collection de-accessioning is not allowed – as it is often in countries with a strong tradition in curatorship – the market value is simply zero (no market, no money).

Moreover, the lack of attention to the different implications of investments and current costs is an ever-present issue in the field, for the cycle of politics and the ego of politicians and directors tend to focus on short-term investment, rather than future conditions of action and responsibility. The case of the Great Court at the British Museum in the 1990s is a textbook example from a rich and well-developed country: budgeting for current expenditures for running the new facilities only emerged at the end of the building process, without being addressed before (Zan, 2006).

From a methodological point of view, our distance from mainstream cultural economics is, if possible, even greater. The idea that one can propose his or her intellectual speculations well before testing them – as Throsby (2001: 114) explicitly acknowledges – sounds to us awkward: ‘[T]he empirical application of these approaches need to be tested by reference to several case studies’. Our attitude in doing research on the management of cultural heritage is just the opposite, a sort of ‘ethnographic’ approach: doing field research, understanding local contexts and situations, developing frameworks for local understanding which are empirically grounded – and then, if necessary, checking their broader applicability later on.

This is not only related to a question of levels of analysis; when the internal functioning of any organization is investigated in detail, we look at possible interactions amongst various aspects that are involved (actions, decisions, actors, processes). In fact, not all management scholars share our ‘ethnographic’ interests. Our method of investigating the micro and administrative aspects is related in two ways to a specific approach to organizational complexity. On the one hand, complexity tends to allow a variety of possible alternative combinations of inputs, throughputs and outputs, to use the language of (complex) systems analysis. On the other hand, the cognitive processes of actors are challenged by complexity itself. Sensemaking, that is, the reconstruction of what is going on (Weick, 1995), is crucial in this approach to understanding organizations (Czarniawska, 2008).

This pluralistic, open-ended attitude means that the analyst during fieldwork in any organization must attempt to ‘catch reality in flight’ (Pettigrew, 1985) – even in profit-seeking, manufacturing contexts. The aim is to understand specific settings, patterns of action (Mintzberg, 1985) or conduct (rather than choices); and to investigate how actors make use of such processes of reconstruction, with meanings that are neither given, self-evident nor clear-cut.

This kind of ‘ethnography of administrations’ approach seems to fit particularly well into the broader trend towards weakening the Western bias of heritage discourses (if not its colonial legacy) that is taking place at the international level (see for instance the Nara document on cultural diversity and authenticity, and the whole discussion around intangible heritage: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1995; Jokilehto, 2006a, 2006b; Stanley-Price and King, 2009; Kulikauskas, 2011). A more radical implication of this phenomenon, though it is referred to rather implicitly, is to acknowledge diversity also from economic and administrative points of view. It is not only cultural and heritage diversity that is relevant, but the diversity of administrative heritage, which shapes the other two in many ways (Smith 2006). In this sense, an ‘ethnographic’ approach to administration attempts exactly to grasp this variety of practices, especially in the context of international comparative research.

Rather than applying predefined economic models to policies taken as a given, this approach searches for idiosyncratic practices and the social construction of economic meanings in a variety of administrative contexts.

Cultural Policies or Administrative Policies for Culture: Some Embarrassing Issues

Another element to be taken into account – though not our specific analytical perspective – is cultural policy. International comparison in this regard can underline the minimal degree of homogeneity that lies beyond the ambiguity of the phrase. ‘Cultural policy’ can in fact refer to very different issues, from what might be better labelled as administrative policies for culture, to true policies for culture – two interpretations that perhaps represent the extremes on a continuum. The former is characterized by the definition of administrative rules and regulatory systems – including incentive mechanisms – to facilitate the development of cultural expression (that is, the funding of performing arts in Italy, or polices for direct management of museums and archaeological sites). The latter provides a completely different context, in countries where governments make direct choices about the content of culture: this is the case of China, where there is an explicit and pervasive use of cultural heritage as a tool for both cultural diplomacy and national identity-building; or in Turkey, where the current neo-Ottoman flavour has impacts on archaeology and heritage.

