Museums Policy: Structural Invariants and Political Agency?

Clive Gray

Centre for Cultural Policy Studies

University of Warwick

E-mail: C.J.Gray@Warwick.ac.uk

Paper to the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, University

of Newcastle, March, 2012

This is an early draft of what will hopefully become a much larger project. As such there are

inevitable shortcomings within it. These are all my fault and any suggestions for improvement will be

gladly received. Regardless of these shortcomings the paper may be quoted and referred to. Many

thanks to all of the museum staff who have allowed me to talk to and question them.

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Introduction

The focus of this paper is on the internal policy decisions that are made within museums and

galleries in England. While the impact on these of the policies that are being pursued by a range of

other policy actors from central to local government, to external funding agencies are seen as being

significant in their own right, they are not the central topic of concern. Thus, precisely why the

Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) or the late Museums, Libraries and Archives Council

(MLA) made the decisions that they did over topics ranging from museums and regeneration

strategies, museums and learning, or museums and social inclusion is not the issue: instead, the

focus is on how staff within the museums and galleries sector manage these choices in the context

of their own decision and policy-making strategies. This discussion and analysis is framed within the

context of the general argument within the social sciences and humanities about the interplay

between structure and agency.

A common argument within this context is that concerning the relative significance of structure and

agency for the functioning of individual and organisational decision processes, with policy actors

being either, like Macbeth, ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in’ by a set of relatively invariant

structural constraints, or capable of claiming that ‘we are not a government poodle’ (West & Smith,

2005), able to make their own independent choices through the exercise of political agency. The

extent to which such positions are either tenable or relevant to an understanding of structure and

agency in the context of social action rather depends upon the underlying ontological,

epistemological, theoretical and methodological positions that analysts assume (Gray, 2010). If a

realist ontological position is adopted, where agency and structure are seen as continuously

intertwined (Archer, 1989, 1995; 2003), with each being recognised as central to an effective analysis

of policy activity then the relative importance of differing structural and agential factors can only be

determined empirically and is not amenable to definitional fiat. Of necessity such empirical analysis

must incorporate both structure and agency to be effective, which raises questions about the

appropriateness of differing methodological means for making sense of their interplay.

Structure, Agency and Museum Policies

Gray (2008, 218-9) has argued that museums policies arise from a combination of exogenous and

endogenous factors. The exogenous factors may range from the policies that are adopted by

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sponsoring or funding bodies that are institutionally separate from the individual museums and

galleries that are affected, to the ideologies that underlie policy choice, to the consequences of

actions that have been undertaken in other policy sectors altogether. The endogenous factors are

seen as deriving from the choices that are made by actors internal to the sector, which can be

influenced by, amongst many other things, organisational strategies, professional standards and the

patterns of accountability that exist. Overall policy is seen as being a response to the differing

pressures that are generated from each set of factors, with this response being mediated by the

conflicts and agreements that policy actors are involved in, both internally and externally. The

conditions of uncertainty that exist in all of these serve to make predictions about the likely outcome

of any given case extremely difficult – but not impossible.

If both sets of factors are important for understanding the precise detail of museum and gallery

policy then the question of how to make sense of what may otherwise appear to be a set of

disaggregated component policy parts becomes analytically important. Archer (1995) argues that, in

effect, it is possible to start from a focus on either structure or agency as being the dependent or

independent variable in question. The classic view from Marx (1973, 146) that ‘men make their own

history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but

under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’, for example,

takes a structural starting point, requiring an identification of the surrounding ‘circumstances’ before

sense can be made of the choices that are arrived at. This may be seen clearly in rational choice

approaches to analysis where the identification of the underlying value preferences that individuals

have serve to structure the choices that are, and can be, then made1 (Hindmoor, 2006). More

voluntaristic approaches, such as those deriving from a phenomenological ontology, would tend to

focus on how actors make sense of these constraints in the first instance before investigating how

they are then manipulated or managed by these knowing actors. Versions of interpretive analysis

that concentrate on the role of individual actors in the creation of meaning through their

manipulation of ideas and their reliance on personal experience demonstrate this approach to

analysis: Newman, 2011, for example, argues that an analysis of individual responses to museum

displays casts doubt on the efficacy of the top-down structural requirements of management tools

to capture the actual cultural impacts that visiting museums and galleries may give rise to.

1 Given the emphasis within rational choice on methodological individualism this may seem to be a rather perverse claim but, as critics have argued (see Green & Shapiro, 1994; Hay, 2004), if the underlying assumptions of rational choice are followed through then individuals can only make some choices out of the multitudes that potentially confront them, and those that are made are determined by the underlying value preferences that they hold. At the very least there are some methodological inconsistencies here.

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Rather than attempting to make claims about the relevant significance of any particular sets of

factors for museums and galleries policies at this stage it may be more useful to simply identify at

least some of the many variables that have been identified as being of importance for policy in

general, to establish a framework within which museums and galleries can be considered. Of course,

these identifications are themselves based upon particular emphases that have been placed upon

analysis in the past and, as such, they have generally been established on the basis of particular

ontological and theoretical presuppositions, where assumptions about importance in practice have

been used to give them importance in analysis2. Be this as it may, however, an awareness of

particular sets of variables can serve to focus attention on what are commonly perceived as being

the prime motivating forces behind policy choice.

It goes almost without saying that different organisations (individual museums and galleries in this

instance) are subject to particular external forces and pressures that need not necessarily be present

in the case of other organisations. Thus local authority museums that are in a Labour-controlled area

will not necessarily be subject to the same expectations and policy structures that one in a

Conservative-controlled area may confront. But, equally, two different Labour authorities may have

quite distinct approaches to their own museum services. In this respect context assumes

significance: simple generalisations do not necessarily reflect complex realities (see Howlett, 2012).

In the same vein two national museums may be subject to the same reporting requirements for

reasons of public performance management but this does not mean that they will actually respond

to these in the same way. Hood (2006), for example, differentiates between five types of ‘gaming’

strategy that have been employed in the British public sector3 any of which may be applied to

reporting, while Smith (1995) has identified eight unintended consequences of performance

reporting (of which gaming is one) which are subject to the choices that are made by organisational

managers. To simply assume that managers will do what they are told to does not seem to be an

accurate reflection of the lived experience of organisational staff.

