From platform governance to institutional practice: Experimentation, misalignment, and contingent adoption of google arts & culture - T. Leo Cao, 2025

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.