[Bilimsel Haber] CfA: Postdoc grant on Management, History, and the Arts of Turkey (University of Bologna)

[Onur Inal]

A research grant on Management, History and the Arts

A 2 year post-doc grant is going to be issued at the University of Bologna,
under the supervision of Prof. Luca Zan.

The application will soon (probably within October 18) be available at
https://www.aric.unibo.it/AssegniRicerca/BandiPubblicati/zz_Bandi_din.aspx

While the content of the research project is described in the following pages,
the basic features of this grant from an administrative point of view can be
summarised as follows (details will be provided in the formal call):

- It is strictly a post doc grant. (PhD students cannot apply, unless they are
at the very end of their PhD, with dissertation accepted and waiting to be
defended).
- The research is highly interdisciplinary. For this reasons  
candidates with PhD
in various fields are eligible, related in a way or another with the project.
International experiences will be welcome.
- The deadline for the call for application will be November 19 (documents
should arrive in Bologna within this date). The contract will be signed within
December 2009.
- The selection is based on a preliminary evaluation of: the scientific and
professional CV; publications; two letters of presentation. Later on (around
December 10), a smaller group of candidates will be interviewed via skype.
- The grant should be around 16.000 euro per year, gross. (Similar contracts
have a special taxation in our country, leading to a net salary of about 1.270
euro per month).
- The working language of the research will be English (mandatory).  
Turkish will
be highly appreciated.

Luca Zan
Luca.zan at unibo.it

Post Doc Research Grant on

Management, History, and the Arts

1. Positioning the research
The grant is related to a broader research programme on the  
relationship between
Heritage and Management. Not only Cultural Heritage has gained increasing
attention in the international community in the last decades - see the
establishment itself of a department of Unesco devoted to the topic, and the
establishment of a World Heritage list. In addition, the need to managing in
appropriate ways Cultural Heritage has been addressed, and the lack of  
adequate
managerial solutions is often seen as a part of the problem of unsafe
preservation conditions. Heritage and Management appear as two areas of
knowledge that are "condemned to co-exist": the urgency for developing a
serious, in-depth, inter-disciplinary discourse on Heritage Management is
strong.

In order to operationalise the research, the focus of the overall research
project will be on professional and administrative aspects concerning managing
issues in Unesco World Heritage Sites throughout the world, largely based on
multiple, in-depth case histories analysis across different countries.
A serious dialogue between the two bodies of knowledge of Heritage and
Management is far from being well established, and the relationship  
between the
two is far form being easy.

On the one hand, the field of Heritage is historically speaking dominated by
professional views that look at several issues from a substantive and
knowledge-specific points of vies (such as architecture, archaeology, art
history, nature & environment, depending on the nature of heritage involved).
Far from being approached in holistic ways, the system is characterized by a
lack of interaction between different disciplines involved, and forms  
of (over)
specialization, often loosing connections and relationships across the
Archaeological Chain, i.e. the process linking discovery, research,
conservation, up to museum access, that cuts different disciplines and
professions 1 . Moreover, important changes in approaches and epistemological
characteristics can be found diffusedly (Yoffee & Sherrat, 1993; Moore, 1994;
Choay, 1999; Smith, 2004; Settis, 2004, 2005; Poulot, 2005), with unforeseen
impacts on humanistic research from hard technologies, which make
organisational issues more complex. However, rarely, if ever, people in this
field have had any training at all on management in their educational
curriculum or even later in their carrier, though they tend to leave in (and
"manage") complex organizations. Economic, financial, administrative issues
tend to be seen as a disturbing elements, as intrusions in the jobs, more than
condition to make it possible. A widespread perception of being "under attack"
by the growing power of economic and managerial priorities is a very common
phenomenon, always discussed in the literature.