2 Regrettably, negative findings remain rare in the literature. This may demonstrate that things are even more complex than is commonly thought – the sheer number of factors that have been argued to affect policy, either singly or in combination, now runs in to the thousands – or it may demonstrate that there is simply an unnecessary complication of analysis, or that there has been a certain amount of re-naming of identical factors in different studies. It would make a change for a study to announce that the variable that has been studied has absolutely no effect on policy.3Neither is this peculiar to the public sector. The private and voluntary sectors have equally as varied responses to demands for information from both internal and external actors.

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Be this as it may it is possible to identify a number of common claims about what determine the

structure and goals of policy, with these operating in two distinct arenas: museum policy as ‘policy’,

and museum policy as action. The former of these is, in keeping with the topic of this paper,

concerned with the structural characteristics of policy, while the latter is concerned with the practice

of the policy process. Given the emphasis within realist ontology on the recursive relationship

between structure and agency the identification of variables as forming a part of either of these

groupings is as much a matter of analytical choice as it is one of necessity: what may appear to be a

structural component in one line of analysis may appear as an agential factor in another, and vice-

versa. At the very least this means that a clear statement of the initial starting place for analysis

would be required to justify the analytical choices that are then made.

Given the tendency from within the cultural sector as a whole to view the choices and actions of

external agencies as being unwelcome intrusions on the independence and integrity of actors within

the sector - the instrumental debate, for example, has seen numerous ‘accusations of rigid

prescription, a loss of quality and artistic integrity, increased bureaucracy and an abdication of

responsibility by the state’ (Nisbett, 2012, 2) – the role of external actors in establishing sets of

requirements for the management of regulation, oversight, accountability, probity and many other

top-down concerns, where these affect internal actors would serve to establish the ‘circumstances’

(in the Marxian sense) within which museums and galleries staff are operating. The extent to which

these function as invariant controls over which internal actors exercise no effective autonomy is thus

a key dimension for investigating the structure/agency relationship. Whether structure is simply a

set of constraining factors or whether it can serve as a means for the exercise of effective policy

choices by independent actors thus becomes the major setting for the analysis.

The Structural Characteristics of Museums Policy

At one level an identification of the range of factors that establish the structural conditions within

which museums staff function is clear-cut: a simple listing of the legal framework governing the

museums and galleries sector, the reporting requirements that central and local governments have

established, the international treaties and obligations that have been signed, the funding

mechanisms through which the sector is financed, and the policies that central and local

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governments have introduced that govern what they are intended to do would be sufficient for this

purpose. At another level, however, such a listing is noticeable as much for what it ignores in terms

of establishing the context within which policy functions as it is for ignoring the less direct ways in

which exogenous actors may seek to impose control over the sector. It is particularly noticeable for

ignoring the unintended consequences of a range of actions external to the sector that could

potentially have major repercussions for how it functions. While the direct structural matters

concerning top-down policy choices clearly have an importance for the sector it is possible to

approach structure in a wider fashion that includes both the direct forms and the range of indirect

and unintended structural factors noted above.

One way of approaching this lies in identifying a range of structural constraints that are present in all

policy settings and then to identify how these play out within the museums and galleries sector. The

constraints that are identified here function at different levels within the sector and operate in quite

distinct fashions from each other. They cover a range of potential, externally-driven, constraints that

have been identified as having at least some effect in internal policy terms. What these effects

actually are in the specific case of museums and galleries (both individually and collectively) can only

be determined through detailed empirical research, even if the assumptions concerning what these

effects are likely to be are relatively clear. What follows is a brief listing of the variables that form the

general model of structural constraints and opportunities that has been developed.

At the macro-level three key structural factors are seen to be of significance: those of ideology,

rationality and legitimacy. Each of these has a role to play in determining the general political, social

and organisational context within which policy operates. Ideology - in the general sense of sets of

beliefs, attitudes, values and norms –establishes the parameters within which policy choices will be

made. At the most crude this could be represented by party political ideologies that establish

different expectations about the role of the state in society – with conservative parties being

generally more restrained about this than social democratic parties are. More generally such

ideologies can establish the balance between collective and individual responsibilities within

societies, as well as with establishing what are seen as being acceptable approaches to issues such as

nationalism, ethnicity and gender. Needless to say, each of these is a matter of some concern within

the museums and galleries sector (see, for example, Butts, 2007; Mason, 2011; Szekeres,

2002).Legitimacy is concerned with the basis upon which decisions and choices within society are

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seen to be acceptable ones, either in the sense that the right of decision-makers to make these

choices is accepted, or that the decisions themselves are accepted as being the right ones. While

legitimacy is unlikely to be an absolute state of affairs - in so far as not everybody always accepts the

right of decision-makers to act and the rightfulness of the decisions that are made without dissent or

disagreement –a basic level of legitimacy is absolutely essential to allow social life to be undertaken.

As such, working within the confines of the established legitimate order is a necessity unless or until

that legitimacy is subject to such extensive stress that it fails to function. Recognising such legitimacy

issues may be simply at the level of knowing the ‘rules of the game’ of organisational and personal

life that allow things to be done, at another level it involves an active acceptance of standards of

behaviour and ways of working if one wishes to become accepted as a participant in the activities of

the wider social world. Rationalities govern the ways in which people operate by identifying the key

relationships that will be used to justify the choices and actions that individuals will take. Classic

Weberian means-end, instrumental, rationality is not the only form of rationality that may be

applied to any given situation – from sociology, affective and communal forms can be identified, in

political science patron-client forms are seen, and in cultural policy a ‘ritual’ rationality can be seen

to exist (Royseng, 2008) – even if it is a common one. Which rationality is being employed at any

given time, however, has some important implications for how social behaviour will be or can be

explained, and it operates as a limit to what are seen as being appropriate ways of behaving in any

particular set of circumstances.

