Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Business Ethics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04504-6 ORIGINAL PAPER The Unethical Enterprise of the Past: Lessons from the Collapse of Archaeological Heritage Management in Spain Eva Parga Dans 1,2  · Pablo Alonso González 1,3 Received: 7 May 2019 / Accepted: 7 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract This paper explores the underlying factors behind the collapse of commercial archaeology in Spain, with implications for other international contexts. It contributes to the current global debate about heritage ethics, adding nuance and conceptual depth to critical management studies and cultural heritage management in their approach to business ethics. Similar to other European contexts, Spanish archaeological management thrived during the 1990s and 2000s as a business model based on policies directed at safeguarding cultural heritage. The model had controversial ethical implications at academic, policy and business levels. However, the global fnancial crisis of 2008 had a huge impact on this sector, and more than 70% of the Spanish archaeological companies closed by 2017. Drawing on the concepts of abstract narratives, functional stupidity and corporatist neoliberalism, this paper illustrates the need to examine ethical issues from a pragmatic standpoint, beyond epistemological and moralistic critiques of proft-oriented businesses in the cultural realm. In doing so, it connects the felds of cultural heritage and management studies, opening up hitherto unexplored strands of research and debate. Keywords Heritage ethics · Cultural heritage · Corporatist neoliberalism · Commercial archaeology · Crisis · Spain Introduction Cultural heritage and archaeology have become a corner- stone of contemporary academic debate, European social policy integration and economic prosperity. The recently published Eurobarometer on Cultural Heritage (European Commission 2017) shows how cultural heritage is currently valued in relation to social and economic prosperity: 27,881 interviews show that more than eight out of ten European citizens think cultural heritage is important to them per- sonally and also for the European Union (EU). The same proportion agrees that Europe’s cultural heritage creates jobs in the EU. The European Parliament declared 2018 as “The European Year of Cultural Heritage” under the slogan “Our heritage: where the past meets the future” (European Parlia- ment 2017). However, given that both cultural heritage and -even more so- archaeological heritage are now matters of public concern as well as economic commodities, tensions have arisen surrounding their defnition, management and policy implications. In the archaeological field, recent debates have also focused on the ethics and implications of the transforma- tion of archaeology from scholarly to commercial endeavour, in becoming a business sector in its own right (González- Ruibal 2018; Gnecco 2015; Haber and Shepherd 2015). These academic approaches generally criticise commercial archaeology (or cultural resource management, CRM) as an unethical, proft-driven enterprise, based on a regulatory body of expert knowledge that leaves far behind the pros- pect of a knowledge-oriented archaeological discipline. This debate highlights the ethical tension between archaeology as an academic endeavour with its own value system, and CRM as a relatively successful business model. This paper aims to go beyond the moralistic argument against CRM that criticises the fact it is part of a broader capitalist framework, * Eva Parga Dans eva.parga.dans@hotmail.com Pablo Alonso González pabloag10@hotmail.com 1 Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología (IPNA-CSIC), Av. Astrofsico Francisco Sánchez, 3, 38206 San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain 2 CICS.NOVA, Avenida de Berna, 26-C, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal 3 Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit-CSIC), Avda. de Vigo s/n, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.