The widening of roles and expectations within cultural policy discourses has been a challenge to museum workers throughout Great Britain (GB). There has been an expectation that museums are changing from an 'old' to a 'new museology' that has shaped museum functions and roles. This paper outlines the limitations of this perceived transition as museum services confront multiple exogenous and endogenous expectations, opportunities, pressures and threats. Findings fromThis paper then explores four factors that limit the implementation of the 'new museology'.The role of professional differentiation is first explored showing that there is often still a perceived, and real, polarisation of factions within museum services. These are clearly related to museum functions and the negotiation of power relationships within the museum services studied. The hierarchical differentiations within the services are then outlined, which paints a complex picture of working relationships, especially between managerial and collections-based roles. The paper then explores the effect of policy and role ambiguity, as well as what could be considered to be the effective implementation of policy. Overall, key discourses related to the 'new museology' were evident, but there were also important restraints on the practical implementation of activities relating to the 'new museology' throughout the services studied. The 'new museology'Mairesse and Desvallées (2010) offer five distinct meanings of museology, although they prefer the definition of museology as the entirety of theoretical and critical thinking within the museum field. The 'new museology' evolved from the perceived failings of the original museology, and was based on the idea that the role of museums in society needed to change:in 1971 it was claimed that museums were isolated from the modern world, elitist, obsolete 3 and a waste of public money (Hudson 1977, 15). Traditional ideas around museum practice, which were seen to have contributed to this, were functionally based around collections and held curatorship as being central to the museum enterprise. The original idea of a museum as a collections-focused, building-based, institution prevailed, with the existence of a general public understanding that the museum is a 'cultural authority' --upholding and communicating truth (Harrison 1993).The consequence of this was perceived to be that the interests of a narrow social grouping dominated how museums operated on the basis of a claimed exclusivity in determining the role of museums (Hooper-Greenhill 2000). This

This paper reappraises the meaning of space and place in contemporary class analysis. We explore how class is reshaped and mediated by neoliberal urban restructuring, of which the processes of gentrification and territorial stigmatization form critical parts. We focus on the contemporary interrelation of class and urban restructuring in the post-crash city by looking at the local lived experiences of the 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Glasgow’s East End. This high-profile regeneration effort in a deprived working-class neighbourhood reveals much about the functions of neoliberal financial capitalism, austerity and contemporary class formation. We show that gentrification and territorial stigmatization work in tandem within urban regeneration policy interventions as a punitive strategy for managing poor populations. This involves land value and (de)valuing of people and creates new localized class inequalities and insecurities. Our research highlights that in the face of national level cuts and commodification, residents’ local relations and support become essential social, economic and political resources. Yet, paradoxically, at the very same time, their local attachment to place is devalued, stigmatized and is at its most precarious. This exposes the coercive elements of the neoliberal class project; a distinct urban class inequality of our time and therefore, we suggest, a critical direction in class analysis.

Abstract

Policy makers across the political spectrum have extolled the virtues of volunteering in achieving social policy aims. Yet little is known about the role that volunteering plays in addressing one of the significant challenges of an ageing population: the provision of care and support to people with dementia. We combine organisational survey data, secondary social survey data, and in-depth interviews with people with dementia, family carers and volunteers in order to better understand the context, role and challenges in which volunteers support people with dementia. Social policies connecting volunteering and dementia care in homes and communities often remain separate and disconnected and our paper draws on the concept of policy ‘assemblages’ to suggest that dementia care is a dynamic mixture of formal and informal volunteering activities that bridge and blur traditional policy boundaries. Linking home and community environments is a key motivation, benefit and outcome for volunteers, carers and those living with dementia. The paper calls to widen the definition and investigation of volunteering in social policy to include and support informal volunteering activity.

Large scale sporting events are a major part of urban policy and regeneration strategies in the UK and globally. These events court as much controversy and criticism from academics and community groups

This paper seeks to understand the engagement of people with dementia in creative and arts-based activities by applying a relational model of citizenship and incorporating concepts of contextual and embodied learning from adult learning theory. A theoretically driven secondary analysis of observational and interview data focuses on the engagement of staff, volunteers and people with dementia during an arts-based intervention in a day centre and care home. The processes through which learning is co-constructed between the person with dementia, staff/volunteer facilitators and peers in the group to co-produce a creative engaged experience involves: increasing confidence for learning, facilitating social and physical connections, and affirming creative self-expression. The role of facilitator is central to the process of creative engagement to reinforce a sense of agency amongst participants and recognise people's prior experiences of learning and engagement in creative activities. People with dementia continue to learn and grow through engagement in creative activities to produce positive outcomes for the individual participants and for the care staff who observe and participate in this creativity. Facilitating creativity requires attention to lifelong experiences of learning in addition to the immediate interactional context to integrate arts-based interventions in dementia care successfully.

This paper explores the gap between museum policy and practice in the UnitedKingdom (UK) by offering empirical evidence from a comparative street-levelanalysis of museum services in Scotland, England and Wales. Exploringdevolution in cultural services from the ground-level using Lipsky’s (1980) ‘streetlevel’approach gives new insights to the role of ground-level workers in culturalpolicy. It shows that museum workers had an awareness of national policies, butimplementation was mainly influenced by a mixture of challenges in the everydaydelivery of the museum services studied. Museum workers understood policy assomething symbolic rather than relating to action, which reinforced policy distance.Workers at the ground-level had more similarities than differences throughoutScotland, England and Wales and the structural challenges within museum servicesindicated a complex negotiation that increased agency at the ground-level. Thesefindings outline the potential limitations of written national and international policyin the cultural sector as it is the activities, values and behaviours at the front-lineof cultural services that ultimately creates policy in the cultural sector. 1Key words: Cultural policy; museum workers; UK devolution; policy distance; street-levelanalysis; Lipsky

Partnership working in the welfare state has moved from the margins to the mainstream in terms of achieving policy objectives. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical developments in the field, this article presents a framework for analyzing welfare partnerships that give precedence to the issues of trust and interdependence. This article presents findings from a study of local authority museum services in Scotland, England and Wales to test this framework. A series of case studies revealed that partnerships have been driven by a number of factors including policy, power, funding and people. Partnerships could gain services credibility, but trust and interdependence were compromised by conflictual and unequal relationships. Partnerships were often short term, lacked ongoing maintenance plans and limited by their type of funding. The article proposes that further analysis of the level of individual agency at ground level be considered when thinking about partnerships in the cultural sector