Introduction

Identifying conservation as a practice of careFootnote¹ has provided a powerful point of contact between conservation and the wider world, identifying it as part of:

Drawing on a wider body of literature that considers care in management,Footnote¹¹ this article therefore asks how this affective turn sits within current and emerging practices in the management of conservation. Within a climate of scarcity and emerging out of a culture of managerialism of the 1990s, conservation is often seen as an expensive but necessary burden on the resources of the museum, a service that is subjected to repeated drives for efficiency often couched in terms of ‘modernising the workplace’. The discourse of care brings to the fore relational activities that take time, and which might appear a luxury within the rapid tempo of programme delivery that marks the modern museum. Practices of care, therefore, are often experienced in terms of rationing and prioritisation.Footnote¹²

The article presented here provides an exploratory consideration of care within the management of conservation. The management of conservation has received little attention, the exception being Susanne Keene’s book Managing Conservation in Museums, the first edition of which was published in 1995.Footnote¹³ This seminal book, which arose out of Keene’s doctoral research and her experience of managing conservation at the Science Museum in London, captured many of the struggles of managing conservation within a broader institutional and policy context. Taking a systems approach, Keene situated the management of conservation within a broader frame. While the book captured many of the tensions within museum management at the time, it spoke in abstract terms about the people involved in the conservation of collections, choosing to use the language of ‘resource allocation’. In doing so it was largely silent on managing people and the relational elements that we associate with practices of care.

The article also builds on my previous work considering making time within the art museum for conservation.Footnote¹⁴ It also was sparked by a memory of a conversation that took place many years ago with a recently appointed Head of Conservation in a major institution that I return to reflect on often. In this conversation they shared with me their surprise at how emotional their new team was, bringing front and centre the challenges for those coming into that role who may have been extremely well-versed in the ability to speak to the quantitative metrics of collection management but felt bewilderment taking on the very different work of managing a large and passionate team who cared deeply about the work they did and how they approached that work. We might read into this conversation the tension between the values underpinning a managerialist philosophy that permeated conservation since the 1990s, and in which that generation was trained, and how this might come into tension with a greater acknowledgement of the relational nature of conservation and the centrality of affect in conservation as a practice.

Method

Using the ethics of care as primarily defined by Joan Tronto as a starting point, and supplemented by additional literature from related fields, four semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior conservation managers to begin to develop a framework through which to explore how the ‘doing of care’ might be visible in the management of conservation.Footnote¹⁵ These conversations were analysed with reference to two different frameworks, firstly Tronto’s 2010 paper ‘Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose’ where she identifies seven warning signs of bad care within institutions,Footnote¹⁶ and secondly the tensions approach described by Nik Winchester et al.Footnote¹⁷

Limitations

This study is to be considered an exploratory pilot study as a way of teasing out some areas for future research; it is not comprehensive, it is extremely limited in geographical scope,Footnote¹⁸ and it does not satisfy the criteria for rigorous qualitative research as defined by, for example, Ashley Hagaman and Amber Wutich, who would argue that 30 interviews should be conducted to identify meta themes in multi-site cross-cultural research.Footnote¹⁹ It brings together literature largely from outside of the field of conservation on management and care and puts this in conversation with the experience of four conservation managers through interviews carried out online for a period of 60–90 minutes with the managers; two in the US, one in Australia and one in Germany. The participants were chosen because of their different experiences managing conservation in institutions and because I knew they would have an interest in this conversation. I also chose to avoid institutions I was close to, so they were not institutions within which I had been managed or which I had been a manager in.

What does it mean to point to an affective turn in conservation?

