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Over the past two decades, wedding tourism has been booming. Despite this, very little research has investigated this phenomenon. This chapter discusses the findings of 15 in-depth interviews with Italian wedding planners, which were carried out to analyse their views on what a destination wedding is, and how frequently they are able to influence the final choice of a site. Further, it discusses four case studies of the most important Italian wedding destinations in order to analyse their offer and related marketing strategy. Findings revealed that wedding destinations can be considered as a complex cluster of interrelated stakeholders; hence, a high degree of coordination and cooperation is needed for destination competitiveness. Further, results suggest that wedding destinations are currently opting for a product/service-oriented strategy with very little attention to a more appropriate experiential and emotional approach.

The existence of a wedding organizer plays an essential role in realizing the dream wedding of the bride and groom and the progression of a family-centred structure. The wedding organizer industry is one of the business sectors that experienced a significant impact during the COVID-19 pandemic due to various policies restricting mobility and interaction. This study aims to answer research questions: What challenges are experienced by wedding organizers in the context of COVID-19? What factors drive entrepreneurial resilience for family business continuity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic?

This study uses a qualitative research design through semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight wedding organizers in Indonesia with questions centred around the context of the family in the event.

This study found several challenges faced by wedding organizers, including personal barriers and environmental challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The four drivers of entrepreneurial resilience of wedding organizers in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis include entrepreneurial motivations, entrepreneurial characteristics, firm strategies, and environmental support. These factors create a positive interaction effect for the continuity of the wedding event organizers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing valuable insights into the broader entrepreneurial resilience issue and offering practical recommendations for wedding organizers and other entrepreneurs facing similar challenges. This study has both academic and practical implications in providing event management guidance and future avenues of research in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to identify push and pull factors that motivate decision makers to choose wedding banquet venues, and to explore the relationships between the motivational factors and demographic information.

The initial questionnaire was pre-tested involving a sample of six graduate students in a hospitality management program of a major university in the Midwestern USA. The wordings were changed based on their feedback. The final survey was consisted of three sections: push motivations, pull motivations, and demographic information. In the first section, 13 push motivation statements were employed to investigate decision makers' reasons for selecting a wedding banquet venue.

The four push factors identified included “seeking relaxation and knowledge,” “fulfilling prestige,” “escaping from daily routine,” and “social networking.” The six pull factors were composed of “budget,” “atmosphere,” “facilities,” “wedding services,” “transportation,” and “service and quality.”

The study helps event industry practitioners understand consumers’ motivations of choosing wedding venues and predict consumers’ behavior. It further suggests marketing strategies to effectively communicate with existing and potential consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of wedding-related consumption of urban families in China during the past 50 years.

This study used qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect and analyse data from 157 families in China. Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys.

The findings are as follows: average wedding expenses per family have increased, mainly as a result of the substantial growth of indirect wedding costs; the percentage of total wedding expenses represented by direct costs pertaining to the ritual is trending downwards; the percentage of total wedding expenses borne by the groom’s family is much higher than that borne by the bride’s family, and the gap is enlarging; the proportion of newlyweds living with parents was more than 50 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, decreased to 10 per cent in the 1990s and began slightly increasing again after 2000.

The authors used signal investment theory to explain the fact that the groom’s family bears more of the wedding expenses than the bride’s family does, but more evidences are needed to verify the theory.

This study contributes to the understanding of evolution of wedding consumption of urban families in China, as well as how social and economic factors influence wedding consumptions in different ages, an area with limited previous research. The authors also propose signal investment theory as an alternative explanation to current wedding consumption theories to justify the phenomenon.

This paper aims to analyze documentary planning tools for an everyday life project, the wedding, to study how “document work” is constructed in this setting.

Using Law and Lynch's study of birdwatching guides for novices as a framework, nine commercially‐available wedding planning guides targeted toward the primary planner, almost universally the bride, were analyzed.

As Law and Lynch found, part of a novice's apprenticeship requires learning how to “see” in ways that are socially organized in and through texts. The paper shows how characteristics of birdwatching guides (naturalistic accountability, a picture theory of representation, and the strategic use of texts) are also evident in wedding planners, and how the very features that make these guides usable also occasion troubles for their users. Wedding planning guides treat the bride as a novice and instruct her in seeing wedding‐related tasks and times as amenable to management. However, planning a wedding requires multiple tasks and times that may be intertwined in ways that make both their representation and their execution highly complex.

The need for both temporal and thematic access highlights more general problems of knowledge organization in presenting a complex planning project in a linear and paper format.

As workplace principles of time and project management are increasingly applied to everyday life, this paper provides a needed case study of the ways that everyday recordkeeping contributes to the novice bride's gendered apprenticeship and embeds her work within broader organizational and ideological systems.

