CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 3Digital Platforms and EconomicsCultural Insights and Digital ImpactsMuseums and Cultural Heritage

From platform governance to institutional practice: Experimentation, misalignment, and contingent adoption of Google Arts & Culture

Open access
Cao, T. Leo·2025·Platforms & Society
DOI 10.1177/29768624251349092
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This study examines how cultural heritage institutions utilize Google Arts & Culture (GA&C), a Google initiative that provides a publishing platform for institutions to showcase their collections and engage with users. Based on semistructured interviews with 23 cultural institutions and one Google employee, the study provides an empirical account of platform adoption beyond dominant commercial and social media contexts. Theoretically, it contributes to platform studies by analyzing how platformization unfolds in the cultural sector, where traditionally public institutions engage with external platforms under varying organizational constraints. Methodologically, it offers a situated perspective on how institutions make sense of platform governance, digital strategy, and content production in everyday practice. Findings reveal persistent challenges in aligning institutional needs with platform affordances. While institutions were drawn to GA&C's promise of greater visibility, infrastructural support, and storytelling tools, these benefits were often undermined by limited technical resources, communication breakdowns, and logistical hurdles. Internal dynamics, from institutional memory to internal collaboration, proved to be the most significant factor shaping institutional participation, leading to fragmented and short-lived use of the platform. The kind of infrastructural alignment central to platformization never fully materialized. As a result, GA&C remained a peripheral tool rather than an integrated component of institutional digital strategies, highlighting the contingent, partial, and often fragile nature of platform adoption in the cultural sector.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/29768624251349092

Cites

67 of 67 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Cachia A (2014) Disability, curating, and the educational turn: The contemporary condition of access in the museum. ONCURATING.Org 24: 51–66.
  2. Lutman S Smith KJ Rudolp G (2021) Digital Transformation: An Assessment of Grants Supporting Digital Staff in Museums (pp. 1-20). Knight Foundation. https://knightfoundation.org/reports/digital-transformation-an-assessment-of-grants-supporting-digital-staff-in-museums/.
  3. Vergo P (1989) Introduction. In: Vergo P (ed) The New Museology. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 1–5.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Cao, T. L.
Affiliations
The University of Texas at Austin (US)
Corresponding author
Cao, T. Leo
ORCID
Cao, T. Leo
Venue
Platforms & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2025-06
Volume
2
ISSN
2976-8624 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1177/29768624251349092
OpenAlex
W4411097170
Semantic Scholar
a43d684c61995e25dbc68184a214615e484e3ffe
Cited by
3
References
62
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1
FWCI
2.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Platforms & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • ResearchOnline (Glasgow Caledonian University) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Museology › Museums and Cultural Heritage
Keywords
Google Arts & Culture, platform adoption, cultural heritage institutions, platform governance, platformization, digital strategy, institutional memory, institutional collaboration

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review