Staging the Museumspace: Overlapping Personal, Social, and Hedonic Experiences

A visit to museum is beyond receiving services from the staff or knowledge from browsing and reflecting on the experiences of interacting with the exhibits. Instead, service encounters at the museum should be conceptualized as a theatrical experience, in which museum visitors pay to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that the museum stages and to be engaged in an inherently personal way (Pine and Gilmore 2011). So the question becomes, “What kinds of experiences do visitors look for and what do they find memorable?” As with any cultural outing, visiting a museum involves the juxtaposing of personal experience with the exhibits (Goulding 2000; Joy and Sherry 2003), and social experience that often shared with friends or family members (Debenedetti 2003). Therefore, it becomes imperative to investigate how such seemingly ambivalent experiences are enjoyed simultaneously and reflected upon after the visit. In this paper, we propose to examine personal, social and hedonic experiences of museum consumption, in particular, the experiences should also be studied in the social context of the companions. The goal of the present study is to emphasize the overlapping nature of museum experiential consumption as well as the theoretical implications. Although museum visits can be considered as a typical service encounter, but the focus of this investigation, the social aspect of museum experience which includes the interactions between adults and children, has been different from what has been previously studied, and therefore lends itself to multi-method data collection, including six-month observation and visual image capturing of a community museum in the United States, 18 group exit interviews, seven ZMET interviews, and 32 narratives about personal and pupil field trips to the museum.