Digital transformation in museums: institutional micro-foundations and the materiality of change

Abstract

My dissertation explores how museums adapt to digital transformation challenges and how these changes affect their long-standing practices. By studying the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the museum workers’ community, and conducting interviews with museum professionals, I investigate how the shift from physical to digital impacts the relationships between people, technology, and material objects in museums. The research shows that digital transformation leads to different outcomes across museums, influenced by how curators and other staff manage this transition. I also highlight how the material aspects of museum work - such as art objects and exhibitions - play a crucial role in shaping both the adoption of digital technology and the ongoing changes in the field. Indeed, museums are full of material things that are the primary concern of museum employees, from curators to educators to conservators. When digitizing their collections, museums shift from a physical to a digital focus. The digital shift lessens the material constraints of everyday work. Still, it contrasts with the museum’s focus on the objects and the artifacts, leading to tensions and matters of broader organizational change and re-evaluation of priorities worth studying.

This dissertation, by focusing on the field of museums and through the lenses of materiality, explores how digital transformation alters the relationships between actors (both humans and objects). The altered relationships between actors and objects affect institutional permanence and change, often translating into heterogeneous digitalization outcomes. Theoretically, I draw on the literature on materiality in institutional theory and the micro-foundations of institutions conceived as levels of analysis.

Empirically, the research explores the phenomenon of digital transformation at three distinct levels of analysis articulated in three papers. The first focuses on the digital transformation happening in the museums field following the International Council of Museums – ICOM - a field-configuring organization attempting to bridge and influence field-level changes (chapter II). The second focuses on the community of museum workers' field-level meaning-making around digital transformation (chapter III), and the third focuses on individuals working in museums, specifically museum curators (chapter IV).

Paper #1 (see Chapter II) explores, through a longitudinal study, how digital transformation became taken for granted in the field of museums. Specifically, I focus on ICOM, a field-conjuring organization, and its role in the diffusion of technological changes at the field level. The output is a process model of the interrelation of discourse and materiality in institutionalization processes, highlighting how the field-configuring organization (ICOM) acts as a bridge between the individual and field levels and influences the taken-for-grantedness of technological changes in the field.

Paper #2 (see Chapter III) focuses on the textuality, visuality, and materiality of the discourses around digital transformation produced by the museum workers’ community. The paper extends the literature on materiality, meaning, and multimodality by exploring the meaning potentials of texts as material artifacts. The theoretical lenses are meaning-making and social semiotics. The paper analyzes how the verbal (textual), visual, and material modes of communication interact with museum workers' meaning-making around digital transformation in museums. This study theoretically samples three temporally separate snapshots of the interactions of the different modes of communication. The output is an extended multimodal framework for meaning-making.

Paper #3 (see Chapter IV) moves to the individual level. Museums’ digital transformation raises tensions and contradictions between their material vocation and the digital shift's de-materialization. The theoretical focus of this paper lies in the literature on professionals and how they experience and react to institutional tensions, leveraging the lenses of materiality to explore the relations between professionals and material objects in experiencing and responding to technological changes.

Overall, this dissertation makes three main contributions. First, exploring the micro-foundations of institutional change highlights how crucial it is to assess the role of actors and objects, such as artworks, texts, and documents, as change agents rather than focusing solely on the macro processes of diffusion. Second, it includes materiality in human relationships and institutional change, highlighting how materiality shapes institutions’ permanence and transformation at the macro, meso, and micro levels. Finally, by focusing on digital transformation in museums, this dissertation contributes to the literature that explores such changes as non-neutral or mechanical phenomena but as active processes involving actors' and objects’ relationality.