I use the concept of an ‘affective turn’ to draw attention to the way in which we see emerging within conservation a greater comfort with acknowledging conservation as an embodied practice impacted by the lived experience and emotions of those undertaking this work. In this I follow the analysis of Sara Ahmed as expressed in ‘The Cultural Politics of Emotion’ in seeing ‘affect’ as embedded in social norms and histories.Footnote²⁰ This line of thought emerges out of feminist, queer and critical race theory and concerns how we orient ourselves towards others and objects.Footnote²¹

There are a number of places where I see this acknowledgement of affect begin to change the way we practice conservation. For example, in the move away from viewing the ideal author of conservation reports as a disembodied author writing in the neutral voice, to valuing the situated nature of conservation as a practice, one in which people and objects are entangled and where those involved respond to one another emotionally, with emotion acting as the agent that moves us and connects us. It is also in the acknowledgement of the wider social networks that surround and support particular forms of heritage, artistic practice or artworks that highlight the relational nature of conservation as a practice.Footnote²² On a macro level this is also reflected in the wider post-Covid environment, at least in some areas of the world, particularly for example, within government policy in Australia. Whilst in Australia statistical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are still used for reportable government metrics there has been a notable shift away from a KPI and statistics-driven notion of management to inclusive and empathetic approaches centred on well-being and psycho-social safety.Footnote²³ This shift is far ranging and includes questions of access, cultural safety for First Nations communities and community engagement. Care in this context includes concern for work–life balance, mental health support and trauma-informed leadership, and an aspiration for museums to act as places of safety.Footnote²⁴

Care ethics and conservation

As this special issues attests, the notion of ‘care’ has been widely adopted within conservation discourse. It was a notion that was, for example, an important area of enquiry within the Mellon Foundation-funded research project ‘Reshaping the Collectible’ which I led at Tate between 2018 and 2022, in part because it allowed us to think about the broader ecosystem in which an artwork operates beyond the confines of the museum,Footnote²⁵ and speak to what Haidy Geismar called ‘Caring for the Social (in Museums)’.Footnote²⁶ This acknowledgement of conservation as an activity that was dependent on a network outside the museum marked an important shift in practice. It also ran parallel to similar thinking that was and is present in curatorial practice.Footnote²⁷

How has the acknowledgement of care and affect as central to conservation practice translated into the management of conservation in the museum? This is the question that frames this article, and it is considered through different registers: care for the organisation, care for the collection, care for people and care for the work.

Caring institutions?

If we recast conservation as a matter of care, then one of the roles of the museum, as a caring institution, is care work. This care work is focussed on both people as care workers and those they care for through their work, namely, artists and their network including those who are part of the infrastructure that supports conservation work and practice, colleagues and audiences and communities, and objects (artworks and technologies and materials which also form part of the infrastructure that supports their work and practice). One of those conservation managers I interviewed, Interviewee 4, raised the question of whether an ethics of care was compatible with the museum and its fundamental mission, namely to continue in perpetuity. They suggested that asking them to take on some of the ‘more challenging aspects of an ethics of care is out of scope for what they’re meant to do … the infrastructure is not set up for care’. This same interviewee suggested that ‘if we’re thinking about an institution that wants to actively incorporate care ethics into what it does, … it might mean radically re-imagining what some of this infrastructure would need to be’. This same interviewee also posed the question ‘at what point does the institution recognise that its well-being is actually contingent on carrying out those care ethics, even if it challenges what the institution is meant to do’.Footnote²⁸ Hence suggesting that whilst requiring a ‘radical re-imagining’ such a shift towards acknowledging the importance of an ethics of care in shaping the future form of our institutions might in fact be essential to their flourishing. Another interviewee tracked this as a change in how organisations were thinking related to profound questions about what cultural organisations can offer the communities they serve and larger institutional questions such as ‘what is our responsibility to be operating in the world that we live in now’.Footnote²⁹ For this interviewee ‘making room for community was always the next horizon’ in an increasingly people-centric approach to conservation realised by empowering communities and leveraging expertise that might not be held internally within our institutions. Again, this was spoken of in terms of shifting the ‘understructure’ of the institution. All of those interviewed spoke of the focus of broadening audiences and engagement with their institutions as a major driver, and saw conservation and conservation stories as a way of engaging new audiences that sat alongside other shifts, for example in the types of exhibition that might be presented and the development of relationships with communities.