Such macro-level structural constraints serve to establish the general framework within which

choices and decisions will be made. This framework may be a variable structure in so far as parts of it

may take different forms at different times (for example, with switches from instrumental to

communal rationality when dealing with some issues) but it is a consistent feature across all areas of

social life. As such it is expected to be unlikely that these limits to action will be at the forefront of

policy actors’ considerations in most cases. Instead it is anticipated that they will function more as

forms of ‘deep’ structure which do not need to be spelt out but which can be identified in the

patterns of behaviour that they generate, or which can be applied post ante as justifications for the

choices and decisions that were made. Further it should be noted that treating these variables as

structural ones is a matter of analytical choice. Each could be equally treated as agential variables

where they are deliberately constructed by knowing actors to serve particular policy ends (Ingram et

al, 2007). By treating them as structural variables the assumption is that actors/agents do not

determine their content in a direct fashion, even if their own choices are affected by them, while

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treating them as being a part of agency would involve agents being responsible for their content,

construction and use.

At the meso-level are a range of structural constraints that are formed by direct exogenous policy

considerations. In effect these form part of the general policy context within which museums and

galleries policies are located. Within this context five variables are noted as being of particular

significance for policy. Firstly, the policy priorities and agendas that other organisations have are

clearly of significance. Thus, in the British case, what these priorities and agendas are for national

governments can have quite clear policy effects for the museums and galleries sector: the current

coalition government’s strategy with regard to public expenditure has had inevitable knock-on

effects across the entire sector, while the role of national government in establishing a framework

for the management of public sector organisations, through the use of ideas from the New Public

Management, that influenced the development of instrumentalisation in the museums and galleries

sector (Gray, 2008) provides a second example.

Secondly, the structural policies that are used by national governments for managing the policy

process in the public sector will have a constraining effect upon how individual organisations and

policy sectors will be expected to operate. Ideas related to evidence-based policy (Davies et al, 2000;

Sanderson, 2002) and ‘joined-up government’ (Pollitt, 2003; Ling, 2002), for example, have had clear

impacts on the manner in which public organisations are expected to be organised and to make

decisions, even if with limited effect in some cases (Gray, 2006). Such general policy ideas may have

limited long-term impact given that they are often seem to be fashions and fads that can be, and

often are, discarded with some rapidity, but in the short-term they can be used to direct policy

actors along certain lines of action even if only at the level of providing the latest jargon for use in

public and official policy statements. In this case the exact extent to which these policies operate as

constraints or as opportunities for policy actors to exploit is a matter of empirical research and

evidence.

Thirdly, the macro-policies that are applied across the public sector can establish the framework

within which policy operators are expected to function. The emphasis on social inclusion and

exclusion(Newman & MacLean, 2004), and the ‘big society’, for example, have both been intended

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to be used as mechanisms to provide a focus and justification for the actions and choices that public

sector organisations are expected to make in the exercise of their decision and policy-making

activities. If they have rarely been used as the central policy focus that organisations are expected to

concentrate on, they have existed as a set of general policy expectations that policy-makers should

bear in mind when making their decisions and choices, and to ignore them entirely would be unlikely

to be good organisational politics. Whether these macro-policies are simply a means for

instrumentalising policy-making across policy sectors would depend upon governments actively

behaving in a top-down policy fashion – and being able to impose their policy preferences on

reluctant organisations and individuals – with little evidence that this has actually occurred. But,

again, the precise impact of these major policy foci on the work of specific organisations is a matter

for empirical research and evidence.

Both structural and macro-policies are normally determined by the dominant political organisation

within national systems – in the case of Britain this would be at the national governmental level at

either Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast, depending upon the distribution of powers within

the overall system, just as in federal systems this would be determined by the constitutional

settlement that underpins the distribution of power and authority within them. Such national

policies, however, are not necessarily the end of the story. International policies can also contribute

to the formation of the national policy landscape, either through the requirement to live up to

international laws and treaties or through the impact of policy learning and/or policy transfer

(Cairney, 2012; Rose, 1994; Benson & Jordan, 2011). In the case of museums and galleries, for

example, not only are European Union laws applicable to the sector, but so also are the UNESCO

convention on intangible heritage and the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated

Art (amongst many others). As such the meso-level is not an enclosed world that is isolated from

broader political and policy currents but it is, instead, also subject to its own sets of structuring

constraints and opportunities from the broader environment within which it is located.

The fourth meso-level constraint is constructed from the organisational universe that underlies

policy activity. The allocation of functional responsibilities between government departments, local

authorities and the world of quasi-governmental organisations – let alone between the public and

private/voluntary/community sectors – has important implications for the distribution of

hierarchical resources between them (Rhodes, 1981, 100-1), as well as control of the actual

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implementation stage of the policy process. Additionally, the organisational universe contains a host

of inter-organisational, intra-organisational and inter-personal relationships that can have an

important impact on the functioning of policy sectors. As such this factor extends between the

formal structural arrangements that exist to include the informal relationships can serve to manage

how policy will be put into practice. At this level there is a clear expectation that matters of agency

will be of some significance for understanding precisely how the organisational universe will

function. Be this as it may, however, the structure of the organisational arrangements that are in

place within policy sectors will serve to regulate the formal dimension of operational activity.

Fifthly, the policy instruments that governments employ to manage public policy serve as important

restraints on the room for manoeuvre that public (and private/voluntary/communal) organisations

have available to them. These instruments can be classified in various ways: Hood (1983), 4-6, refers

to nodality, treasure, authority and organisation; de Bruijn & Hufen (1998), 17-9, refer to regulatory,

financial incentive and information transfer instruments; while Howlett (2011), , refers to

information, advice, resources and structural instruments. Whichever listing is chosen, however,

they are all referring to the mechanisms that are employed by governmental actors to turn policy

preferences into actions. The combination of instruments that are employed at any given time will

establish parameters for action within which actors should be expected to function4, they will

equally close off other pathways that might otherwise have been pursued. As such they establish a

form of what historical institutionalists would refer to as path dependency where present choices

are constrained by previous ones that direct individuals and organisations along particular routes,

and limit the extent to which alternatives are likely to be pursued (or even recognised) (Hall &

Taylor, 1996).The structural determinism of this view is questionable and accepting policy

instruments as structural components does not necessitate an acceptance of such determinism –

instruments may serve as much to liberate policy actors as they do to constrain them – and whether

they function as constraints or opportunities is, again, subject to empirical research and evidence.

