Abrioux, Florence
From one crisis to another, resilience and differentiated organizational learning: the case of museums
- 2026.
72
This article compares the impact of different crisis situations on the world of museums, by means of a case study concerning Orléans during the COVID crisis. It explores how resilience and organizational learning manifest themselves so as to entail certain managerial recommendations. The comparison of health crises provides a useful basis for further analysis. The COVID crisis has changed the relationship between museums and their audiences and engendered new forms of remote access to content, and the experience of repeated lockdowns provides a fine-grained view of the stages of the individual and organizational effects of such policies. The contemporary analysis of museums in Orléans is based on interviews with museum staff. The collated textual corpus was subject to a content analysis and a quantitative analysis via Tropes. In the case of the COVID crisis, the absence of a public, coupled with the rupture in the relationship to space and time to which the museum staff were subject, have modified the relationship between the staff and their work in the museum. There has accordingly been a reorganization, which has been based in large measure on both personal and professional networks. While some adaptations are temporary, intended to overcome a situation of acute crisis, others seem to have changed the staff’s professional perspective in a more enduring way, including at the core level of their occupation.