Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of Public Archaeology, we devote special coverage to the topic of museums in crisis. In their extended article, Ioannis Poulios and Smaragda Touloupa critically evaluate how archaeology museums in Greece navigated the 2007 Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath of government-imposed austerity measures. The authors survey a range of public and private museums across Greece with a view to understanding their capacity to act in response to the Crisis, assessing the effectiveness of these institution’s actions in both socio-cultural and fiscal terms. Crucially, the authors develop the concept of ‘strategic agility’ — adapted from the world of business — to suggest a means of thinking and acting for museum administrators, to ensure that institutions are able to move swiftly and with a range of approaches to combat prospective threats, whether they be economic, social, or political in scope. Ultimately, their approach is one that encourages more autonomy, control, and entrepreneurialism for museum directors and administrators. The study provides a valuable addition to a body of research examining the effects of the Crisis on Greek cultural life. While some new forms of leisure have resulted from the Crisis — such as graffiti tourism in Athens, or the broader notion of ‘crisis tourism’ (cf. Plantzos, 2018) — the more pressing concerns are the profound structural issues that it has precipitated, which have the potential to radically reconfigure the nature of cultural funding, both in Greece (Tziovas, 2017) but also across Europe. The general (and understandable) outcome of the Crisis has been for museum bodies and commentators to encourage museums to become less dependent on direct government support and increasingly develop their commercial facets (Woodley, et al., 2018). The term ‘resilience’ has entered the museum professional’s lexicon, although perhaps it should give pause for thought that in doing so museums are engaging more directly with the vicissitudes of the market from which they are seeking resilience. When considering the extent to which museums should accede to a greater market orientation, it is vital to understand how such moves influence wider issues such as the privatization of public space, staff and visitor wellbeing, and job/wage precariousness (Palliard, 2017) and how the sector can mitigate such issues. In some ways, the Crisis has acted as a form of shock therapy that has accelerated changes in the museums sector that have been in motion — certainly in the UK — since the 1980s, of reduced government support and the promotion of market orientation. Museums on the Continent have been less susceptible to these changes, but the years since the crisis have provided an aperture to introduce this basic ideology into wider strictures of museum management. While there are undoubtedly benefits to museums pursuing a more commercially responsive management approach, there is a growing sense that austerity is pushing museums to an increasing reliance on public archaeology, Vol. 17 No. 1, February 2018, 1–2