Competition and the Development of Authorised Heritage Discourses in a Re-emergent Scottish Nation

Abstract

In seeking to understand the nature and development of cultural resource management in the Britain, it is common to explore the form and nature of heritage legislation—that is, the specific drafting of legislative sections and their intentions, and how legislation develops and changes over time. These are valuable studies, frequently identifying and contextualising the key drivers (social, economic, intellectual and others) for change in the legislation and accompanying policy. In recent years we have also seen the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, investigating how government-initiated activities supported by official regulation create a particular type of “heritage” and heritage practice (see for example Sorenson and Carman 2009; Smith and Akagawa 2009; Labadi and Long 2010) and which explores how competing discourses between the “official” heritage and others are operationalised and experienced.