On the other hand, management appears as a rather aggressive  
discipline, a sort
of "Latin of our times" (Gherardi & Jacobsson, 2000), despite week
epistemological foundations. Drawing on my previous research, two major
criticisms however can be addressed: the lack of sense of history, and the
intrinsic rhetorical nature of management, with important implication for this
research:

* It could be noted that evolution of management as a body of  
knowledge has its
own (hidden) history, often related to the evolution of State bureaucracies in
the last centuries, in the West dating back to the Renaissance period.
Administration has its "history" too, its forms of "heritage", which tends to
make managerial practices idiosyncratic, related to the long term  
trajectory of
administrative rules that differ in any specific context, with  
different degrees
of inertia or attitude to change.
* In addition, the present stage of evolution of management studies, in its
"irresistible" diffusion to new areas and territories, seems to be
characterized by a self-confident attitude which hides the rhetorical  
nature of
the discipline. Referring to the rhetorical nature is not necessarily intended
as a negative element: rather, it means recognizing the nature of discourse of
management notions, debates and disciplines, as subtle (and sometime
sophisticated) ways to address attention, set priorities, structure time and
space in organisational life and practices. What is negative is the lack of
acknowledgement of such a rhetorical nature, resulting in abuses of managerial
language that often lack linkages with day to day practices at the shop floor
(particularly in the case of professional organisations). Often in the
political agenda, complex epistemological inconsistencies inside management
discourse tend to be blurred, and management knowledge is assumed to be "ready
to use", simply applied to a further territory, e.g. Cultural Heritage. Recent
research on arts management demonstrated that this is not the case (see the
crisis of the British Museum following the introduction of a "managing
director" position; or the failure of the reform of Italian Opera Houses, all
based on easy and superficial call for "managerial" solutions: Zan, 2006).

In such a context - with problematic dynamics inside heritage and management
disciplines - it is not so unexpected that managing heritage happens to be a
serious problem in itself, and pitfalls and mistakes in terms of managing can
be no less dangerous that natural threats to World Heritage.  
Unfortunately, the
notion of management seems to be rather opaque for professionals, as well as
possible implications. When professionals are open to managerial discourse,
they tend to be seduced by juridical approaches (in a context that can be
described as "managing by law"). Sometimes they are seduced by Cultural
Economics, which however has troubles in addressing the attention to specific,
individual implications at the micro level. Sometimes they understand
"management" in a reductionist way, as an issue of marketing and fundraising.
There is much more than this, more than can/should be taken from management
studies to better run and organize professional discourse in terms of  
extension
and approaches inside management (organization, and in particular organization
of labour; human resource management; costing and management accounting;
strategic management and change etc. including complex processes of knowledge
management).

Unesco amongst others, seems to find itself in a particularly critical
situation. Indeed in the current Unesco application dossier for being listed,
there is a specific chapter about managerial aspects, about the "issue of
managing". The question in itself seems clear. The answers - here again the
rhetorical nature and ambiguity of management language plays a crucial role -
are much less clear, if not totally irrelevant (sometimes depicting Pompeii as
"well managed", despite all evidences and controversies; or mentioning legal
aspects and general organisational designs as in the Chinese case; or with
recurrent misunderstanding on the meaning of "unitary" entity in the
Machupicchu case).

Indeed, there is a lack of control on the managerial meaning of answers:
because professional discourses in the case of World Heritage are themselves
complex; because issues of culture, identity etc. tend to be of a particular
difficult/critical value both in cognitive and policy senses; because  
action in
Heritage implies to a large extent the relation with administrative  
systems, not
only at the level of initial intervention, but also in the ongoing running of
heritage sites/museums etc. And, additionally, because in terms of bodies of
knowledge and skills, Unesco does not have a particularly robust troop of
management experts: similar to the entities it interacts with, a professional
bias is probably involved. Consequences are non the less huge:  
opportunity lost
for protection and development of sites, waste of (scarce) resources, lack of
effectiveness also form a professional point of view and so on.
Similar situations were found in my previous research as elements of the
context, as unanticipated elements in the effort of putting the analysis of
individual cases in their more general contexts. This project aims at  
searching
these issues in a more explicit, direct and systematic way. We will be  
analysing
and comparing differences among different countries’ practices regarding World
Heritage, in terms of professional dimension, administrative  
dimension, and the
interaction between them.

