ABSTRACT
Archaeology is coming under increasing pressure of ferees of change. The nature of these forces was indicated by Cooper in his paper ‘Archaeology and management perspectives’ (Cooper 1993). Consequently, people in the discipline are becoming anxious. This anxiety can be viewed as the product of, on the one hand, fear of the known (experiences at the Victoria and Albert or Natural History museums in London, for example, where new forms of management structure, redundancies and entrance charges accompanied cuts in public funding, under the dictum of Value for money’, sending Shockwaves through the profession); and, on the other, fear of the unknown. Negative responses are triggered by a belief that management is largely uncharted water as far as archaeology is concerned and is somehow intrinsically and ethically dubious. The purpose of this paper is not to extol the virtues of management, but to challenge the justification for such anxiety and to consider whether archaeology does have anything to learn from the discipline of management or, indeed, whether management has anything to learn from the discipline of archaeology. The author was trained in archaeology, moved into business studies, and now lectures within a business school, and therefore had the opportunity to view archaeology’s current situation from ‘both sides of the fence’. Having crossed the archaeology/management boundary with relative ease, it would appear that the divide is neither as concrete nor as wide as some might believe. This chapter is based on that premise.
