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In the 2010s, austerity measures had a severe impact on the level of spending on cultural activity. In England, the potential for this was especially great due to the reduction of resources available for local government, the largest funder in this field. Whilst prior work has attempted to establish overall reductions in spending, little attention has been paid to variations in cultural spending across the country in this period of austerity, or which types of cultural services have been cut and why. Here, we compare local authority spending in 2009/10 with 2018/19 to provide further detail on the varied picture that has emerged in this period. Whilst there is indeed a significant reduction in the level of spending on culture in this period, we identify significant variation in local experiences of austerity across England. We also show which types of cultural services are more vulnerable to cuts and explore a range of contextual factors as potential explanations of these patterns.

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The editorial provides a framework for considering the museum as organization and its implications for methods.This special issue contains seven empirically driven contributions to provoke further examination of the museum as organization.

The chapters in this volume have suggested that the term 'dialogue' often raises normative expectations related to its potential as a vehicle for positive change. As Nicholas Burbules ( 2000), one of the leading theorists in dialogic approaches to education, proclaims in the opening section of his analysis of the limits of dialogue as a critical pedagogy: 6

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Interaction with documents and documentary infrastructure is part of the day to day reality of museum work. However, their constitutive and mediatory role is rarely foregrounded in empirical studies of museums. In part, this is because a defined theoretical and methodological framework for such an investigation has yet to be developed. This article outlines what a conceptualisation of documents as more-than-text informed by actor-network theory offers to studies of museums, particularly the potential of this method for investigating how documentary infrastructures influence daily practice and inform notions of possible action amongst museum staff. The insight that institutional practices operate ‘on the field of possibilities’ is Foucault’s ([1982] 2000: 341). However, as I outline in this article, actor-network theory took up this insight and developed it, drawing out its methodological and analytical consequences. Empirical material exploring the influence of Arts Council England’s Accreditation Scheme on someone new to museum work, drawn from a study of community asset transfer, a process whereby people new to museum work become responsible for the operation and management of museums previously run by local authorities, is used to demonstrate the potential of this approach.

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