Alongside these macro- and meso-level structural factors a means to identify the precise location

and role of agency factors is needed if analysis is to be more than a simple description of structures

that is isolated from the practice of policy activity within these structured boundaries. While it is

4 Whether they actually do is a matter of agency rather than structure but treating instruments as structural components identifies the policy framework that is being employed and the boundaries to action that this then imposes on actors.

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possible to investigate the role of individual and group actors at a number of levels, for current

purposes agency is located at a micro-level established in and of individual organisations. Within

these organisations policy actors are not only confronted with higher-level structural constraints and

opportunities but are also subject to the possibilities – both as limits and as room for manoeuvre –

that are provided by specific organisational characteristics. Identifying these structural factors will

serve to provide a multi-dimensional image of the policy space within which actors will exercise their

role as agents of choice.

These micro-level structural factors are, firstly, the specific policies that organisations have. These

will identify the aims and intentions of policies, the targets at which policy is directed (whether these

are people (for example, school-children) or processes(audience development or staff training, for

example), or the distribution of functional competencies between staff members. These policies are

the focus of the activity undertaken by agents in so far as they are concerned with introducing,

incrementally amending, strategically changing and terminating particular directions and intentions

that the organisation maintains. Regardless of whether agents operate in a proactive or reactive

manner with regard to the policies that the organisation has, they do provide the ground-plan that

regulates and controls organisational operations. These policies are determined internally by the

organisations concerned and are thus analytically distinct from those operating at the meso-level in

the form of structural or macro-policies.

Secondly, the policy instruments that are used at the level of the individual organisation operate in

the same fashion as at the meso-level, establishing the parameters of action of organisational

members are expected (and anticipated) to function within. Which instruments are utilised, and how

these relate to those that are used at the meso-level of structure, are subject to empirical

investigation, with an expectation that there will be variations both between levels and between

individual organisations (as well as between differing policy sectors) as to these issues. In this case

policy instruments are used to identify the policy processes that are made use of within

organisations.

Thirdly, the people who inhabit the organisational space of individual institutions can serve as a

structural factor: whether this be simply in terms of the number of staff that an organisation has, the

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split between full-time employees and volunteers, or the distribution of professional resources

within the organisation, all can affect the policy capabilities that exist. At the simplest level the

existence of in-house conservation staff has obvious implications for what can be done with and for

the maintenance of the museum or gallery collections (see, for example, Davies, on Birmingham),

while the argument of Newman & Tourle (2011) about the potential long-term implications of cuts in

full-time staff numbers effectively focuses on the competencies and capabilities of museums and

galleries to serve the public. Regardless of the consequences in terms of agency choice that arise

from these concerns the general treatment of the human element as a structural constraint or

opportunity for museum and gallery functioning shifts attention to the general context within which

these organisations operate.

Fourthly, the distribution of power within individual organisations, or which affects organisational

functioning, has important implications for understanding the specific choices and decisions that are

made. Whilst the relatively oligarchic nature of policy-making across cultural sectors has been

commonly identified (see, for example, Gray, 2000 on the arts sector) what occurs within specific

organisations is less clear. Certainly differences between, for example, national, local authority,

private and military museums would be anticipated not least because of the formal structural

relationships that have been established between national museum Boards and Directors and

government ministers, local authority managers and councillors, and the Boards of private trusts and

foundations and their managers and Directors. The level at which effective policy is made, and

whether this is made in a top-down, bottom-up or collaborative fashion will affect the types of policy

that are made, how these will be expected to be implemented and evaluated, and how they will

relate to meso-level expectations in terms of policy priorities and agendas, structural and macro-

policies. While the distribution of power would be expected to vary to some extent between issues

and over time, for any particular policy case who the policy-makers are will be of significance for the

resultant policy outcomes.

Finally, the specific resources in terms of money that are available to the organisation or

organisations concerned will have obvious policy consequences – not least in terms of the people

and professional and technical competencies that organisations can make use of.

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In summary, the relationship of all of these structural variables is represented in Figure 1. This

relationship is in the anticipated form of increasing (from the centre out) or decreasing (from the

periphery in) generality in terms of the specific impact that each set of variables has for the overall

shaping of museums and galleries policy. The precise effect of each set of variables on individual

museums and galleries will be a matter of the exact context that is being examined – in other words,

there is a differential effect in terms of how they contribute to individual policies and organisations

within the sector.

Identifying Agency in the Museums and Galleries Sector

Within the framework that is shown in Figure 1 the precise way in which the general exogenous and

endogenous structures that have been identified affect the mechanisms of choice and the exact

policies that are pursued by actors within the museums and galleries sector needs to be examined.

This is necessary not only for the descriptive light that this can throw upon individual cases or upon

changes in policies over time, but also for the establishment of causal relationships between

structure and agency that can clarify the circumstances within which they function. Given the realist

ontological position that has been adopted it is anticipated that both structure and agency operate,

and interact, on a continuous basis, and that attempts to establish the primacy of one over the other

will be a fruitless exercise. Instead, empirical analysis is employed to establish how staff within the

sector see the limits and opportunities that these structural factors provide for their own policy

activity. It may be that in some circumstances and cases the constraining influence of structure will

provide the best explanation of what is occurring whilst in others the liberating influence of agency

will provide a better understanding of events. In neither case would this be indicative of the absolute

importance of either agency or structure only that they have particular effects in particular

circumstances and conditions, and it is the identification of these that is informative rather than

anything else.

This research is being undertaken on the basis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with

education, conservation and curatorial staff as well as senior managers within public sector

museums and galleries (national, local authority and University). The intention is to establish which

sets of structural factors are identified by museums and galleries staff as being of primary

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importance for the work that they undertake and for the policy directions that they pursue5. By

distinguishing between functional groupings within the sector the identification of differences and

similarities between them will be made possible, and distinguishing between types of museum and

gallery in terms of their organisational location will allow for a second set of similarities and

differences to be investigated. Put crudely, if all conservators see professional standards as being the

key factor behind their choices and policies and all educational staff see the national curriculum as

being the key then different structural characteristics would be seen as having significance for what

is taking place within the sector. Likewise, if local authority museum staff (regardless of functional

specialism) see the maintenance of good relationships with their local councillors as being central to

their work, whilst national museum staff see international status and importance as the driver for

what they do, then clearly different structural factors are at work in each case and the emphasis on

agency in the former case is of a different nature to the role of agency in the latter. Rather than

prejudging the case a number of preliminary hypotheses have been developed that attempt to

locate the continuous interaction of structure and agency within the sector.

