Researchers from Polytechnique Montreal, led by Virginie Francoeur with Joliann Morissette and Catherine Beaudry, spent nine months in 2022 embedded with Culture Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, a non-profit organization in Quebec that supports workers in the arts and cultural sectors. The organization estimated it was roughly ten years behind on its technological transition, and in 2022 it launched a digital platform designed to centralize the region’s cultural offerings and let artists, cultural workers and institutional representatives create profiles showcasing their expertise and services. For a region that had never developed a tool capable of consolidating its cultural forces, the researchers describe the platform as a radical change, and radical change is precisely where most transformation projects fail.

The stakes are high because change management research has long estimated that between 20 and 80 percent of change projects fail, and one of the main reasons is the neglect of the human factor. To understand what drives or blocks adoption in a creative environment, the team turned to a framework from the 1940s: psychologist Kurt Lewin’s three-step model of change. Lewin argued that change requires creating a state of imbalance between the current and desired situation, and his model unfolds through unfreezing, in which established behaviors and habits are questioned; changing, in which new behaviors and structures are implemented; and refreezing, in which new practices are stabilized and integrated into daily operations. Although the model has been criticized for its simplicity, the authors argue it remains empirically grounded and flexible enough to analyze change in contexts where it has never been tested, including museums, theaters, publishing houses and artist studios.

The study tested a moderated mediation model linking individual dispositions such as skills and beliefs, organizational dispositions such as support, and technology readiness, operationalized through optimism, to the intention to use the new platform. Beliefs were split into two dimensions: appropriateness, the conviction that the proposed solution fits the challenges of one’s environment, and valence, the expectation that one will personally benefit from the change. Affective commitment, defined as the emotional attachment a person feels toward the change process, served as the mediating variable. The research question was direct: to what extent do individual, organizational and technology-readiness dispositions influence the intention to use a digital platform among artists and cultural workers?

Because the arts and cultural sector has been little studied in change management research, which traditionally focuses on white- and blue-collar workplaces, the team adopted an action research approach that combined knowledge production with deliberate support for the organization’s transformation. Data collection ran from January to October 2022 and was unusually rich for a case study. The researchers conducted one 75-minute group interview with three Culture SLSJ employees, six 60-minute individual semi-structured interviews with potential users, and 18 informal discussions during 25 hours of in situ observation across eight cultural sites in four cities, including Chicoutimi, Alma, La Baie and Val-Jalbert, some 470 kilometers from Montreal. They then distributed a 29-question questionnaire on the LimeSurvey platform, drawing 70 respondents, a 30 percent response rate of the target population, with artists and self-employed workers making up just over half of the sample.

The quantitative analysis used Hayes’s MACRO process for Model 7, a bootstrap procedure with 5,000 resamples, to test the moderated mediation. The results confirmed that all four individual and organizational dispositions significantly predicted intention to use the platform. Ranked by explanatory power, appropriateness led with a t-value of 5.75, followed closely by support at 5.70, then valence at 4.99, and finally skills at 2.22. In other words, believing the platform is well suited to the sector’s needs, perceiving visible support from leaders, and expecting personal benefit predicted adoption far more strongly than users’ self-assessed digital competence. Support alone explained roughly 32 percent of the variance in intention to use, while skills accounted for less than 7 percent.

Affective commitment emerged as a powerful mediator, and in one case a complete one. For skills, the direct path to intention to use was statistically non-significant once affective commitment entered the model, meaning that perceived competence influences adoption only through emotional attachment to the change. For support, valence and appropriateness, the mediation was partial, but it consistently improved the model’s overall explanatory power. The qualitative data helped explain why: artists and cultural workers described their relationship to their work in terms of attachment, belonging, creation, mutual aid and passion, vocabulary that maps directly onto the affective dimension of commitment. One cinema director captured the mechanism plainly, saying that people have to be engaged in the process from the start because it is then easier to get buy-in.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerned optimism. The researchers expected technology readiness to strengthen the path from positive beliefs to commitment, but the moderating effect of optimism on the relationship between valence and affective commitment was negative. When optimism was low, the effect of valence on commitment was 0.3122; when optimism was high, it dropped to 0.1524, with a significant difference between the slopes. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, the authors suggest that optimism and valence function as interchangeable psychological resources: highly optimistic individuals, who already view technology as beneficial, depend less on positive beliefs about the specific platform to sustain their commitment. Alternatively, high optimism may inflate expectations about what the platform will deliver, and unmet expectations produce disillusionment that erodes the value of the change.

The study also documented resistance in real time and showed how it can be converted into momentum. Early interviews recorded reactions ranging from an artist’s exasperated declaration of not wanting yet another platform to a literary director’s doubts about whether Culture SLSJ had the staffing capacity to carry such a large project. Acting on the researchers’ recommendations, the organization strengthened the legitimacy of the project leader, communicated the platform’s benefits through newsletters and social networks, and held four discussion-day sessions where potential users could understand the reasons for the change. Data security concerns raised during field visits prompted ABCD Data training and educational sheets in spring and summer 2022. By the time the questionnaire was distributed, attitudes had measurably shifted, with one artist noting that the project was supported by serious people with expertise and legitimacy. Notably, every artist interviewed ultimately enrolled on the platform.

The authors distill their findings into a practical guide mapped onto Lewin’s three steps. Unfreezing requires challenging traditional ways of working and showing that digital transformation increases artists’ visibility and the accessibility of their work, while offering visible support from cultural leaders who act as ambassadors and providing training personalized to specific needs. The change stage calls for demonstration sessions and built-in appropriation time so users can interact directly with project leaders. Refreezing demands consolidating acquired knowledge through cultural days dedicated to technology, assessing user satisfaction and impact, and mobilizing the sector continuously through creative formats, from comic strips about the technological transition to poetry readings on the benefits of digital tools. The researchers acknowledge limitations, including a modest sample size that prevented distinguishing between worker categories and a single-region case that limits generalizability, but they argue the framework offers cultural organizations everywhere a roadmap for digital change built not on software but on support, belief and emotional investment.

Subject of Research: A mixed-methods action research study applying Lewin's change management model to digital transformation in the arts and cultural sector

Article Title: Understanding digital transformation through the lens of change management: a case study in the art and cultural sector

Article References: Francoeur, V., Morissette, J., & Beaudry, C. (2026). Understanding digital transformation through the lens of change management: a case study in the art and cultural sector. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 15, Article 15467. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15467

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2025.15467

Keywords: digital transformation, change management, cultural sector, arts, Lewin's change model, affective commitment, technology readiness, action research, Quebec, COVID-19, Understanding, digital