As analysts, we were involved in both situations. Though the direct, ‘heavy’ intervention in cultural policy is not our political and theoretical preference, one of the distinguishing elements of this book is its focus largely in non-Anglo-Saxon countries and its distance from the North American experience and its lack of cultural policies, even in a weak sense (lacking even a Ministry of Culture). However, the situation of a North American dominance in management studies (Engwall, 1998) can have strange impacts here. When contemporary China imports the whole debate on arts management focusing on the dialogue between profit and non-profit, scholars and students are forced to forget the role that the state (and the communist party) still plays in the country, and the absence of any institutions comparable with ‘non-profits’ in the West. The problematic nature of the label itself (cultural policy vs. administrative policies for culture) is not even perceived in the international debate because of North American dominance.

The second element of embarrassment relates to the rhetoric of policy, the difficulty in linking policy to actual conduct, and the diffusion of conduct and behaviours that are difficult to relate back to precise and explicit policies. Investigating policy carries the risk of analysing directives and wishes that are never translated into practice; or of ignoring practices that emerge beyond (without, despite or disconnected from) policies. The decay of Pompeii is not the linear result of a perverse policy, rather the unanticipated consequences of an intricate set of somehow hidden rules, attitudes and practices (and laws).

In a sense we also try to use our lenses in reference to (cultural) policies, analysing the issue of managing policies themselves. Very often, in fact, policies cannot be other than very general ideas and directions: the actual procedures, the processes that characterize them, the resources used in their realization determine the policies themselves, well beyond the initial explicit statements. Even given a change of analytical level (from the individual entity to the whole sector), we cannot give up our epistemological preferences. When talking about policies it is possible to take a position that stresses non-linear behaviour, is open to unanticipated consequences of human action, and acknowledges the role of bounded rationality, ambiguity, emerging phenomena and the like. Though this general view is present in the overall international debate on public policy (as we will discuss in Part 5 of this book), it is missing from the more specific debate on cultural policies.

The Management Studies Perspective: Some Basic Features of Our Approach

So far, we have underlined our differences with other streams of research outside the traditional fields of heritage professionals, marking a distance from administrative law, cultural economics and cultural policy. We need now to position our approach within management studies. We will point out similarities and differences with alternative approaches within the management field, underlining the implications of our approach for investigating cultural organizations, and for the world of heritage professions that characterize them.

SOME THEORETICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES

It is worth making some of the elements characterizing our approach explicit:

• First, drawing from the field of critical management studies, we are interested in issues of organizing and managing entities, whatever their contents and tasks are. Whilst sometimes professionals tend to associate the notion of ‘management’ with commercial and profit-seeking activities, we look at issues of ‘managing/organizing’ (Czarniawska, 2008) in any potential activity within a heritage organization (for instance, archaeological excavation is a complex activity that is – in one way or another – ‘managed’).

• Second, we are particularly interested in practices more than abstract ways of looking at management as a set of principles, procedures and normative statements, strictly determined by experts or by law and regulations. In that sense, we are more concerned with actual behaviours – what is actually done and how – rather than what should be done.

• Third, we share a call for a contextualist approach to management (see March, 1978; Pettigrew, 1987): management tends to be shaped by ‘local’ contexts and conditions, more than being defined by any ‘one best way’. These elements tend to interact strongly amongst themselves and impact the ways in which organizations are run, and should be carefully reconstructed. Such attention to the ‘local’ is twofold: any organization needs to be understood in terms of its relationships to its context; this is even more important when taking into account the problem of international comparison.

• Finally, our epistemological preferences are towards non-positivistic explanations. In general that means the weakening of cause-and-effect relationships, calling for more dialectical, uncertain and non-linear interactions amongst various elements of the decisional context, leaving room for ‘unanticipated consequences in human action’ (Merton, 1936), or ‘unintentional consequences’ (Hayek, 1952; Popper, 1959). More specifically, in Organizational Theory this has led to an extremely rich debate on decision-making processes, drawing on the original notion of ‘bounded rationality’ to develop of a s...