This paper aims to demonstrate deep gaze using a Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony as an example. Some long-term tourists develop an intimate understanding of the host country’s culture by gaining access to authentic experiences typically limited to the locals. These native visitors experience a deep gaze.

Combing subjective personal introspection (SPI) and confirmatory personal introspection (CPI), the author’s 76 wedding photographs are examined critically.

Results demonstrate how a native visitor uses SPI and CPI analyses of native gaze. While the Shinto wedding ceremony’s authenticity mixes traditional and evolutionary elements, the ceremony is best viewed as a Gestalt experience. The evidence suggests authenticity need not have deep roots in the culture.

The findings serve as only one configuration of many possible gazes. Tourist Gaze 4.0 is a set of complex antecedent conditions and multiple configurations.

Using photographs taken by native family members, this paper demonstrates how SPI and CPI identify deep gaze through a different lens.

This chapter builds on Georges Bataille’s analysis of waste as a constitutive element of social life. We argue that two separate but intertwined dimensions included in the idea of waste, waste as sacrifice and waste as competition, can enhance our understanding of the role of the lavish wedding in contemporary consumer society. We suggest four categories of waste as constitutive of the meanings of the wedding universe: pure waste, lavish waste, simulated waste and anti-waste.

We use a combination of netnography and long interviews to explore notions of waste in Danish weddings. The netnography was conducted in a Danish wedding forum, where informants for the long interviews were also recruited among the members.

We find that the four dimensions of waste suggested in our theorization are indeed found in the way consumers plan and enact their weddings. In particular, the notion of sacrificial expenditure – what we call “pure waste” in our context – is indeed present in contemporary weddings.

This research is undertaken in a Danish context, which represents a particular historical and cultural framing of the wedding ceremony and its types of expenditure. We encourage research in other cultural contexts to elaborate on our findings.

Without denying the fundamental symbolic character of consumption activities, we argue that, more generally, a Bataillean perspective on consumption and waste can further our understanding of the limits of the symbolic character in consumer research, since it underlines the more corporeal experience of certain consumption rituals.

Using this case, the students will be able to: understand the ethical issues such as “Management by Trust”, and having specific “Code of Conducts” in an organization; analyse the unethical behaviour that can occur inside the organization based on ethical theories such as egoism, utilitarian, deontology and virtue theory; discuss elements that promote fraudulent behaviour using the fraud triangle framework; explain how internal control contributes in deterring fraudulent employee behaviour; and analyse strategic approach to handle employee misconduct to reduce the risk of fraud.

The owner of Fortune Weddings, Anis, realized that his business was not as profitable as it used to be in the early years. He was suspicious of his employee Samera, for the sudden change of her luxurious lifestyle, but he did not inquire her as she was a hard working employee and customers were fond of her friendly attitude. Nissa, the wife of Anis, received message from customer to confirm the payment, but when she checked the bank account, the money was not there. Further investigation by Nissa revealed that it was Samera who was stealing money from the company. She used to give her personal bank account to customers to transfer their payment. Anis must decide the appropriate course of action to resolve the issues as soon as possible. Failing to do so will incur more incidences of stealing.

The intended audience for this case study are both undergraduate (BBA) and postgraduate students (MBA, MSc) who are taking the Business Ethics course.

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CSS 7: Management science.

When celebrating with newly-weds on their wedding day, many would imagine the best way to enjoy the day at its best would be to invite and include all members of the family, including the youngest. However, unlike adult guests who will usually happily enjoy the food and drink offered alongside any entertainment, children can be trickier to keep safe and happy all day long as their boredom threshold may well be lower than their adult counterparts and their needs more complex. There has long been a difficult debate over whether children bring unwanted stress to wedding plans or actually enhance the fun and celebration wished for. This chapter discusses all sides of an emotive argument of whether children should be invited to weddings and wedding receptions and how we might ensure their presence is enjoyable for all including the young person themselves.

Research on same-sex marriage has suggested that the transition to marriage is a symbolically meaningful experience that significantly changes sexual minority lives. This chapter draws upon semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 28 married gay men and lesbians to examine how the life course trajectories they took en route to marriage shaped their experiences transitioning to marriage. A description of the short and direct and long and winding trajectories to marriage is provided. Subsequently, it is demonstrated that, although those who took the former report experiences much like those documented by research thus far, those who took the latter had smaller wedding ceremonies to which they attach relatively little meaning, and they report that getting married has done little to change their family relationships. These findings paint a more nuanced picture of the transition to same-sex marriage than has been documented to-date, and point to important directions for future research.