Looking to the literature, we find authors echoing the centrality of continuity. For example, Katie Barclay and Vivienne Moore argue that institutions differ from large business organisations.Footnote³⁰ Museums can be understood to align to Barclay and Moore’s key features of institutions in particular as ‘structures that are designed to produce continuity over time and generations’. They are also designed to exist ‘beyond the individual or their leadership’ so that staff may identify with the institution and not see it as represented by the current leadership.Footnote³¹

For public institutions such as museums and hospitals neo-liberalism has meant a focus on cost-cutting and efficiency.Footnote³² In 1998 Ian Palmer wrote an article which mapped the way in which ‘managerialism’ was beginning to dominate the way in which the arts were managed, normalising the view that the arts are an ‘industry’ among others.Footnote³³ The management of conservation in the UK in the 1990s was driven by notions of efficiency and quantifiable metrics, in part in response to a view that management and management methods could be applied regardless of the specifics of a particular sector.Footnote³⁴ These managers are also praised for their rationality.Footnote³⁵ Removed from this account are the emotional, the relational and the lived experience.Footnote³⁶ Faced with cuts in funding, and growing ambitions for growth and an increased turnover of exhibitions, institutions looked to business to provide information as to how to get more done with less.

Conservators, and other types of museum worker, point to a desire ‘to practice what might be termed “transformational care” in contrast to “transactional care”, where there is time for relationships of trust to be built and for emotional practice to occur’.Footnote³⁷ For two of those interviewed finding opportunities to create ways to enrich the working lives of their teams was a major focus, with one reporting the amount of creativity that this required and the other reporting how job satisfaction was a major focus as well as a realisation that creating flexible working arrangements was an important aspect of care.Footnote³⁸

For many institutions the wider political and financial environment has changed. The way in which conservators understand and articulate the practice of conservation has also shifted over the past 30 years, and also the shared experience of the Covid pandemic has impacted management practice to become, in some circumstances and to different degrees, more people-centric, something that has filtered down to how conservation is managed within those contexts. Covid-19 was a traumatic experience for many institutions and individuals, and may sit alongside other traumatic experiences such as the opening of a new building or the moving of a building, natural disaster, the sudden death of a director or prominent staff member, rapid expansion, financial crisis and layoffs, and political interference. To some extent, it has been argued that all change can be traumatic in institutions and that one of the side effects of trauma is that it is difficult to organise after the traumatic event but that the need for a people-centric approach becomes paramount.Footnote³⁹ For at least one interviewee, their institution successfully used this time to improve structures, for example, around communication.Footnote⁴⁰

In this article I have avoided the language of leadership because my focus is the day-to-day business of managing conservation. However, in their article ‘Leadership and Care Ethics in the Voluntary Sector: a Tensions Approach’, Nik Winchester et al. explore points of intersection between leadership or management and care ethics.Footnote⁴¹ Here they note that by evoking an ethics of care, they displace a focus on reason and objectivity through a focus on needs and needs recognition,Footnote⁴² and in doing so they stand in contrast with rationalist neo-liberal approaches.Footnote⁴³ Winchester et al. focus on Joan Tronto’s elements and phases of care. They point to the following as the pillars of an ethic of care: caring about—attentive and curious about needs; taking care—taking on the responsibility to respond to care needs; care giving—the practice of responding competently to needs; care receiving—responsiveness of the object of this care to the care given. This latter is seen as the heart of the democratic basis for care.

One of the major challenges of management is scarcity of resources; here it is seen as a constraint and forms the basis of this article’s exploration of the tensions encountered in management: ‘Leadership works through care against constraint, not using constraint to withdraw from care practice’.Footnote⁴⁴ In their article Winchester et al. consider the data from a number of interviews exploring the tensions inherent in working through care against constraint and balancing the elements of care. I take these tensions and put them in dialogue with seven warning signs of bad care within institutions as identified by Tronto.Footnote⁴⁵ Articulating the signs of bad care is a useful way to help articulate what a caring organisation might look like. To summarise, these warning signs are:

1. Misfortune causes the need for care.

2. Needs are taken as a given.

3. Care is considered as a commodity not a process.

4. Care receivers are excluded from making judgements because they lack expertise.

5. Care is seen only in terms of care giving rather than the full process of care which includes attentiveness to needs and the allocation of responsibility.

6. Care givers see organisational requirements as a hinderance rather than a support.

7. Care work as being distributed along the lines of class, caste, gender and race.

Taking these two frameworks, I will now discuss how these relate to the management of conservation.

