Thinking about "scenes": a new view of visitors' influence on museums

Sociologists have described "scenes" as voluntary social groupings or figurations that are "... thematically cultural networks of people who share certain material and/or cognitive forms of collective stylization", according to Hitzler, Bucher, and Niederbacher (2001, 20). This terminology is quite useful for thinking about Stephen Weil's assertion that visitors play a role in shaping museums. Through "scenes", we see how is might happen, and how visitors might already be exerting subtle pressure on the forms and contents of museums. The study of scenes could help us develop a tool that would offer a unique vision of the influences that visitors have on museums.