Online User-Generated Contents for Performance Measurement of Cultural Institutions

Though academics and scholars recognize the potentialities of online User-Generated Contents (UGCs) to support management decisions, a gap exists in literature connecting the topics of performance management (PM), text modelling, online UGCs, especially with reference to cultural institutions. Targeting specifically these organizations, this research explores the role that online UGCs could assume in PM, investigating ways to account for measures of thoughts and needs expressed by online users through online User-Generated Texts (UGTs). This is pursued through three main steps. First, a critical literature review of mathematical models for machine-readable representations of online text supports the development of a methodological framework to accurately select the most adequate online text embedding for the specific PM task of interest. The result of this analysis demonstrates to the PM community of academics and experts the potential and limitations of adopting specific methodologies for the analysis of online UGTs and specific guidelines for selecting the most adequate criteria for the specific purposes of interest. Second, guided by the aforementioned methodological framework, this research evidences the usability of online UGTs as tools for PM of cultural institutions identifying performance dimensions by means of quantitative statistical analysis of the own words of online users of cultural institutions. This also allows to underline the additional value brought to decision makers automatically exploiting online UGTs, since elaborating these data could enrich the information that the decision maker already acquires through more traditional data and methods, like interviews or surveys. 2 Finally, to complement the theoretical and quantitative results, an exploratory qualitative analysis allows to understand the cultural managers’ perspectives towards the design, use, reporting and trust of online UGCs as PM tools. This step aims at supporting the development of a framework for PM of cultural institutions based also on online UGTs. From an academic perspective, this work aims at contributing to PM literature, exploring the possibility of including textual expressions of online users’ perceptions, grasped through online UGTs, into a system for the management of performances of institutions. The implementation of this PM system to the specific case of cultural institutions is expected to offer an innovative methodological perspective to PM of cultural institutions, accounting for the perspective of large amounts of actual cultural users on the line of a more participatory approach to Culture.