As might be anticipated the role of financial resources, particularly during a time of financial

austerity, is anticipated to be a major structural determinant of policy choices across the sector:

indeed, such resources are always of significance regardless of the general economic climate. The

extent, however, to which this operates as a simple limitation on the room to manoeuvre that exists

within the sector, and the extent to which it has encouraged a reappraisal of what is done within it –

the proverbial ‘doing more with less’ approach that the present coalition government is encouraging

– is a matter of some concern, not least because of what it says about how staff view their own role

within the system. It is, again, anticipated that staff will not behave simply as a combination of

Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper but will, instead, use the cuts as a means to either re-assess their

own activities or to re-confirm their commitment to central component parts of their functional

roles. As such agency is anticipated to be the key explanatory factor in determining precisely how

structural limits are managed in this case. While the cuts are an inescapable fact of life in most of the

sector the management of them is expected to be placed firmly on the shoulders of staff within the

sector. This is a consequence of both the increasingly professionalised nature of the museums and

galleries sector and the more crudely political preference of the cutters to evade having to bear the

direct responsibility for the consequences of their decisions6 but it is expected that the practical

5 A secondary consideration is that this will also provide some empirical evidence in terms of the role of central governments in establishing, or not, an instrumentalisation of museum and gallery policy. 6 The shifting of responsibility by politicians to the implementers of the policy is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be traditionally accepted that in times of plenty it is those with ultimate

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working-through of what, in terms of Figure 1, would be seen as a combination of structural policies

and the use of particular policy instruments is left to the discretion of sectoral staff. Whether staff

respond in a reactive or proactive fashion to the financial position that they find themselves in is

anticipated to be a key factor in accounting for the responses that they adopt to the hard times that

they are currently functioning within.

It is also anticipated that differing functional groups will be affected by, and will affect, different

combinations of endogenous and exogenous variables. This is a consequence of the nature of the

functions that are concerned. While each of conservation, curation, management and education can

be argued to be key component parts of the overall functions that museums and galleries undertake

(Gray, 2008; Davies, 2008)7 the underlying focus of each rests on very different sets of underlying

criteria, ideologies and professional expectations and norms. In the case of education these are

largely to be found in the field of pedagogy which rests outside of the museums and galleries sector,

even if the sector contributes specialised concerns and issues that the field would be expected to be

aware of. With conservation they are to be found in fields of technical and scientific expertise that

are located, again, outside of the sector. In this case, however, the sector has a considerable role to

play in determining what this technical and scientific expertise is and how it should be applied. In the

case of curation the underlying factors are largely determined within the sector itself and while they

may make use of material from a variety of external sources (covering everything from computer

technology for digitisation to materials science for preservation), the central concerns of the exercise

are internally focused on what is seen to be one of the core concerns of the sector itself8.As a

consequence of these differences a preliminary hypothesis would be that for curation and

conservation the micro-level structural factors which operate endogenously to the sector are

responsibility who claim the credit while in times of famine it is never their fault. Whether this qualifies as rank hypocrisy or is merely a fact of political and organisational life is not necessarily clear-cut but in either case it is not particularly admirable behaviour. 7 Any such listing of functions will be, at least, debatable. Hill (2005, 3), for example, notes that museums and galleries have also been argued to be responsible for creating urban societies, modern populations and identities, forms of knowledge and authority, and practices of consumption. Bennett (1995, 21) adds that they could also be seen to raise popular taste, increase sobriety and prevent civil unrest, as well as (73) displaying class power and advancing reputations and careers. Whitehead (2012, 179) argues that interpretation should be added as a core museum function alongside ‘conservation, collecting and exhibiting’. At the very least museums and galleries are multi-functional organisations with differences between whether these functions are concerned with internal activities to the museum and galleries sector or whether they are concerned with the social and political consequences that the sector may have in terms of the societies that they are located within. This difference between internal and societal functions is not necessarily easily equatable to a simple endogenous/exogenous division between them. 8 As can be seen in the case of the impact of the ‘new museology’ (Vergo, 1989) across the sector in terms of the meanings and practices that were adapted and/or changed as a result of the re-appraisals of existing museum activity that were a part of this.

15

expected to be seen as being of greater significance than would be the case for education where

meso-level exogenous factors would be expected to be of greater relevance. For general managers

the focus would be expected to be at the meso- and macro-levels where the role of more nebulous

factors such as ideologies and rationalities would be of greater significance for managing the

exogenous structural pressures that are at play within the sector than would be the case for the

other functional groups.

In organisational terms it is anticipated that the formal structural context within which museums and

galleries are located will have a significant impact upon how staff within the sector will function. In

this case there is expected to be a clear distinction between managers and other staff categories.

The formal hierarchical relationships that exist within the local government, University and national

museums systems establish different locations for managers in terms of their centrality to the

decision- and policy-making process within their respective organisations in comparison to other

staff groups. In the case of local authority museums and galleries the central role played by

councillors9 in formal terms would be expected to create the necessity for much closer links between

managers and councillors than would be the case in either the Universities (between

museum/gallery managers and University management systems) or the national galleries and

museums (between managers and civil servants or elected politicians). Certainly in terms of the

nationals the arm’s-length relationship between managers and the political realm as expressed in

such details as Public Service and Funding Agreements indicates a certain degree of internal

managerial autonomy that is not necessarily true for either local authority or University museums

and galleries10.Thus the expectation is that the significance of intra-organisational and inter-

organisational relationships will differ between the three museum and gallery groupings, with the

former being of greatest importance in the local authority arena and the latter being of greatest

importance at the level of the nationals. University museums and galleries are expected to be in an

intermediary position depending upon their role within their organisational home.

9 This assumes that local authority museums and galleries have not been placed in a trust. The expectation is that trust status would make the museums and galleries concerned more akin to the nationals in this context with relatively clear distinctions between the roles of internal actors and external management boards.10 One anonymous source from a local authority museums service did declare that part of their job seemed to involve “gentle flirting with older men”. This is not indicative of the idea of ‘closer links’ that is meant in this set of hypotheses but is, rather, a managerial strategy for dealing with councillor/officer interactions and could potentially exist in any of the organisational forms that are being analysed regardless of the arm’s-length status of the formal relationships that exist for them.

