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This paper aims to explore how music festival organisers negotiate diversity and inclusion in marketing and promotion practices through symbolic and social boundaries.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 festival organisers in Rotterdam and participant observation with six festival photographers I show that symbolic and social boundaries are employed in three areas: (1) boundaries in festival format (i.e. [partially] free or ticketed), (2) boundaries in distribution partners and technologies and (3) boundaries in promotional content.

Symbolic and social boundaries are intentionally used by festival organisers to build and delineate festival audiences. Implications are drawn on current understandings of the accessibility of music festival spaces, arguing that festival research should move beyond within-space dynamics to grasp the negotiation of diversity and inclusion at festivals more fully.

While music festivals are often marketed as celebratory spaces that are “welcoming to everyone”, few studies have investigated diversity and inclusion nor marketing and promotion practices at music festivals. This study shows how festival audiences are shaped through marketing and promotion practices.

The aim of the article is to develop a framework for assessment for contemporary commercial music (CCM) in a music department that is still organised in a traditional way. Assessment of CCM in tertiary institutions and external graded music exams were described and analysed, followed by the presentation of an assessment framework.

This research design is a content analysis. Data was collected through purposive sampling of primary sources of CCM syllabi. These syllabi are used descriptively and analytically for comparison.

The major findings from the content analysis are presented as an assessment framework for CCM. The assessment framework has implications for teaching and learning vocal CCM at both undergraduate and postgraduate in higher education.

The study focused on the development of assessment criteria for CCM, in a music department where no degree specialisation for CCM exists, and CCM is manifested in the principal instrument only. The framework for assessment may be useful to practitioners and academics who are attempting to introduce CCM in classically oriented music departments and where external constraints prohibit the introduction of a degree specialising in CCM.

This article presents an authentic assessment framework for CCM, that considers its style and performance practices.

This chapter explores the concept of authenticity in the context of today’s highly competitive hospitality industry. Drawing on the multi-sited ethnographic case study of Ziferblat, the world’s first pay-per-minute cafe franchise, the author examines how the imperative of authenticity is addressed by small international enterprises falling in between the categories of chain and independent. By tracing how Ziferblat’s original concept, shaped by the personal and socioeconomic background of its founder, was subsequently transformed by the local teams and adapted to different cultural-geographical contexts, this chapter adds new empirical evidence to the dynamic and pluralistic notion of multiple authenticities.

The purpose of the study is to compare features of career development and fandom in frequent festival attendance in the context of Finnish music festivals.

The study uses a mixed methods research approach and employs two theoretical frameworks: theories of career development and fandom.

In frequent festival attendance, both festival career development and festival fandom are most clearly present in motivation development and social dimensions.

Strategically, frequent festivalgoers should be considered as crucial stakeholders, who might mobilize the co-creation of a sense of community or festival brand.

Music-related fandom has been previously investigated in relation to artists and specific musical genres, but not so much in relation to music festivals in general. Career studies, on the other hand, concentrate heavily on sports events. There is a scarcity of research scrutinizing both career development and fandom in the festival context within the same study, and festival attendance as part of music tourism is an under-researched area.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This paper aims to challenge the assumption that brands of everyday products have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years by conducting the first case study of the marketing practices of the Swedish toothpaste brand Stomatol (1910–1940). Through visual social semiotic analysis, it explores how the brand was a pioneer in lifestyle marketing, using discourses of modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” to sell its toothpaste.

Two hundred Stomatol advertisements were collected from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive and analysed using visual social semiotics. The analysis considers how the idea of a cultural Swedishness centred around modernity and beauty developed between 1910 and 1940, and how both linguistic and semiotic resources were used to make these claims seem credible.

At a time when its main adversaries were capitalising upon science in their advertisements to construct authority and credibility, Stomatol instead targeted lifestyle. Modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” were central themes of their marketing campaigns, yet the way these themes were articulated varied between 1910 and 1940 in accordance with changing popular discourse. This made Stomatol more competitive than other toothpaste brands because it was able to sell an experience rather than a product, turning it into Sweden’s most popular toothpaste.

This paper demonstrates the importance of case studies to challenge the assumption that toothpaste brands have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years (a claim based on Anglocentrism). It also showcases the need to further investigate non-Anglo countries when conducting research into lifestyle marketing to build a more nuanced perspective on its origins and the supposed novelty of (largely) US practices. Thus, Stomatol makes an important case for Sweden as a trailblazer in lifestyle marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a within-gender analysis and between-gender differences in seeking (personal and interpersonal) and escaping (personal and interpersonal) motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia. Specific objectives were: to conduct a within-gender analysis in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia; and to examine between-gender differences in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia.

