Communicating Museums: A Textual Analysis of Content and Interaction Management

Abstract

Museums, through their institutional discourses, are playing an important but sometimes neglected role in enforcing social practices and creating social identities. With the new digital era, museums had to adapt to new forms of communication: in an environment that, at least, gives everybody an equal voice, museums managed to communicate themselves without renouncing their position of depositaries of knowledge and authority. By analyzing online communication, through content management and interaction management (on websites, Facebook pages) the current study aims to explore the mechanisms enabling museums to convey information about their specific features (space, access, learning and interpreting) while retaining a main role not only as communicators, but also as actors reinforcing the larger system of beliefs and knowledge that govern what counts as right or wrong, good or bad, normal or abnormal, in a particular society. Thus, by combining communication seen as a management tool and textual analysis, this study illustrates the application of diverse qualitative research methods in the fields of management, and, specifically, in the field of communication management.