Marjana Johansson

City festivals: creativity and control in staged urban experiences

In a global market, cities aim to develop a distinct profile to attract mobile consumers. One means increasingly used to attain distinction is to brand the city as experience space. In particular, the urban festival has become a popular organizational form for creating experience spaces and for marketing cities. Festivals are often strategically conceived with the purpose of promoting a ‘distinctive city’, in line with uniqueness being the keystone of success in the experience economy. This paper applies an experience economy framework to analyse city festivals as potentially transformative practices, helping re-imagine urban space and reshape urban identity. Building on empirical studies of the Stockholm Culture Festival and the Nowy Kercelak Fair in Warsaw, it examines the tension between controlled image production and carnivalesque celebration and the extent to which the meanings and flow of urban space can be managed. Using Lefèbvre’s notion of the production of space and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, this paper critically assesses the possibility of reshaping urban practices through the staging of festivals, and the potential for creativity and expression extant in managed staging of experience.

Place Branding and the Imaginary: The Politics of Re-imagining a Garden City

This article discusses contemporary practices of place branding through the concept of the imaginary. Specifically, the aim is to interrogate place branding as a politically constituted process which unfolds in relation to dominant discourses and symbols that are in circulation; how existing material structures inform the process; and what material consequences occur as a result. The process is empirically illustrated by drawing on a qualitative study conducted within a municipal project organisation charged with organising the 50th anniversary of Tapiola Garden City in Finland. The anniversary provided the decision-makers with an opportunity for re-imagining the Garden City, which in the course of time was seen to have become outdated and in need of symbolic and material rejuvenation. In the light of the study, the article examines how place branding contributes to producing discursive privileging and marginalisation of particular values and social groups.

The discourse of meritocracy contested/reproduced: : Foreign women academics in UK business schools

This article provides insights into the role of minority employees in reproducing and contesting the discourse of meritocracy in contemporary organizations. It also discusses the effects the contestation of meritocracy, or the lack thereof, has on organizational power relations and on the situation of individuals who are the target of meritocratic policies. Empirically, we address the experiences of a growing category of workers—women academics of non-UK origin—employed within UK business schools. Based on the analysis of narratives focusing on the career trajectories of our research participants, we show how the belief in, and paradoxically the questioning of, meritocratic principles contribute to the reproduction of inequalities. We conclude that, as a result of the overarching perpetuation, and only limited challenging of, extant power relations in organizations, both the current definitions of merit and the application of meritocratic principles remain unchanged.

Welcome to Paradise. Customer experience design and emotional labour on a cruise ship

This paper describes the work on board a cruise ship. The purpose is to examine the emotional demands put on workers in the so-called experience industry. A field study was conducted to study how customer experience is created through the management of space, passengers, and emotions. It is argued that the sought-after paradisiac experience is attained by acts of sanitising, and that the perceived freedom of the passengers is mirrored by increased control on the part of the service providers, synthesising Hochschilds notion of emotional labour with Ritzers sociology of consumption to attain an understanding of the organisation of experiences.

Creating a Stir: The role of Word of Mouth in Reputation Management in the Context of Festivals

ABSTRACT This qualitative case study examines the role of word of mouth (WOM) in reputation management in the context of networked festival productions. Particularly, it explores the ways in which WOM marketing (WOMM) is employed in festival marketing and brand-building. The paper links reputation and WOM to the concept of cultural branding with the aim of providing a framework for analysing how a festivals reputation shapes the creation of a culturally meaningful message. The empirical analysis is based on a multiple-case study involving three Finnish festivals hosted in the city of Pori: the Porispere Festival, the International Pori Jazz Festival and the International Lain§uojattomat Theatre Festival. The cases represent festivals of different sizes and varying organisational structure, content and life cycle. The findings indicate that the meaning and use of WOMM vary depending on key constitutive differences that affect the nature of the festivals’ reputation and brand-building processes. Although the importance of external and internal stakeholders in these processes is evident, it seems that when the power of networks is recognised as crucial for festivals, WOM has a leveraging role in reputation management and brand-building. In these processes, the value of the festival leaders persona becomes crucial.

‘From mosh pit to posh pit’: Festival imagery in the context of the boutique festival

This paper addresses market-based cultural production in the context of the UK festival field, with a focus on the framing of the festival experience through anticipation. In particular, boutique festivals are discussed as examples of a contemporary cultural ‘product category’ which has emerged and proliferated in the last decade. Through discourse analysis of media representations of boutique festivals, we situate the boutique festival in a broader sociocultural discourse of agency and choice, which makes it meaningful and desirable, and outline the type of consumer it is meant to attract. For the contemporary consumer, the boutique festival is presented as an anticipated experience based on countercultural festival imagery, while simultaneously framing cultural participation through consumption. The paper contributes to a wider debate on the construction of the consumer in the cultural economy.

Compositions of professionalism in counselling work: An embodied and embedded intersectionality framework

This article explores the embodied compositions of professionalism in the context of the counselling psychology profession in Russia. Specifically, we develop an embodied intersectionality framework for theorizing compositions of professionalism, which allows us to explain how multiple embodied categories of difference intersect and are relationally co-constitutive in producing credible professionals, and, importantly, how these intersections are contingent on intercorporeal encounters that take place in localized professional settings. Our exploration of how professionalism and professional credibility are established in Russian counselling shows that, rather than assuming that a hegemonic ‘ideal body’ is given preference in a professional context, different embodied compositions may be deemed credible in various work settings within the same profession. An embodied intersectionality framework allows us to challenge the notion of a single professional ideal and offer a dynamic and contextually situated analysis of the lived experiences of professional privilege and disadvantage.

The ladder of opportunity and other myths of meritocracy debunkedAgainst Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, LittlerJo. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 236 pp. £29.99, ISBN 9781138889552.

Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, Jo Littler. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 236 pp. £29.99, ISBN 9781138889552.