Guest editorial

Citation

Leask, A. and Hassanien, A. (2011), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Event and Festival Management, Vol. 2 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijefm.2011.43402baa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Event and Festival Management, Volume 2, Issue 2

About the Guest Editors

Anna LeaskReader in Tourism in the School of Marketing, Tourism and Languages at Edinburgh Napier University. She has taught and developed undergraduate and postgraduate modules in visitor attraction management, heritage tourism and conference management. Her research areas include managing visitor attractions, heritage tourism and work on Generation Y as visitors and workers. She has co-edited several textbooks in the area of heritage and attraction management, in addition to authoring book chapters, journal articles and conference papers in a variety of tourism publications.

Ahmed HassanienLecturer and the Course Leader of Hospitality Management Programmes at Edinburgh Napier University. He has published many articles in international-refereed conferences and periodicals and is a reviewer for a number of international academic periodicals. His research has focused upon innovation, repositioning, branding and product development in the tourism, hospitality, sport and events industries.

The field of “event management” is extremely complex, with huge variance in their type, purpose, aims and desired outcomes. Their diversity has been explored by academics and practitioners, resulting in a diverse range of research interests and projects. While this work initially concentrated on economic then socio-cultural impacts of events, recent publications have become more focussed on areas such as pre- and post-event planning and attendee motivation and participation. However, the role of venues within the event development and planning process has remained relatively under researched, this despite the crucial part that venues play within the successful delivery of many events and festivals. This lack of attention is seen in the omission of venues from published lists of emergent research trends and themes and yet, without venues, many events simply could not occur.

Having identified this as a potentially valuable area for research work, a call was made to encourage papers exploring venue development and management. The six papers within this special issue do, to a certain extent, reflect the diversity of the field, in covering a range of venue type (sporting, entertainment, purpose-built conference, meeting and unusual venues), a variety of event type (meeting, mega-sporting, conference, wedding, social) and a variety of venue users (corporate, association, public and government). The opportunity to publish work on emerging research themes was also possible, with papers exploring sustainability, environmental corporate social responsibility, work process knowledge, marketing communication and technological developments in the form of Web 2.0 communication. The special issue also contains a conceptual paper exploring the complex issue of event typology.

Venues require significant investment funding so their need for management efficiency and long-term and contribution to event legacy is crucial. The papers within this special issue all aim to identify pertinent research issues, review relevant literature, explore and apply appropriate methods to test ideas and then to devise a set of implications for both academic and practitioner use in future working practice and research activities.

Ahmed Hassanien and Crispin Dale investigate the scope of the sector and propose a number of criteria that can be used to classify the different types of events venues. Rob Davidson explores the use of Web 2.0 applications in marketing communication strategies in the UK conference venue sector, while Philip C. Rothschild describes how sports and entertainment venue managers in the USA make use of social media to market their venues and events. Shuna Marr, meanwhile, applies the concept of work process knowledge in the Scottish Visitor Attractions sector, exploring solutions to the challenges encountered in the multiple use of these sites. Julie Whitfield and Leonardo A.N. Dioko investigate corporate social responsibility in the UK conference sector and propose a conceptual framework to encourage greater environmental sustainability practices. The special issue ends with Ian F. Ponsford’s topical coverage of actualising environmental sustainability at the Vancouver Winter Olympics Games.

The guest editors would like to extend their thanks to the reviewers involved throughout the preparation of this special issue, without their constructive criticism and guidance the papers presented here would not be as valuable as they are. They would also like to thank the contributors for their initial interest, informed responses and timely paper submissions.

In conclusion, a number of different themes are presented which, it is hoped, will both inform as well as stimulate continued development of the subject area. No special issue could possibly hope to demonstrate the entire range of event-related research being undertaken, but the papers presented demonstrate some of the diverse areas and approaches being used to further develop our understanding of event-related tourism.

Anna Leask, Ahmed HassanienGuest Editors