Mia Larson

Festival Innovation. Complex and Dynamic Network Interaction

Abstract This article argues that festival innovation is a highly cooperative endeavour among many actors in an inter‐organizational network. The aim is to understand how collaborative festival innovation is performed and who takes part in the process. Material from case studies of three Swedish festivals showed that innovation takes place in complex networks involving many actors having various interests. Innovation networks are often highly dynamic and changing: innovation often takes place in new partnerships. The innovation work is hard to plan: it is to a large degree an emergent process and sometimes innovation originates from improvisation. Some innovation can, however, become institutionalized and embedded in the routines of the partnership interaction. Festival organizers need to reflect on their network and relate strategically to how their partners can contribute to successful festival innovation.

Innovation and Creativity in Festival Organisations

This study contributes to understanding processes of innovation and creativity in festival organizations. The focus is on the internal work of renewing the festival. Three case studies of Swedish festival organizations demonstrate how festival workers attempt to renew the festival product. Processes of renewal include various ways of encouraging new ideas and creative solutions, such as brainstorming, imitation of similar products, and influences from the external environment. Two main processes of renewal were identified: institutionalized and emergent. The study further elaborated on the emergent process of renewal, thus identifying incremental and improvised renewal. Different factors contributing to or hindering innovations were distinguished; the demands of potential visitors, the managements view on renewal, the teams view on renewal, the organizational culture, and change of managers and staff.

Popculture Tourism: A Research Manifesto

Tourism in the wake of films, literature, and music is gaining interest among academics and practitioners alike. Despite the significance of converging tourism and media production and popcultural consumption, theorizing in this field is weak. This chapter explores complex relationships among popcultural phenomena, destination image creation, and tourism consumption. By taking a broader social science approach, it revisits and connects research themes, such as symbolic consumption, negotiated representations, fans and fandom, technology mediation, and media convergence. The chapter concludes with an integrative model, or “popcultural placemaking loop,” which is qualified through six propositions.

The Virtual Fan(G) Community: Social Media and Pop Culture Tourism

Abstract This chapter focuses on the importance of social media for pop culture fans. A web survey for fans of the Twilight Saga is implemented, using the concepts of cognitive, affective, and evaluative social identity and personal, product, and situational involvement. The purpose is to examine to what degree social identity and involvement can explain pop culture fans’ future intention to travel, make recommendations to others, and use social media. Findings show that pop culture fans use social media to a large extent and that these means are important for making decisions about traveling and event participation. Moreover, the chapter shows that involvement dimensions are more important than social identity dimensions to explain future intention to travel, to recommend to others, and to use social media.

Social Media Co-creation Strategies: the 3Cs

This article explores how social media becomes a part of integrated marketing communications of festival organizations. The purpose of this article is to conceptualize the cocreation of festival experiences online by comparing managerial strategies and communicative patterns of three large Scandinavian music festivals: Storsjoyran, Way Out West (Sweden), and Roskilde Festival (Denmark). The theoretical point of departure is taken in the literature on consumer–producer cocreation, originating from recent conceptualizations of the service-dominant logic and a tribal perspective on consumption. Based on the empirical findings, we propose an analytical framework to improve our understanding of the management of social media communications, offering three distinct value cocreation strategies in a festival context.

Governance in Multi-Project Networks: Lessons from a Failed Destination Branding Effort

Abstract This article describes and analyses the process in which the establishment of a Christmas market led to an attempt to establish a regional destination brand named “Delightful Christmas”. Our focus is on the network dynamics of the process, in particular its multi-project network characteristics. Empirical findings are based on qualitative data from personal interviews, participant observation and documentation in an action research approach. The process is analysed as a so-called project network (Hellgren & Stjernberg, 1995) involving different actors having different aims in event and destination brand development, thus creating a process with actors of existing, but resource-lacking, dependencies. Despite the disagreements between actors, the common beliefs and hopes for the integrated destination theme remained and innovative work continued for about three years in an environment where conditions were difficult due to insufficient financial resources, project coordination and long-term strategic planning. Conclusions concern the dynamics of a complex multi-project network organization and how its failure can be explained.

Imagining the Alpha male of the tourism tribe

Abstract This paper analyses how the “alpha male” of the tourism academy tribe is imagined in celebratory contexts. The tradition is interesting from a gender perspective, in that the majority of celebratory portraits found in tourism research journals are those of male scholars. Whether this is regarded as a coincidence or a consequence of the resilience of a glass ceiling, it is interesting to investigate how these “alpha males” and their academic lifeworks are described, characterized, and presented. The paper contains a quantitative description and qualitative analysis of the portraits published in Anatolia. In particular, we apply philosopher Stephen Pepper’s root metaphors of formism, organicism, mechanism, contextualism to examine how tourism research work in the world is imagined.

Collaboration Deficiencies in Meetings Networks: Case-studies of Two Peri-urban Destinations

The intention of this article is to understand inter-organizational collaboration in a meeting destination context and explain the failure of such collaborative networks. We demonstrate how meeting tourism actors in two smaller Scandinavian cities fail to form long-term collaborations. Major players and organizations in the destination promotion triads [Sheehan, L., Ritchie, J.R.B., & Hudson, S. (2007). The destination promotion triad: Understanding asymmetric stakeholder interdependencies among the city, hotels, and DMO. Journal of Travel Research, 46(1), 64–74] were interviewed in order to map cooperative activities, intentions or latent tensions among these. Based on a constructivist framework of network analysis, we identified the lack of convenor legitimacy and low levels of trust and commitment as reasons for collaboration deficiencies. The findings contribute to Larsons [(2009). Joint event production in the jungle, the park, and the garden: Metaphors of event networks. Tourism Management, 30(3), 393–399] model of event networks, identifying yet another metaphor – the desert – illustrating a network consisting of loosely coupled actors that co-exist but do not interact. The findings also indicate that collaborative dynamics may follow cyclical loops, entailing shifts between turbulence and stability over time.

The Legitimacy of Festivals and Their Stakeholders: Concepts and Prepositions

This conceptual article provides an overview of organizational and stakeholder legitimacy as applied to the study of festivals and their networks of stakeholders. Legitimacy is shown to be a vital condition for festival acceptance and sustainability. Different kinds of criteria for judging legitimacy (legal, pragmatic, moral, and cognitive) are illustrated by reference to typical festival stakeholders. As well, legitimacy can either be situational, depending on problems at hand, or more permanently derived from legal status or institutional arrangements and ownership. Networks of stakeholders have to be considered, and at the levels of industry (i.e., the festival/event sector), area (e.g., festivals in a city), and firm (the festival organization). This article concludes with a discussion of practical management implications, and with a set of propositions that can be used as hypotheses to be tested and as a general guide for future research and interdisciplinary theory building.

Community-based tourism in practice: evidence from three coastal communities in Bohuslän, Sweden

Abstract Local involvement in tourism development is defined as a key issue for sustainable tourism, however it is often questioned and less seldom implemented in reality. Reasons behind this condition are lack of knowledge and practical experience on community-based tourism as a bottom-up approach. In this paper it is argued that local involvement in tourism development is both a democratic right and a strategic destination management tool. The paper scrutinizes a process of collaboration and local participation in a tourism development project within three coastal communities on the Swedish West Coast. A mixed-methods approach was employed in the project with the specific aim of investigating attitudes to the community and tourism development and of involving community stakeholders in exploring alternative avenues of tourism development. The article describes four phases of the process of local involvement in a tourism development project: step 1, formation of a representative project group and negotiation of community-based approach; step 2, consulting local stakeholders and employing a mixed-methods approach; step 3, elaborating results with local stakeholders; step 4, increased community collaboration.