Firstly, let us consider the idea that misfortune causes the need for care, which serves to deny and obfuscate the simple fact that everything and everyone needs care. In the workplace there have been great strides to acknowledge the care needs of workers outside of the workplace, although there remains in many workplaces a sense that the ideal is still the autonomous worker.Footnote⁴⁶ Conservation remains a female dominated profession, in the 2022 ICON survey of conservators in the UK, 79.34% identified as female,Footnote⁴⁷ and as the 2025 ‘Facts about Carers Report’ highlighted, women are more likely to be carers than men.Footnote⁴⁸

In terms of objects, this deficit model might relate to concepts such as ‘inherent vice’ in materials or complaints about poor workmanship in artworks which rather than being seen as integral to the identity and biography of a work, is cast as misfortune. A beautiful example of this is ‘La Baila Mecánica’ (1979) by Felizia Bursztyn. The instability of this work, which might be dismissed as poorly welded, was designed to echo the politically unstable situation in Colombia when it was made and as such is inherent to the meaning and significance of the work. It was therefore not a misfortune that it was structurally unstable but in its need for maintenance and care it revealed its meaning.Footnote⁴⁹

In terms of institutions, all need care to continue, and for most institutions including museums, as noted above, continuity is at their core. It is only through the myth that institutions are not created by people but have always been there that we might ever imagine that they do not need care.Footnote⁵⁰ Compromise might be needed to survive, especially when under external political pressure as we see currently in many US museums and others around the world. Compromise may be traumatic for staff as values are undermined, not compromising may also be traumatic as jobs are lost and programmes cut or hijacked. This again is caring through care against constraint. When institutions go through a traumatic event institutional survival might come up against the needs of staff, however as museum director and consultant Elaine Heumann Gurian writes, ‘attention of staff discomfort is our work. It is neither an interruption nor an intrusion’.Footnote⁵¹ We see this sentiment echoed in the focus of interviews 1, 2 and 3 in acknowledging the risk of burnout. Those interviewed also see their role as balancing the needs of the institution and their teams, helping their teams to see the bigger picture and thereby understanding the challenges facing the institution, and what it means to have the responsibility to care for the institution. Interviewees 2 and 4 also stressed the extraordinary weight of personal responsibility that is felt by individuals working in collection care teams that sits alongside institutional responsibility and the serious challenge faced for these individuals when these two are not aligned.

The second sign of poor care described by Tronto is the idea that needs are taken as a given within an organisation; they are seen as fixed rather than fluid and emergent. This might apply to particular members of the conservation team, but also objects. Part of Tronto’s elements of care includes a requirement that we are curious about needs, a point picked up by Winchester et al. in their suggestion that there is ‘a requirement for leadership practice to broaden the potential to hear, notice and investigate care from outside one’s immediate relations’.Footnote⁵² This openness is familiar to conservators working with the specificity of artworks, artists and their network, communities and materials which may require attention to specific needs and forms of care that broaden the standard purview of conservation. We see this in the ways in which conservators exhibit extraordinary attentiveness and responsiveness to the needs and desires of living artists and the specificity of their works within contemporary art conservation. Here we see examples of practices being altered to accommodate and more effectively care for these artworks and the people that surround them,Footnote⁵³ and developing new areas of practice to respond to expanding needs, for example the needs of a broad range of time-based media works and live performance works coming into collections.Footnote⁵⁴ The curiosity and openness to changing needs often results in an explosion of innovation and creative development with conservation practice.

