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This is the first book to examine how and why museums are political institutions. By concentrating on the ways in which power, ideology and legitimacy work at the international, national and local levels of the museum experience, Clive Gray provides an original analysis of who exercises power and how power is used in museums.

This paper reports on the results of recent empirical research on the interaction of structure and agency in the museums sector in England in the context of policy-making within individual museums and galleries. Policy in the museums sector is subject to a large number of political, economic, social and technological pressures and demands that are both externally and internally created: the management of these pressures and demands provides the opportunity for the establishment of multiple responses by the members of individual organizations. The effects of hierarchy, organizational and functional centrality, accountability and professionalism in this process, and the manner in which legitimacy and ideology are employed as central resources by museums staff, are identified. The focus on an under-researched issue allows for an original evaluation of claims and assumptions about what drives the policy choices that are made within museums.Key Words: Museum policy, structure and agency, England

Arguments within political science, public administration and public policy about how to both conceptualise and operationalise structure and agency in analysis have tended to operate at the level of ontology – and occasionally at the level of epistemology. This paper argues that development at the methodological level is required to make sense of the complexities of this debate. An analysis of how structure and agency can be applied to the museums policy sector is utilised to demonstrate the importance of linking methodology to epistemology and ontology, and to show the analytical consequences that arise from this.

Politics takes diverse forms within the museums sector, from the effect of national government policies and funding decisions to the manner in which the contents of museums are presented to the public. This diversity of political forms leads to the creation of a range of administrative and managerial contexts within which museums operate. This paper explores the relationship of political practices and administrative and managerial regimes for the manner in which museums and galleries in the United Kingdom undertake the functions that they are responsible for, and indicates the possibilities and problems for museum and gallery practice that are associated with different political forms.