16

The expectation that managers will operate as a form of buffer or gate-keeper between museum

staff and other groups of policy- and decision-makers is something of a corollary of this formal

structural differentiation in terms of roles. A consequence of this is that there would be an

expectation that there will be different perceptions of what accountability means within the

museums and galleries world, and different understandings of how accountability will apply within

it. Given the multiple nature of forms of accountability within the sector – there are, at least,

managerial, political, technocratic/professional and temporal versions of this in operation (Gray,

2011, 53-4) – this fragmentation would be hardly surprising, but the relationship of it to how

museums and gallery staff manage the resultant consequences in terms of their professional

activities has important implications for how they locate themselves in terms of the endogenous and

exogenous pressures that they face. It is anticipated that for managers political and managerial

forms of accountability would be the most important; for conservators and curators it would be

technocratic/professional and temporal forms that dominate; and for education staff it would be the

technocratic/professional form that would be of greatest significance. These differences derive from

the internal functional divisions within the sector rather than from anything else and, as such, could

be seen as being largely structurally determined in the first instance. Their impact, however, is

subject to the active agency of the members of staff affected. This is anticipated to be more evident

in terms of how questions of accountability are mentioned by staff in different functional groups

rather than in terms of whether they are perceived as being relevant or not. As such it is expected

that some notion of accountability will be present in all cases but the centrality and focus of it will be

subject to functional differences. As a result it is anticipated that there will be different

consequential considerations arising from questions of accountability for the different staff groups.

Extremely Preliminary Findings

These four sets of hypotheses concerning financial resources, functional differentiation, structural

context and accountability are discussed on the basis of 16 interviews (six curators, one conservator,

four managers and five education officers) that have taken place in eight local authority (six) and

university (two) museums and galleries. As such these findings are extremely preliminary in nature

and do not allow for definitive claims to be made about the accuracy of the hypotheses. They do,

however, demonstrate some early stage similarities and differences and it is hoped that further

empirical work will serve to demonstrate the overall significance, or not, of these early findings at a

later date.

17

Bearing these caveats in mind it is not perhaps surprising that one area that everybody agreed with

was the importance of financial resources for the work of the individual museums and galleries: at

the general level it was accepted that they were “all living hand-to-mouth to keep the place going”.

The response to this, however, varied considerably between individual examples and between the

two groups of museums and galleries. In some cases there were demands from within the overall

organisation for the museum and gallery service to be more proactive in raising funds from other

sources, even though this has always been a part of the overall management of the service in both

the university and local authority sectors. The role of external funding agencies (particularly the

National Lottery and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Association (MLA)) in providing resources

for service development, individual projects and building and maintenance works was frequently

mentioned and, in the case of the university museums the important role of the Higher Education

Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in supporting their work was gratefully noted. All staff members

were only too aware of the importance of finance for their individual work and recognised the

importance of being able to demonstrate their value to both their individual organisations and the

communities that they served, even if, at times, it felt as if they were “in a constant state of

justification” in relation to higher organisational tiers.

A consequence of this is that the importance of intra-organisational relationships has been

increased, and changes to how the service is explained and the role of the service in the fulfilment of

organisational goals have taken place. For education officers, for example, this has seen an increased

emphasis on how their work can be seen to contribute to national curriculum demands, or how it

leads to audience development amongst the priority groups (ethnic minority, disabled and social

classes D and E) that central government has identified as being of greatest concern. This would

appear to be an example of bottom-up policy attachment (Gray, 2002) - with staff saying “you give

us the money and we’ll jump through your hoops” - rather than a case of top-down policy

instrumentalisation, as the emphasis is on ensuring that the museum and gallery staff are in a

position to determine what work will be undertaken rather than on fulfilling the policy demands of

external organisations per se. As yet it does not appear that internal relationships within

organisations have been particularly adversely affected by the colder economic climate that exists,

even if in some cases there appear to be increasing tensions over financial allocations - particularly

where the museums and galleries service is attempting to get resources from other departments

18

through policy attachment - while in other cases these difficulties have yet to appear, even if they

may do so in the future.

The role of volunteers and voluntary groups, which has always been an important resource for the

museums and galleries service, was highlighted by several respondents as being central to the

preservation of what the service could provide: one named museum “would be a shell of itself

without their role”. Managing relationships with differing volunteer groups has also always been a

matter that has required careful handling and this would appear to have been a task that has

required increasing attention, not simply in terms of the labour power that they can make available,

but also in terms of gaining access to the funds that some of the larger voluntary and charitable

organisations can make available. While it should be noted that the coalition Government’s ‘big

society’ proposals (a meso-level macro policy) - which might be thought to be entirely relevant to

the role of voluntary groups within the museums and galleries sector – were occasionally noted11 it

was more the case that “nobody can afford it and nobody can be bothered”, implying that there had

been no central re-consideration of how this resource was being understood, even if there were

newer pressures on managing it as a consequence of the new financial climate that museums and

galleries are operating within. In this respect the developing pressures on financial resources might

be understood as being part of a wider internal examination of resource usage within the sector.

This is perhaps indicative that the hypotheses that there would be a re-assessment of activities

within the sector, and a re-confirmation of commitment to the core activities of each functional

grouping, are correct but a larger number of cases is really needed before they could possibly be

confirmed.

In terms of structure and agency the view from below is certainly one where meso- and macro-level

structural constraints are a reality and what is required within the system is an active approach to

managing the subsequent problems that are generated. The specific policies that are pursued at the

micro-level do not appear, as yet, to have been affected although further research is certainly

needed to determine whether this is true across either the sector or over time. The shifts in internal

relationships within the museums and gallery sector itself, and between this and the wider

organisational contexts within which they operate, are a consequence of the meso-level structural

11 Although no-where near as often as the Government might have wished. This may be simply a reflection of the long-established role of volunteers and voluntary groups within the sector which makes a new label largely an irrelevance, but it might also be that the idea has yet to become accepted as a valid model for the delivery of public services. In either case the findings to date do not indicate that this is an idea whose time has come.

