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

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. I 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. When digitizing their collections, museums shift their focus from physical to digital. 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, focusing on the field of museums through the lenses of materiality, explores how digital transformation alters the relationships between actors, including 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 museum field, following the International Council of Museums, 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).