Very diverse cultural practices develop within sufficiently large polities, in response to, and contributing to, a matrix of social relationships. Museums play a formative role in defining and reproducing those relationships through their policies and narrative practices. As importantly, how museums are construed, who uses them, and how they use them, are also defined within this web of relationships. Discussions of audience inclusion and exclusion should thus be grounded in an analysis of the complex sociocultural roles that museums play, and specifically in regard to the user's search for shared narrative.

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Museums are not neutral organizations; they are active social participants. While museums serve many social purposes, fundamentally they define and express major social narratives. Museums are important collections of ideological symbols and perform a special communication as well as legitimizing role. The narratives conveyed by museums are observed as definitive and authoritative, and the objects displayed are understood as emblematic or normative culture. This article examines two museums and a historic site in the United States in the context of their social narratives. Attention is paid to the political implications of recent program decisions. The social and political interactions that accompany these institutions' program decisions demonstrate the ideological purpose of the museum.

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Museum use is a process of ideological negotiation, and thus museum users are active agents, not empty vessels waiting to be filled with curatorial narrative. Ensuing dialogues argue over trivia as well as important ethical issues. Discussants take up topics that range over specific public programs, the object maker's motivations and intentions, the choice of a subject, the phrasing of a caption, or the selection of objects on display. These discussions are held in hushed conversations in crowded galleries, in casual conversations within museum hallways, or with animated gestures on the front steps. In the course of this dialogic social practice, each participant's cultural repertoire is enhanced and grows. Every dialogic event is part of a socio-cultural continuum that will engender other events, with other participants. The comments made by visitors in a visitor comment book are therefore instances of the specificities and the universality of that discussion.