Aimée L Felton 2012

29 where a limited conservation consciousness guided their approach.The primary barriers to achieving best practice initiatives within commercial organisations was attributed to a failure to consider long term perspectives and generic KPIs applied across the whole property portfolio, rather than tailoring documents and agendas to the individual needs of the historic buildings. Despite the theoretical importance of maintenance in conservation, there is little evidence that maintenance plays a central and strategic role in heritage organisations’ corporate planning (Dann et al . 2006:p98). In the current economic climate, where asset value and annual budgets are tightened, many authors have noted a negative shift in maintenance theory from prudent maintenance to strategies overly ruled by economic forces and operational obsolescence. Strike (1994:p140) predicted such developments in his 1994 text, stating that technical advancements and social behaviour changes would engender many historical buildings as unsuitable for 21st century needs. Some of this approach to the importance and priority towards maintenance can be attributed to the very nature of non-heritage focused organisations. The primary activity is not to preserve and protect the buildings as ‘artefacts’ yet, buildings are still likely to be major capital assets of organisations and might aid revenue through tourist appeal or visitor access. However, the primary consideration to heritage focused organisations is aesthetics.Without ‘Heritage’ (with a capital H) as the cornerstone of the business plan, conservation ideals and agendas, the concept of minimum intervention, cultural significance and value are at odds with the need to measure output with activities (Dann et al . 2006:p104). Aesthetic appearance and image of a historic building is often the driving force behind any maintenance work with the primary value of historic buildings attributed to corporate identity and brand value.The social THREE Chapter Three - Literature Review Aimee Felton