ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how democracy can manifest itself in the work of museums (henceforth also used to include art galleries), and how the forms of democratic engagement unique to them sit within the organisational culture of the UK museum. However, to undertake such an inquiry one must recognise the existence of several practical, sometimes overlapping, concerns. Firstly, there is the policy itself, which in many instances involves a market-driven social turn within the organisational culture of museums, arguably manifest across practice, management and even scholarship over the last 20 years. Such transformation has meant that the work of museums has been submitted to norms and priorities external to the museum field, including pedagogical, cultural and even social policy ends. Furthermore, such an expansion of the roles and operational remit expected of museums has brought about extensive re-evaluations, while a managerialist mode of governance that regulates and steers museum work, assessing it against largely numerical and quantitative targets and criteria, is now firmly in place. Against this backdrop of change and flux, this chapter poses questions concerning these new configurations – the assemblage of the social turn, the blurring of the specifically museographic content in museum work, and the managerialist ethos – and re-examines the museum as a potential ‘worksite of democracy’.