Winchester et al. describe this tension between a curiosity about needs and the expansion of needs against a backdrop of shrinking resources as a boundary tension.Footnote⁵⁵ This tension arises because whilst there is an ethical requirement to be curious about needs, to apply the attention required for adequate care one is required to draw a boundary around what one will care for. For most museum staff this is determined by the programme (exhibitions and displays, loans and acquisitions) and the collection and it is the programme that is largely driving what receives care and in some cases this subsumes other things that staff feel they would like to spend more time on, particularly in terms of the ability to dive deep.Footnote⁵⁶

There are always constraints on resources, and within institutions there is an excess of need. In the case of one of those interviewed, the problem was articulated in terms of the model being broken and an urgent requirement to rethink the model to radically redistribute conservation activity to include wider communities.Footnote⁵⁷ In another case it was a managerially creative act to identify opportunities for some of the more rewarding work made possible by saying yes to a particular loan or exhibition.Footnote⁵⁸ Politically it requires caring for the institution to support an ambitious programme that will attract visitors, but not so as it impacts the well-being of the staff. Here conservation is seen as very much in service of the programme and relatively powerless to do more than negotiate improved terms, for example, a little bit more of a gap between projects etc.Footnote⁵⁹

This often brings about an examination of what we spend our time and resources doing and its value. Condition checking for exhibitions to satisfy insurance and lender requirements is considered by institutions as essential care. However, it is some of the least satisfying work for conservators to do. If we return to the different focusses of care: the people (staff, communities (including ancestors), artists/makers and those around an artwork), the collection and the organisation, and the work and how work is done, then here we see a tension between caring for the work of conservation and the people who want to be able to take a deeper dive and spend more time with specific artworks, and the organisation.Footnote⁶⁰ Our polices and protocols here have perhaps created barriers to providing better care.

Within institutions we have seen a greater awareness since the events of 2020 of addressing the inequities within collections; such work requires care and for resources to pivot to be effective, as was evident when failures of care occurred and resources failed to be reassigned.Footnote⁶¹

Listening and paying attention to the needs of others was also cited by the majority of those who were interviewed for this article as one of the most important things they make time for and are concerned to develop their skills around. One interviewee, for example, spoke of the need to make herself available for more in-depth one-to-one conversations outside of the team meetings.Footnote⁶² The feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed has highlighted the power dynamic regarding who is heard in her concept of ‘the feminist ear’ in institutional mechanisms of not-listening.Footnote⁶³ Similarly, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has pointed to listening as a form of care in listening to neglected things.Footnote⁶⁴ For the majority of those interviewed, engagement with care as a process of listening and curiosity around the needs that were heard was a constant.

The third sign Tronto identifies as a sign of bad care is when care is considered as a commodity not a process.Footnote⁶⁵ Good care is seen here as something that flows through management practice, holding in place tensions and risks.Footnote⁶⁶ One of the tensions explored by Winchester et al. is the tension between an expansive curiosity around care needs and the need to set boundaries because of the limits of resources. This tension is something that is unserved by Tronto’s refusal to acknowledge the need to set limits on care. Tronto writes: ‘While it is true that care requires copious amounts of time, it is not the case that to increase care necessarily means that one decreases something else’.Footnote⁶⁷ This is a hard argument for those working in care professions, including conservation, to swallow. This in a way is the politics of care in a nutshell; namely if you are caring for this artwork or group of artworks, people, networks or technologiesFootnote⁶⁸ it means your attention and resources are not somewhere else. Similarly, the need to make time was the focus of one of the interviews.Footnote⁶⁹ By seeking creative ways to explore opportunities by sometimes expanding the boundaries of care and recognising additional needs, for example by taking on a new project, managers are able to provide care for the work and the people by providing additional depth and more rewarding work.Footnote⁷⁰ The pressure of the quantity of work which does not allow staff to go deeper can lead to superficial or diffuse practice and burnout. Visibility was also a central theme in one of the interviewsFootnote⁷¹ and a concern for whose work is paid attention to within an organisation and whose work is marginalised.Footnote⁷² This came up repeatedly in relation to how schedules were organised within institutions, without an awareness of how collection care teams are involved in every aspect of an exhibition, from preparation, installation, maintenance and deinstallation. However, the schedules may be more aligned to curatorial departments who are more likely to be working sequentially on projects.Footnote⁷³