19

changes that have taken place and are a second example of the importance of agency for

understanding why they have been taking place. Again, while this appears to be true in both the

local authority and university realms it may not be so true at the level of the nationals which are

operating within a different set of meso-level constraints and interviews in this realm are required.

The hypotheses concerning functional groupings can only be briefly discussed in some cases given

the lack of interview data to work from. From what exists, however, it is evident that exogenous

factors are important for all functional groups even if, at times, their importance is percolated

through particular professional filters. The Museum Association Code of Ethics, for example, and the

Washington Principles on spoliation were acted on by one curator as “largely second nature” having

been engrained as part of normal professional practice. Whether this then makes these external

factors an example of endogenous professionalism or exogenous constraints is an open question at

present and clearly needs to be pursued further. In the instance of education staff, on the other

hand, it is clear that exogenous expectations in the form of educational content, outreach work,

audience development and social inclusion strategies have formed a major part in providing the

framework within which their work is undertaken, with the role of the National Curriculum

frequently being stressed as being central to much of the work that education staff undertook12.

The existence of a large number of plans, strategy documents and performance targets clearly had a

differential impact on the various functional groupings. In the case of the local authority museums

and galleries, for example, all staff were aware of their authorities’ key documents but it was largely

managers, as might have been expected, who had the closest connection to these. One curator saw

national policies, in particular, as being so broad that they were of little direct relevance to their day-

to-day working, but was equally aware that they needed to be taken as seriously as was necessary to

meet their intentions. This largely pragmatic view of the importance of exogenous policy demands

was a common theme, particularly amongst staff who did not consider that these demands took

their professional judgements on board. A sense of involvement with the construction of these

external limits was clearly marked as a factor that affected the extent to which staff saw them as

affecting their work. In some cases museum staff saw their role as being to “find clever wording” to

ensure that their professional activities could be fitted in to broader organisational policies, while in

12 The emphasis here is important: work with adults, for example, was almost entirely divorced from the National Curriculum, as was a certain amount (although not all) of the outreach work that was undertaken in the museums and galleries that have so far been included in the research.

20

others the necessary requirements of the service meant that they were able to extract concessions

from hierarchical superiors about organisational policies that would allow them to undertake their

own work13.

The consequence of this appears to be that there is a distinction drawn by staff between

professional and non-professional policies - with the former being seen, not surprisingly, as more

directly relevant to organisational practice than the latter – and a secondary distinction between

those policies that staff have participated in writing and those that they have not. Managers, as

those with the most direct role in contributing to the production of organisational policies, are most

attuned to the policy requirements that are then generated, and the further removed the policies

are from them the less significant for practice they are seen as being. In local authorities, for

example, local strategies, local performance targets and expectations, local partnership

arrangements and relationships with local “stakeholders”14are clearly assigned greater importance

than are the more removed national frameworks and policies that exist. The latter, indeed, are

sometimes criticised for being concerned with indicator and survey requirements “which come and

go” and are based on what are seen as poorly designed questionnaires, neither of which leads to

them being seen as being of central importance for the management of the service or for the

undertaking of professional duties. As such the general hypotheses of concern here gain some

support although the original hypotheses themselves would have been refined, if being produced

now, to clarify the specific role of staff in contributing to the creation of policies.

The existence of policy instruments at both the meso- and micro-level allows for some comparison

of their importance for local policy-makers. Clearly there is a distinction being drawn between those

that are created at the level of the individual organisation and those that are established elsewhere.

Within the latter there is also the distinction between those that are seen as being professionally-

based and those that are derived from other concerns. In the case of the former of these it appears

that they are not seen as structural constraints but, rather, as parameters to manage, again

indicating the importance of agency for managing the sector. This also casts doubt on the

assumption of some of the instrumentalist literature (see the discussion in Nisbett, 2012 on this) that

13 This has been most commonly seen in terms of organisational Health and Safety policies which have been commonly re-developed to take on board “non-normal” working hours and conditions in museums and galleries.14 A word, tellingly, only used in one out of the eight organisations covered in this discussion, a clear case of autre temps, autre mœurs in the field of management jargon perhaps.

21

top-down policies create a strait-jacket for museum and gallery staff and leaves them with no

independent role in their management. Indeed it appears to be the case that meso-level policies are

sometimes perceived as something of an irrelevance to some staff rather than as a directive

juggernaut.

The structural context within which museums and gallery policy operates can only, again, be briefly

touched on here as no nationals have been covered as yet. The importance of local councillors for

local authority museums and galleries is, however, clear with councillors being seen as the central

group for museum and gallery staff to be concerned with. In this respect managers do operate as a

form of organic buffer within the system: other groups note that they are rarely liaised with over

planning, strategy and practice except through the medium of their immediate managers, implying a

vertical arrangement of staff in this context. Horizontal links with other parts and departments of

local authorities appear to be concentrated on matters of policy implementation with these seeming

to be most evident with educational staff liaising with their counter-parts in the appropriate sections

who have responsibility for children and young people. In practice it would appear that the

museums and gallery system in both universities and local authorities operates as something of a

semi-detached arena of activity. Most of the relevant relationships for various groups of staff tend to

be located within the service itself, with managers acting as a vertical linkage mechanism to the

wider system. Horizontal linkages tend to be seen to be functionally specific rather than as part of

some more co-ordinated managerial mechanism, indicating that hopes for forms of ‘joined-up’

service delivery have not been entirely successful to date.

The continued existence of a museum and gallery policy ‘silo’ at the local government level is

perhaps a consequence of the long-standing tradition of managing the service through independent

committees, and the allowance of high levels of policy autonomy for the organisations that were

concerned15. It may also be a consequence of the sui generis nature of the museum and gallery

system within the realm of local government itself where the specifically local symbolism of

individual museums and galleries does not seem to have been developed in any other functional

area (with, perhaps, the exception of the ‘local’ grammar school and most of those had disappeared 15 The extent to which these are true is something of an open matter at the moment: a serious hunt through the archives is really needed unless somebody could point me in the direction of relevant material on the subject. A potential parallel might be found with the case of environmental health and trading standards with both being relatively small-scale local government services with both a clearly local focus and a high degree of professionalism: see Rhodes, 1986, where some of the consequences of these factors for central-local government relationships were considered.

