SSPEL Newsletter: Research and Scholarly Activities

Having gained some financial support from the School, I am off to Montreal in July to do a paper for the 8th A.I.M.A.C. conference . This is the international group for arts and cultural management. It's a bi-annual conference and I've done two papers for their conferences before. Both of the papers eventually led to publications in their journal, the International Journal of Arts Management (IJAM). In fact, this paper is a follow-up to some of the published research. It is the outcome of a research project designed to apply a model of strategic management for cultural organisations. The model, first presented in I.J.A.M. Gilhespy (1999) put forward two related contentions. These were that ‘the objectives of cultural organisations may be rendered down into a number of strategic options….and further, that the achievement of these strategic options may be measured with a degree of sensitivity’(Gilhespy, 1999 p.38). This paper reports the findings of a long-term case study which was set up to assess the veracity and the validity of these contentions. And, perhaps, more importantly, the paper evaluates the usefulness of the model in the management of an organisation. The work has been carried out at Morwellham Quay heritage site in the form of interviews, policy document analysis and surveys mainly undertaken by the students on a second year module.

The title of the piece is :The Application of a Performance Measurement Model in the management of a Heritage Organisation: A Case Study of Morwellham Quay and Copper Mine.

I'd be happy to send anyone a copy of the paper and would be pleased to get feedback, no really!


Ian Gilhespy