Museum leaders’ perspectives on social media

ABSTRACT

In the context of the shift towards participatory practices within museums, museum engagement with social media represents a form of organizational change. This study approaches social media and the corresponding organizational change from a museum leader’s perspective, utilizing data from a broad cross-section of 82 museums in Norway. We address how the characteristics of a museum and its leader impact social media attitudes, behaviors and intention towards social media-based change. Combining factor analysis and clustering techniques, we identify four museum leader ‘types’ who are primarily defined by their (1) perception of museum benefits from social media, (2) perception of own and museum support in social media activities, (3) perception of conflicts that arise from social media usage, and (4) social media-related values. With museums being asked to more fully embrace the participatory potential of social media, this study points to significant differences in readiness to change across museum leaders.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum
• leadership
• social media
• participation
• organizational change
• workplace stressors
• typology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Booth is a postdoctoral fellow in the Digitization and Diversity research project, BI Centre for Creative Industries. He is trained as economist at The London School of Economics, in visual arts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and completed his doctorate in Cultural Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research covers cultural economics, theories of value, sociology of art and finance, and issues connecting the arts and museum sector, digitization and diversity.

Anne Ogundipe is a doctoral candidate in the Digitization and Diversity research project, Department of Art and Media studies, NTNU. Her research concerns diversity dimensions of digitally enabled participation in the arts and museum sector, and her professional interests are rooted in media aesthetic approaches to visual art, digital imaging technologies and photographic media.

Sigrid Røyseng is Professor of Arts Management at BI Norwegian Business School. She is trained as a sociologist from the University of Oslo and took her doctorate in Organization and Administration Theory at the University of Bergen. She has published books and articles on the role of artists, cultural policy, cultural entrepreneurship and cultural leadership. In the ‘Digitalization and Diversity’ project, she researches digitalized museums.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (project number 247602), The Programme on the Culture and Media Sector (KULMEDIA).