Category: walter benjamin

Events Management Research: Attendee motivation, Festivals and Economic Impacts

Along with my colleagues Denise Hawkes, Emma Abson and Paul Booth, we’ve recently had a new book chapter published which looks at the relationship between motivations to attend events and the spending that takes place at them.  This research was carried out over three months during a series of festivals held in an area of London, in the UK and it has been published in the book ‘Impact Assessment in Tourism Economics’

cover

The findings of this research indicated that there was a significant relationship between attendees’ motivation to attend the events in the festivals and the amount of money that they spent during the events.  We used Beard and Ragheb’s ‘Leisure Motivational Scale’ to categorise attendees by their motivation and we found that the highest spenders were people who had come to the event to meet new people and socialise.  The lowest spenders were those attending events to spend time with their families.  If you would like to read this research, but you can’t gain acess to it, please contact me.

The conclusion of this chapter suggests:

“The literature on event motivations focuses on the marketing of events and on attendee satisfaction with events. Such studies…have made recommendations for event development, market segmentation and promotional activities. Linking motivations to expenditure, as we have attempted in this paper, suggests a range of new approaches to these areas of successful event management.

For example at these events, segmentation by motivation has allowed for the identification of a high-value segment, those who are attending ‘to meet new people’. Meeting the needs of this segment could be suggested as an area of event development such as the creation of opportunities for social interaction and the provision of enhanced food and drink retail opportunities at the events. Attracting this lucrative segment would require the promotion of the social aspects of the events and a significant change in approach from the current marketing approach [of many public sector-supported events], which concentrate on local media and emphasises the inclusive, familyfriendly and low cost aspects of the programme.”

 

Packaging liminality: the management and commodification of liminal landscapes in tourism

Wesley Rykalski and I have had the abstract below accepted for the ATLAS 2011 conference in Valmeira, Latvia.  The theme of the conference is ’Landscape and Tourism: a dualistic relationship”.  Our plan for this paper is to take the methodology that we’ve been developing through the ‘Reading the Arcades / Reading the Promenades’ project over the last two years and apply it to other tourist spaces, in order to test its value as a new approach to engaging with the non-spaces (Auge 1995) of much touristic practice.

Liminal Landscapes

Wesley Rykalski and I will be presenting a paper based on our research for the arcades / promenades project at  this conference.   Once the paper is finished we’ll post more details up on our project blog, along with a programme for the event, once it is available.

You can read the abstract for our paper by clicking here.  The final paper is quite a development from this point and incorporates some of the material that we have been posting on here over the last year.

New posts on Aracdes / Promenades

There are three new posts up on our ‘Reading the Arcades / Reading the Promenades’ blog. The first is on our use of a yahoo pipe to collect images of the seaside promenade, the second is a set of links to other projects who also use Benjamin’s ‘Aracdes Project’ as inspiration for new work, and the latest post is a series of quotations on the use of photography in sociology.

New post on Arcades / Promenades

Wesley has posted up the latest contribution to our ‘Reading the Arcades, reading the Promenades’ blog, where we are attempting to bring together our readings of Walter Benjamins’ ‘Arcades Project‘ and apply these to the British seaside promenade.

The Arcades Project
The Arcades Project

A taster of Wesley’s piece:

“Benjamin is, very, clear and, far too, concise in his summation of the method of The Arcades Project.  Convolute N, which deals with his historical method and his analysis of that method (moving into the philosophy of method and history), contains a very great deal of material but the following are his key methodological statements on the Project itself.

This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.
[N1,10]

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
[N1a,8] “

CFP: Liminal landscapes – remapping the field

This looks to be an excellent event. Wesley Rykalski and I will probably be submitting a paper, based on some of our work on our arcades / promenades project.

Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk
Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk

New arcades/promenades post

I’ve just posted about ‘the fantasy of cultural history’ and cultural materialism on the arcades/promenades blog.  Wesley has also posted a photo-essay that takes its cue from Brighton’s promenade.

“…fashion…this semblance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the ever recurrent. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of “cultural history” in which the bourgeoisie enjoys its false consciousness to the full.” (Benjamin 2002: 11)

The arcades/promenades blog is a representation of our attempt to grapple with the meanings and practices of the seaside promenade through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’