Useful information and definitions

Organisational sustainability

This study defines organisational sustainability as the continued ability of an organisation to achieve its cultural, social, economic, and environmental objectives, by ensuring its people have the practical knowledge and technological tools to perform their jobs and to provide quality service.

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Cultural heritage management

Cultural heritage management is a relatively new discipline still being moulded, concerned with the significance, policy, and intergenerational curation of tangible and intangible heritage assets, and of the cultural values enriching them (Howard, 2003; Messenger and Smith, 2010; Smith, 2010; Taylor and Verdini, 2021).

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This research sees cultural heritage existing not in a vacuum but within its natural (including urban) environment, and having common sustainable development objectives (education, participation, development, and preservation) and operations with natural heritage.

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Culture
Culture is termed both as a) the ‘implied cultivation and a sense of growth’ with its suggestion of ‘a degree of sophistication and refinement’ (Pounds, 1994, p. 1) and b) the organisational [corporate] culture (Schein, 1985, pp. 1–9). UNESCO defines culture as an ‘organized sector…of human  intellectual and  artistic creativity and comprising individuals, organizations and institutions responsible for their transmission and renewal…commonly regarded as the “cultural sector”, a demarcated policy domain, concerned mainly with heritage and creativity’ (UNESCO CDIS manual, 2014, p. 10). 

Heritage
Heritage encompasses everything that surrounds us, in a nostalgic recitation of function and beauty (Lowenthal, 1985; Smith, 2010; Throsby, 2010a, p. 106). It takes a time-affected physical form, built and natural, embellished with an intangible body of cultural traditions (UNESCO ICH, 2020). Its significance varies upon our understanding of our environment and of our past, is influenced by the levels of available information, the viewpoint of the communicator and the human needs (Belk and Wallendorf, 1994; Black, 2005). ‘It records and expresses the long processes of historic development, forming the essence of diverse national, regional, indigenous and local identities and is an integral part of modern life. It is a social dynamic reference point and positive instrument for growth and change. The particular heritage and collective memory of each locality or community is irreplaceable and an important foundation for development, both now and into the future” International Cultural Tourism Charter, ICOMOS, 2002’ (Historic England terms, 2022).

Cultural Heritage
   The cultural heritage definition relates to the cultural values  that are embedded in heritage assets. Cultural heritage is the incubator for inspiring participation and mutual appreciation of our inherited world, and of custodian attitudes towards it (Schein, 1985, pp. 1–9; Belk and Wallendorf, 1994; Pounds, 1994, p. 1; Black, 2005; Verwayen, 2010, p. 23; Historic England terms, 2022).  

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Curation

Curation involves the participatory practices of creating, collecting, storing, conserving, and communicating about, heritage assets and cultural values (Fouseki, 2010; George, 2015). 

On knowledge
Knowledge in Western philosophy (see (Chen, 2022) for other cultures) can be viewed from the ontological realist stance as ‘justified true belief’ aligned with Plato’s teaching, or from a constructivist view of knowledge being variably formed from the different observers’ interpretations (Kimble, 2013). This study follows the pragmatist (James, 1907; Dewey, 1930) synthesised stance of ‘meaning-in-context’ (Bublitz and Norrick, 2011, p. 4) in which knowledge is actionable (Nonaka, 1994; Kelly and Cordeiro, 2020) as social knowledge organised for application in practical everyday life (Neuman, 2014). 
   In constructivist and positivist theories the meaning of, and indeed whether knowledge can be defined, differ significantly. Both provide however a similar relation between data, information and knowledge (Boisot, 1998; Davenport and Prusak, 1998); data becomes information once communicated, and information becomes knowledge once it is understood: 'data is a set of discrete, objective facts about events…information is a message, usually in the form of a document or an audible or visible communication’ (Davenport and Prusak, 1998, pp. 2–4). Knowledge is ‘the understanding of…a subject…by experience or study’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022a). In practice theory, such understanding of knowledge is shaped significantly by experience, as a social, collective process (Hislop, Bosua and Helms, 2018).