Exploring the Gap between Museum Policy and Practice: a Comparative analysis of Scottish, English and Welsh Local Authority Museum Services

Abstract

This paper explores the gap between museum policy and practice in the UnitedKingdom (UK) by offering empirical evidence from a comparative street-levelanalysis of museum services in Scotland, England and Wales. Exploringdevolution in cultural services from the ground-level using Lipsky’s (1980) ‘streetlevel’approach gives new insights to the role of ground-level workers in culturalpolicy. It shows that museum workers had an awareness of national policies, butimplementation was mainly influenced by a mixture of challenges in the everydaydelivery of the museum services studied. Museum workers understood policy assomething symbolic rather than relating to action, which reinforced policy distance.Workers at the ground-level had more similarities than differences throughoutScotland, England and Wales and the structural challenges within museum servicesindicated a complex negotiation that increased agency at the ground-level. Thesefindings outline the potential limitations of written national and international policyin the cultural sector as it is the activities, values and behaviours at the front-lineof cultural services that ultimately creates policy in the cultural sector. 1Key words: Cultural policy; museum workers; UK devolution; policy distance; street-levelanalysis; Lipsky

Which museums to fund? Examining local government decision-making in austerity

“…Analysis of this sort has been lacking in the discipline of museum studies, where a concentration on the 'poetics of display' (Morse et al 2018: 114) has taken precedence over situating museums in their social, economic, legal and political contexts. Those with an interest in linking the internal functioning of museums to broader developments, whether in government policy or professional arguments deployed to make the case for continued subsidy or investment mostly capture a time before austerity (Lawley 2003;McCall 2016;Gates 2012;Gray 2016). Studies which concentrate on austerity and museums have begun to emerge but tend to concentrate on changes within policy texts and political statements and consequently neglect how these developments affect individual museums (Lagerqvist 2015(Lagerqvist , 2016Kloosterman 2014).…”

Public libraries, museums and physical convergence: Context, issues, opportunities: A literature review Part 1

“…McCall (2016: 99), too, refers to complexity in the museum domain in the UK: ‘There are also many different types of museums (trust, independent, national, local authority, regimental) that have different governance and funding structures’, and she also refers to fragmentation – administrative, managerial and geographical.…”

Analysing the Adjectival Museum: Exploring the bureaucratic nature of museums and the implications for researchers and the research process

“…These are based on a series of qualitative, semi-structured interviews throughout Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England with front-line museum workers (including those undertaking a variety of roles such as curators, outreach officers, security staff, retail workers and so on). The authors have used theoretical approaches such as street-level bureaucracy and partnership working as a lens to approach bureaucratic hierarchical working 4 ; and some of their conclusions, such as shared challenges in museums, managerial conflicts and research limitations have been shown to cross-cut not only museum types but also across UK national borders (Gray 2014;McCall and Gray 2014;McCall 2016;McCall and Rummery 2017). It is now worth considering how this can offer further insight into the functions, and functioning, of museums.…”

“…In this respect staff at all levels of a museum should be expected to have the freedom to make their own choices and decisions over their own functional activities, and that there should be clear differences between staff as to where the boundaries of their competence lie. McCall (2009; for example has applied Lipsky's (1980) street-level bureaucracy approach to museum practice in the case of particular museum services in England, Scotland and Wales, as they are examples of 'hierarchical organization [s] in which substantial discretion lies with the line agents at the bottom of the hierarchy', where 'translation between levels not only occurs but is also expected to occur'. (Piore 2011: 146) This was often expressed in statements where front-line staff clearly identified expectations about how their own direct service providing roles differed from the expected strategic and service-management roles that senior figures in the organizational hierarchy were expected to fulfil, particularly if, as one senior museum manager put it, 'we're seen not to have screwed up yet'.…”

“…The staff in museums are not simply robots, mindlessly undertaking a set of actions that have been predetermined for them by their hierarchical superiors, particularly as many organizational policies are so ambiguous that they are capable of multiple interpretations, with this providing a variety of benefits for both policymakers and implementing staff (Gray 2015b). Indeed the available evidence demonstrates that museum staff are capable of managing the demands that are placed on them in ways that are not only examples of their individual agency but are also capable of modifying what is demanded of them into completely new forms (see, for example, Gray 2014Gray , 2016McCall 2009;Newman and McLean, 2004;West and Smith 2005).…”