Glenn Bowdin

There is increasing global interest in the requirements necessary to practice the complex and responsibility-laden business of event management as evidenced by the growth of the number of academic, credentialing, knowledge transfer, and qualification standards programs focusing on the field in place and in development around the world. Educators, regulators, associations, and practitioners are seeking to create and improve curriculums, reduce risk, employ best practices, and achieve recognition as a legitimate profession. This article presents an overview of the current status of the knowledge systems supporting the event management industry and offers a framework for an international event management body of knowledge (EMBOK) that may facilitate the ability to map, define, and align current event management standards consistent with the needs of a global event management environment.

This book has been dubbed 'the events management bible' and fosters an interactive learning experience amongst scholars of events management, tourism and hospitality.

A must-have introductory text of unrivalled coverage and depth focusing on events planning and management, the fourth edition of Events Management provides a complete A to Z of the principles and practices of planning, managing and staging events. The book offers a systematic guide to organising successful events, examining areas such as event design, logistics, marketing, human resource management, financial planning, risk management, impacts, evaluation and reporting. The fourth edition has been fully updated and revised to include content covering technology, including virtual and hybrid events, concepts such as social capital, soft power and events, social inclusion, equality, accessibility and diversity, and the latest industry reports, research and legal frameworks. The book is logically structured and features new case studies, showing real-life applications and highlighting issues with planning events of all types and scales in a range of geographical locations. This book has been dubbed ‘the events management bible’ and fosters an interactive learning experience amongst scholars of events management, tourism and hospitality.

In order to succeed in the current environment of increased competition and regulation, reduced profit margins and a more demanding clientele, event management companies must deliver a quality product/service in a cost-effective manner. To event management companies, effectively managed systems and procedures are essential as they define the operational quality and standards achieved. Quality costing, defined as the 'cost of ensuring and assuring quality as well as the loss incurred when quality is not achieved' (BSI ,1990, p. 3), enables managers to justify and control the quality management system in financial terms. This paper advances quality costing as a management tool for the event industry. Three approaches to quality costing are presented and discussed and a practical system to record and control quality costs for events developed. The paper concludes by discussing the potential implications of quality costing for the successful management of events.

Exploring the concepts involved in planning events, this study is designed to develop an understanding of the key issues which include: management, logistics, staging, marketing, promotion and post-event evaluation.

With the increasing demands of stakeholders and professional development in festival organisation, evaluation is becoming recognised as a valuable management tool in demonstrating success and achievement of objectives. However, to date, literature in this area has tended to focus on impacts, satisfaction and on how and why to conduct evaluation, with limited research or published examples covering the approaches taken by individual organisations. This paper explores festival evaluation practice by reviewing current literature and presenting the findings of an exploratory study into the approach taken for evaluation of the seven arts festivals in the United Kingdom. The results suggest that there is a relatively clear understanding of the principles of event evaluation and it forms an essential part of the event planning process. Evaluation is carried out at varying levels of advancement with a variety of methods used, though it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of the evaluations.

The book: * Introduces the concepts of special event planning and management * Discusses the key components for staging an event, and covers the whol;e process from creation to evaluation * Examines the event industry within its broader ...

It was Don Getz (2012) who first suggested the field of events management needed to move beyond operational concerns to the study of (his term) ‘planned events’, that began using the phrase “event studies”: developing a typology of events in the process. Significantly, what drives the conceptualisation of event for Getz is less an attempt to grasp what the term refers to and more a wish to ground a study of events that supports the dominant paradigmatic frame within which current events management operates. Despite his overview of the use of event in different fields of scholarship, he still locates event studies as a field of research with events management and tourism at its heart; commodifying event within what Bob Jessop (2010, see also Sum & Jessop 2015) refers to as the prevailing cultural political economy. Even Chris Rojek (2013) a recent critic of events management, does so without even attempting to say what event refers to.

This paper critically examines how future thinking is positioned in the mindset of event professionals through the lens of provocative far future scenarios. In debating these far future scenarios within a polylogue (multiple voices) framework, we explore how dianoetic (discursive reasoning) approaches can facilitate long-term ´civilisational´ thinking and capture stakeholder reactions and emotions to future event environments. As such, our study contributes comparative qualitative insights into how current and future industry professionals respond to the contradictions and complexities of event futures. Our findings have implications for industry resilience and strategic thinking at a time when Covid-19 pandemic recovery has coincided with other global economic challenges and unpredictable threats such as climate change. Our findings highlight the importance of developing effective tools to overcome emotional barriers to thinking about the future. They also reveal the importance of engaging a broad stakeholder demographic and learning from other sectors to diversify conversations about the future.

In this methodology research letter, we describe the development, piloting and large-scale trial of an experimental concurrent group discussion approach. Specifically, we detail how we used provocative 2050 scenarios to ‘open up’ future thinking, facilitate multiple polylogues and efficiently collect large sample qualitative data. The method was trialled with 120 business tourism professionals at the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) conference in Glasgow in 2023. We conclude by reflecting on our learning from the large-scale trial and consider how this method can be developed for other tourism research applications.

A reflective piece on how a small team of students and academics gained more awareness of their own sense of enterprise and creativity. The case study examines the phases and crisis points of the whole event process and identifies some of the key learning outcomes for all involved.

Excerpt: More than 1.3 million meetings were held in the UK in 2011 in more than 10,000 venues. Attendees spent just under £40 billion attending UK meetings, and most meetings took place in London, the South East and the West Midlands. After England, Scotland took the lead in hosting the largest number of meetings. Whilst large hotels hosted most meetings, unusual and unique venues proved popular for conference organisers, and small hotels more popular for incentive events. Corporate clients hosted the vast majority of events, with many (more than 60%) favouring smaller meetings of less than 100 people. Meeting organisers staged on average 147 events in the year and received £11 billion from hosting meetings in the UK and £1.4 billion from hosting meetings outside the UK.