Cultural organizations and cultural change: two cases compared

Abstract

Organizational culture represents an important factor which characterize every type of enterprises. Understanding how internal culture origins and changes, helps in explaining how new rules and routines are adopted within the organization. Cultural enterprises are flourishing because of being an important resource in driving innovation and digitalization. Among all the cultural enterprises, a significant contribution on Italian economy is given by public museums. Public museums have been recently reformed, and this implied the arrival of new directors, selected with an international call. New museum directors must deal now with increased autonomy: they have to administrate their organization and budgets, following some financial and fiscal constraints. These new directors are now becoming “cultural entrepreneurs”. The focus of this thesis is to investigate how the organizational culture of two important public museums (the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia) have changed after this transformation.