Museums Policy: Structural Invariants and Political Agency?
Clive Gray
Centre for Cultural Policy Studies
University of Warwick
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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.
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 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 made[1] (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.
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 analysis[2]. 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 sector[3] 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.
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 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 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.