ABSTRACT
The emergence of cultural heritage as a field with strong interdisciplinary and international focus has important implications for disciplines taking part in the debate and the relationships between them. Management is much more than simply fundraising or communication, as it is sometimes understood by outsiders; nor the writing of tourism and conservation plans, as is often used in heritage scholarship. In heritage institutions, profitability is absent in the vast majority of situations: normally museums and sites tend to be undefended and exposed to the risk of bankruptcy, in the East just as in the West. The question of preservation and exploitation is a very crucial issue in heritage management, with a difficult trade-off between preserving and using, a sort of compromise between different imperatives. The delay with which management studies are approaching heritage and heritage studies is in itself a sign of the difficulty of the process.