Based on the data collected from 458 attendees at a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia, the authors employed network analysis for within-gender analysis and MANOVA and ANOVA for between-gender comparison. The network analysis served two purposes, in that it examined each item’s predictability for each gender, and analyzed the correlations among motivation items within each gender. In addition, the General Linear Model served to compare the male and female groups’ motivations to attend the non-traditional festival. The authors first performed MANOVA for each dimension and then ANOVA for each dimension’s individual items.

Within-gender analysis reveals that several sets of motivations were associated strongly for both genders. This suggests that Saudi Arabians seem to enjoy entertainment because it projects the festival mood; they want to escape both from home and work and attend the festival to relieve stress by changing their routine pace. However, gender differences were apparent in several other items, especially for the group of women. Between-group comparison analysis shows significant gender differences in several elements of motivation. Overall, personal seeking and escaping were greater for males than females. In contrast, interpersonal seeking was greater for females than males.

Entertainment seems to be a key contributor to the festival mood because entertainment and the festival mood were related closely for both genders. In fact, personal and interpersonal escaping means were greater than personal interpersonal seeking means for both genders. Indeed, opportunities exist to develop non-traditional festivals in the country further. Gender differences were identified in several items of personal seeking and escaping, and interpersonal seeking. With respect to personal seeking, men tend to seek the entertainment, festival mood and the event’s uniqueness more than do women, a finding that their higher means in personal escaping supported. It is clear that men view the festival as a way to enjoy themselves to escape from their jobs and daily stress to a greater degree than do their female counterparts. Women are more likely to seek interpersonal experiences in that they are more likely to enjoy the festival because it offers the opportunity to meet new people and spend quality time with family and friends. This study has several limitations, leading to suggestions for future research. Because seeking and escaping motivations have been used relatively little in the festival setting, future researchers should develop a valid scale of personal and interpersonal seeking and escaping motivations specifically for festivals employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Second, while the data were collected at a single non-traditional festival, future research can use multiple sites to increase the ability to generalize the findings. Third, although this study was limited to Saudi Arabia, further research can apply seeking and escaping motivations, both at the personal and interpersonal levels, to other cultures to extend the applicability of the framework used in this study.

Non-traditional festival managers need to focus on an atmosphere that provides festivities, as many people in the Saudi Arabian culture appear to be escaping from their everyday lives to enjoy themselves and with family and friends. To appeal to male workers, festival organizers and managers need to advertise and market the events’ mood and liveliness overall with photos of workers leaving the office free of stress and looking forward to attending an event. To appeal to women who desire unique experiences that a variety of forms of entertainment provide, event managers must ensure that the entertainment is innovative and creative, and differs from what other festivals provide to attract more female attendees. Also, festival planners must focus on events that incorporate the family unit and promote the opportunity to meet new people to appeal to women in Saudi Arabia.

This is the first study to examine gender differences in festival motivations in Saudi Arabia. The relaxation of the historically strict and conservative cultural values, coupled with the country’s desire to develop its tourism and event sector, provides an ideal opportunity for future research. The authors hope that this research will stimulate further interest in the country with the goal to develop and market its tourism sector and products on the world’s stage.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

To explore the value in reminiscing about past festivals as a potential way of improving wellbeing in socially isolated times.

The paper uses previous research on reminiscence, nostalgia and wellbeing to underpin the analysis of self-recorded memory narratives. These were gathered from 13 pairs of festivalgoers during Covid-19 restrictions and included gathering their individual memories and their reminiscences together. The participant pairs were a mix of friends, family and couples who had visited festivals in the UK, Finland and Denmark.

Four key areas that emerged through the analysis were the emotions of nostalgia and anticipation, and the processes of reliving emotions and bonding through memories.

Future studies could take a longitudinal approach to see how memory sharing evolves and the impact of this on wellbeing. The authors also recommend undertaking similar studies in other cultural settings.

This study findings have implications for both post-festival marketing and for the further development of reminiscence therapy interventions.

The method provides a window into memory sharing that has been little used in previous studies. The narratives confirm the value in sharing memories and the positive impact this has on wellbeing. They also illustrate that this happens through positive forms of nostalgia that centre on gratitude and lead to hope and optimism. Anticipation, not emphasised in other studies, was also found to be important in wellbeing and was triggered through looking back at happier times.