The fourth sign provided by Tronto is that care receivers are excluded from making judgements because they lack expertise. Here to demand a voice is seen as resistance or obstruction. Winchester et al. use the beautiful phrase ‘Participative Equity’ to describe a way of addressing the power dynamics of care due to dependency.Footnote⁷⁴ They point to care practice as founded on listening to and acting with the other. Our institutions remain hierarchical, and I have certainly been guilty of non-participatory decision-making that has caused harm when in a position of power—not out of malice but out of a failure to listen and consult. Plenty of responsibility but a failure to pay attention to a broad enough arrangement of needs. Echoing Interviewee 4, participation takes time and commitment; to quote Tronto, ‘in order to be created and sustained, then, an ethic of care relies upon a political commitment to value care and to reshape institutions to reflect that changed value’.Footnote⁷⁵

This also speaks to a tension within the field of conservation where there is an increasing recognition of the expertise that sits outside the museum and professionally, or narrowly, defined field of conservation. This expertise may sit outside, but conservation needs to gain access to it in order to do its work. As the sociologist Paul DiMaggio famously acknowledged, change in museums is often led by the professional bodies around which expertise is organised, and that it is in the gatherings of these professional bodies away from the museum that new ideas are developed and tested.Footnote⁷⁶ Within conservation we have seen this in recent years with a great acknowledgement of the need for greater participatory equity, to use the phrase coined by Winchester et al.,Footnote⁷⁷ in relation to both artists and their networks but also their communities and the communities in which the museum is located.

‘Participative equity’ is also key for our institutions to be relevant and provide a sense of being part of a geographically located community, however the road to greater participation has been slow despite the urgency for many types of museum to speak beyond their colonial and imperialist legacies.

One of the interviewees spoke about the need for a foundational change to the ‘undercarriage’ of the way in which we organise the museum as an institution so that whilst recognising that ‘expert conservation will always be needed’ there is space to expand by diversifying roles. She proposed working with the outreach team to ‘crowdsource care’ as a way of increasing overall capacity, agency and impact, but also shifting care from being a zero-sum game to allow a flourishing and abundance of care. This is in recognition that our institutions do not have the resources of the post-war era or even the twentieth century and the model has to shift.Footnote⁷⁸

The fifth sign is that care is seen only in terms of care giving rather than the full process of care which includes attentiveness to needs and the allocation of responsibility. Tronto asks who are the ‘care attentives’ and the ‘care responsibles’?Footnote⁷⁹ Curiosity regarding needs is an essential part of an ethic of care. Tronto’s point here is that unless we are explicit about who in an organisation are responsible for care and are empowered to identify care needs, these people remain invisible. The invisibility of conservators in institutions is as much an issue for conservators as specific types of care givers as it is for other carers.Footnote⁸⁰ However, conservators are recognised as having a clear responsibility for identifying certain types of needs, for example through risk assessments a range of needs might be identified for the tangible and intangible needs that define an attempt to gain consensus on what is important to conserve about an artwork. They are often clearly responsible for specifying environmental needs, as well as packing and storage needs, and treatment needs. Many of these responsibilities are shared, for example, the conservation team often holds installation specifications sharing joint responsibility for display requirements alongside the curatorial and installation teams. Where the lines are less clear cut is in responsibilities for relationship management with the artist and their network and different communities invested in the future of the work, which again is often a shared responsibility. Making these responsibilities more visibly part of the role of conservation, and articulating some of these responsibilities in terms of the ethic of ‘participatory equity’, serves to elevate the role of conservators and others undertaking conservation work.

The sixth sign is that care givers see organisational requirements as a hinderance rather than support. As Barclay and Moore write, ‘policy becomes the lifeblood of care; institutional care is enabled through its bureaucracy’, echoing the points made by Interviewees 1 and 4 about the need for changes in institutional infrastructure or understructure to reflect the capacity to incorporate new modes of care within an institution.Footnote⁸¹ Barclay and Moore also identify the problem as being one of emotion, understood as a product of our socialisation. It is not therefore an issue of individuals but a problem of ‘the ways that institutional structures enable and direct people to care and give care its form’.Footnote⁸² The same can be said about the lack of care, for example lack of structures to manage burn out.Footnote⁸³

