ABSTRACT
The role of management within the heritage sector has changed over the past two decades as heritage itself has increasingly been recognised as playing a key role in many crosscutting societal, economic and political arenas. The management of heritage as a resource, a force and a concept has adapted from a traditional administrative paradigm (based on legalistic notions of protection and status within society and space) towards a new public management strategic paradigm, recognising competing stakeholders, product ranges, impacts and alternative models of service provision. At the heart of this change is a greater appreciation of the kinds of relationships, understandings and knowledge we have about heritage, as both a conceptual entity and a set of processes. More fundamentally for the realm of heritage knowledge, the paradigm shift has brought about a growing appreciation of what management of heritage does, rather than what we know per se about heritage. This was prompted by the changing ideals of public service (and thus public and governmental management of heritage assets) and has been greatly assisted by the development of methodologies for assessing the state of the historic environment (or heritage resource, see Baxter 2004 for a review of the changing terminology of heritage management). The notion of ‘audit’, as applied to heritage in England since 2002 with the launch of the ‘State of the Historic Environment Report’, has not only fulfi lled a need for greater public accountability for how taxpayers’ money is spent on heritage, but has also begun to bridge the ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of public management of heritage and, more widely, cultural resources. Audit as a mechanism has thus begun to measure
what has been achieved by management and additionally to understand what else may be required. In line with these changes, it has become necessary to investigate new facets of the construction of heritage, including the management system itself. This calls for the recognition of a new range of concerns and questions, and concomitant with that searching for new data and developing new methods of analysis. This chapter refl ects on how we may analyse these changing circumstances in the management of heritage with particular attention to how we use the concept of heritage auditing to analyse change and impact. It looks at these issues through the specifi c managerial implications that the devolution of the political/cultural power base in the United Kingdom had for the development of a heritage auditing programme within Scotland. While the data and procedures are specifi c to England and Scotland, the importance of managerial paradigms and of understanding the roles and methods of audit are of wide general relevance for heritage.