The difficult dialogue between Heritage and Management can be improved taking
into account the historicity of both traditions of thought and their related
variety. Cultural Heritage and Management have in themselves elements of
modernity and elements of past influence if not inertia. Understanding in a
dynamic way possible interactions between evolutionary trends in each of them
would be essential in making change possible (and preservation  
easier). Drawing
on my previous research (management history and management of arts
organizations) this project joins the studies of Cultural Heritage and
Administrative History, according to some important features  
characterising the
investigation. The overall research will be carried out:

- in comparative terms, across different countries, aiming at reconstructing
varieties, commonalities and differences across space in the relationship
between Cultural Heritage & Administration across the Archaeological Chain;
- in multi-disciplinary terms, looking at various debates that can be
reconstructed on both sides, i.e. among different disciplines involved in
humanities (archaeology, architecture, art history, conservation etc.) and in
administrative discourse;
- in evolutionary terms, aiming at reconstructing the evolution over time of
both the definition of heritage (and related disciplines) and national
administrative practices relevant in running heritage entities;
- in dialectical terms: how the former and the latter have been reciprocally
influential overtime, more than a mono-directional relation in the last
decades. Often what is now labelled under "Cultural Heritage" was in the past
realities of public or private entities which have had an influence on the
emergence of modern discourse on administration (see the more than centennial
histories of many cultural institutions: la Scala, Pompeii, British Museum
etc., or the Venice Arsenal as well).

2. Specific goals of the grant
Within this overall framework, the specific goals of the grant of this
application will be reconstructing few in-depth case histories  
analysis, across
two countries and kinds of heritage (tangible and intangible), applying the
investigation perspective outlined above.

In particular one country will be identified in addition to Italy.  
Turkey seems
a particularly interesting candidate, for its log history, the richness of
heritage and not least the recent changes in public sector  
administration, also
related to the European issue. In this context the researcher will aim at
reconstructing:

- long term and short terms process of transformation of the public  
sector that
represent the general administrative context in which individual World  
Heritage
entities are embedded;
- professional debates related to Turkish World Heritage along the
archaeological chain (from archaeological discovery, excavation, research,
conservation, up to museum opening and access);
- organisational and managerial change processes at the level of some  
individual
World Heritage organizations. The identification of individual  
entities will be
the first step of the grant itself, given that a similar kind of approach
requires an open access to documents and people. In principle, two or three
major sites/entities will be investigated.

In parallel, regarding Italy, the grant will be used to focus two long  
term case
histories related to heritage (tangible or intangible). The precise
identification of these cases, once again, will take place as a first step in
the research, involving a preliminary assessment of willingness to  
cooperate by
top managers of possible candidates entities and the actual situation of
archives (Scala, Pompeii will be a preterit selection, in their  
multi-centuries
histories).

3. Training activity
The grant will represent an important opportunity for developing post doc
skills, for various reasons:
- it will help interdisciplinary attitudes of the researcher, given the nature
of the overall research programme in which the grant is embedded;
- it will help research efforts at various levels of aggregation
(country/sector/individual entities);
- it will provide opportunities of interactions with an international group of
scholars, both at LSE & SOAS (see below).

4.  International collaboration
This research programme is an interesting opportunity for developing an
international network of scholars, working at the cross of various traditions
of research, such as business-managementaccoutring history, creative  
industries
and arts management, and new public management. Such a network is still under
construction. However some important institutions and researchers already
agreed to start a collaboration under which the present application for a
research grant is located.

Prof. Norman Flynn at SOAS will bring his competence as one of the most
important author in the field of New Public Management in international
contexts, with a long experience of field work in this area. SOAS itself is an
excellent site for its relation with the East (including Middle East), and one
of the world sites in the research about West/East relationship.

Dr. Gerben Bakker is an emergent scholar in the field of business history and
management & accounting, with a particular concern on the history of creative
industries (including Opera, film industry), who will be happy also to share
the research on administrative history.


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