22

by the mid-1970s whilst the local museums did not). In the case of university museums and galleries

there, again, appears to be something of a separation of these from the mainstream of the

organisational context. In this case there is a functional differentiation in place, although the

significance of this varies between universities. This is most marked in the case of one gallery which

has a central role in direct education provision at both post-graduate and undergraduate levels and

is clearly operating in a different organisational environment to much larger settings where the

gallery and/or art gallery is distinctly peripheral to the mainstream operations of the universities

concerned16. As such the relationship between this gallery and the university is much closer than is

the case in the other university that has been examined so far. The expectation of an institutional

separation is thus based on the differences between two universities and may prove to be

misleading. Even so this has raised the question of whether some part of the explanation of

differences within the museums sector may be dependent upon the extent to which they are

prisoners of their own organisational histories (a form of historical institutionalist path dependency),

or whether explanation may lie in the particular nature of museums and galleries as an institutional

form. Again, this will need to be examined at a later stage.

This set of hypotheses indicates that the structural arrangements within which policy functions are

of some importance, at least. In this respect the meso-level organisational universe within which

museums and galleries operate can be seen to have much greater structuring properties for both the

formal and informal arrangements that make the system work than might have been anticipated. At

the very least this implies that agency alone does not provide a full picture of what is taking place

within the system. Apart from pursuing these issues in the context of the nationals it would also be

helpful to undertake further historical research on local authority and university museums and

galleries17 to identify the developmental consequences of particular historically established

arrangements for management within the system.

In terms of ideas of accountability within the sector the expectation that there will be differences

between staff groupings in terms of how important these ideas are for their activities, and

differences in terms of the forms of accountability that they are most aligned with, there is some

supporting evidence in place. Certainly education and curatorial staff are consciously aware of

16 Such peripherality from the organisational centre may allow university museums and galleries some shelter from wider institutional pressures but it may also make them more vulnerable in uncertain times.17 There are a large number of histories of the nationals from which some of this material can be gathered but relatively fewer of individual local museums.

23

accountability to professional and technical standards and expectations of behaviour, although with

differing emphases on where these are derived from. For curatorial staff there is frequent reference

to the Museum Association’s code of ethics and accreditation procedures, indicating an emphasis on

endogenously developed standards; for education staff the more frequent reference is to broader

educational expectations – particularly the National Curriculum (again), but also, particularly in the

university sector, the Research Assessment Exercise – indicating a more exogenous focus for

standards.

As might be anticipated managers in local authority museums and galleries are highly conscious of

their need to meet the demands of political accountability. In this respect the development of

effective relationships between museums and galleries and individual councillors across the political

spectrum is seen as being of key importance. The fact that museums and galleries are discretionary

services in local government – in one local authority the museum was the major element of

expenditure in the sole discretionary service that the local authority was still providing – does make

them vulnerable and without active councillor support the future appear to be rather bleak in some

authorities. The establishment and maintenance of support for the service can involve reference to

the importance of Museums Association accreditation and its Code of Ethics to justify particular

choices that are made, indicating that accountability is not seen simply in terms of politics but, at the

managerial level the latter appears to be of much greater importance. In this respect it is significant

that national politics, in the form of relationships with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

(DCMS) and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), are rarely mentioned

and, even then, in a manner that indicates that neither has a central role in affecting how local

authority museums and galleries function, either because their policies are too general or that they

have only an incidental effect on practice. Where they are effective is in terms of specific guidance

and advice on issues such as human remains where they can provide clarification in particular

instances. In terms of Figure 1 this decidedly secondary nature to the role of central government in

museum and gallery policy is not surprising: the meso-level location that is assigned to the structural

constraints that central government is associated with would lead to the expectation that their role

would be of a more general nature in comparison with that of local councillors who are operating at

the micro-level of policy as much as they are at the meso-level.

24

There are clear functional differences between staff groups in terms of where they locate their

accountability. While the discussion here has focused on references to particular meso- and micro-

level factors such as policy documents (at both levels) it should also be noted that groups of local

people are also referred to. This reference is almost entirely in terms of either the recipients of the

particular services that are being provided – education officers usually referring to school groups and

teachers, for example – or to groups with particular roles to play in service delivery – curators, for

example, often referring to volunteers or particular locally-important pressure groups or discussion

fora – and more general reference to the public at large is noticeably absent. This may well be an

effect of simply concentrating on the core actors with whom museum and gallery staff are dealing on

a regular basis and who have a direct impact on their work, but it may also be that the

undifferentiated mass of ‘the general public’ are not particularly seen as being a group to whom

accountability is applied18. Curators and the one conservator interviewed to date both made

reference to the idea of temporal accountability through the maintenance of the collections that

they were responsible for in terms of future generations. As such there is an implicit idea of the

public to whom they are responsible, even if it was not referred to explicitly in these terms, but

otherwise accountability was always addressed in terms of specific organisations, individuals and

groups.

Conclusions – For Now, at Least

The relationship of structure and agency in the field of museum studies is long-standing and has

covered a great deal of ground – ranging from the role of museums in acting as classifying agencies

(Fyfe, 1996), agents for social inclusion (Newman, 2011), to interpretation (Whitehead, 2012, x-xviii)

and learning (Hooper-Greenhill) within them – even if much of the literature has tended towards an

implicit rather than explicit discussion of the subject. The current research is an attempt to develop

such a framework within which questions of structure and agency can be located, within which

hypotheses can be generated, and within which answers can be understood. The preliminary stage

of empirical work demonstrates that there is some validity in the approach that has been adopted

even if in some areas it falls in to the traditional academic trope of demanding more research to be

undertaken. Certainly the discussion of the earliest findings is not intended to provide anything like a

definitive set of conclusions about how structure and agency intersect in the making of museum and

18 The latter of these is almost certainly wrong in light of the next two sentences in the text but, in terms of the interviews that have been undertaken, the focus was not on the general public. Given that the research focuses on how, and why, museum and gallery staff identify significant influences on their work this lack of reference to the public at large is of some importance and needs to be returned to at a later stage of the research.

25

gallery policies but, instead, to illustrate the directions to which they point and the uncertainties that

they give rise to. Improvements to the analytical framework are expected: suggestions for what

these may be will be gratefully received!

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