Finally, Tronto identifies care work as being distributed along the lines of class, caste, gender and race. Professional conservation is a highly privileged type of care work being majority middle class, and white.Footnote⁸⁴ While framing conservation as a form of care work connects conservation to wider discourses of relational ethics, repair and maintenance, it also risks inadvertently reinforcing a universalist narrative of care, one that presents care as a neutral or universally shared good, rather than as a practice embedded in specific social, cultural and institutional contexts and positionalities and that can just as easily be harmful, oppressive, racist and coercive. As TrontoFootnote⁸⁵ and Puig de la BellacasaFootnote⁸⁶ remind us, such universalising discourses can obscure the power dynamics that structure actual caring practices (a point echoed by those interviewed). Within museums the discourse of care has been explicitly used as an argument for retaining the spoils of colonial and imperialist violence or in excluding the voices, protocols or desires of communities or individuals whose heritage or creations are the object of care on the grounds of lack of expertise or facilities. Points of tension regarding what care practices cannot be accommodated by our institutions are revealing of the power dynamics involved in institutional care. Conservators gain the right to care for collections through the power and cultural capital of their institutions and their access to specific training which conveys the authority of a professional identity. In this sense if we are going to equate conservation with care work, Tronto’s final sign of bad care in institutions should be inverted to ask who is excluded from having the right to determine the care of our collections and how this power is distributed along the lines of class, caste, gender, race, ability/disability and identity.

Conclusion

Since Suzanne Keene wrote her book on managing conservation in 1995,Footnote⁸⁷ there has been a rise in what might be considered a people-centred approach to conservation and its management. However, institutional infrastructures may be slow to catch up with this shift and values are not always shared across the organisation. We are at a moment of epoch defining change in the world and our institutions are in many cases fighting to articulate their relevance, independence and role in the world. Change is taking place in response to a range of pressures, not least basic sustainability, that call for new models. To care for their institutions as well as their collections and associated communities, conservators will need to understand and engage with the bigger picture. Managers centring an ethics of care in their approach to their work may experience a tension between caring for the teams and collections for whom they are responsible and caring for the institution. In doing this work they support their teams to navigate these two priorities. First, in supporting those tasked with the highly skilled work of identifying the emerging needs and responsibilities associated with the care of a collection. Second, to align that work with ongoing institutional and societal change.

In this article I have drawn on the literature of institutional change and the ethics of care to consider some of the tensions that are encountered within the management of conservation. My primary focus is the contemporary art museum, not least because it is where I was managed for a large part of my career, and also where I managed a conservation section and later led Collection Care Research. However, in putting together this article I have also been lucky enough to draw on the expertise of those who have many years of management experience, to hear their accounts of managing conservation, some from the vantage point of divisional managers. These perspectives also therefore come from those considering the management of conservation not only in terms of a specific department but also more broadly in terms of a range of activities focussed on collections within their institution and beyond. They are people who also contribute to the senior leadership of their institutions. They are people who also contribute to the senior leadership of their institutions. I want to thank the respondents for sharing their expertise and experiences so candidly.

From this provisional exploration, we can perhaps begin to see notions of good care emerge. Through the accounts of those interviewed we can imagine re-tooling the institutional ‘understructure’ of conservation management and our institutions through a more explicitly people-centred ethics of care. We learn to acknowledge care as a process, as something that is dynamic, responsive and curious about needs as they emerge and evolve. We see management processes as ones which work through the tensions of needs and responsibilities. We see good care in the call for rethinking our institutions as a place of care, not simply in response to failures of care but instead in the work that addresses the structural causes of these failings. We see a call for ‘participative equity’ as a way of addressing historical and current experiences of privilege, violence and exclusion, placing attention to how care is received and in seeking practices that exhibit greater respect and reciprocity. Finally, in acknowledging conservators as embodied, emotional and passionate we see a move away from a purely transactional account of conservation work that can be summarised in solely quantitative metrics, to a practice that has agency in its affectiveness. The article brings together my interest in the ethics of care as a framework for our practice and an interest in institutions and institutional change. My hope is that this paper, despite all its inadequacies, offers an invitation to think institutionally about what care means within practices of conservation, for the care workers, the collection, artists and their networks, and those wider communities on which those works depend for their meaning and survival, and also the institution and the way we do our work. Ultimately, I have tried to support the work of the managers of conservation; to argue for our institutions to make visible the care work that is being carried out within them, to value it and find ways to support its flourishing.