Practitioner Lived Experience of Complex Stakeholder Management in Festivals and Events: A Phenomenological Approach

Abstract

The experiential nature of events is considered a central and foremost feature of event management (Getz, 2008). To address this requirement there have been calls for phenomenological approaches including hermeneutics to be embraced by the event research community (Crowther et al., 2015; Getz, 2007). However, such approaches are seen to be problematic as there is no established knowledge and tradition of phenomenology in the field of event management (Ziakas & Boukas, 2014). Indeed, analysis of event management literature has shown that qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups accounted for only
34% of publications (Crowther et al., 2015) and a mere 0.7% used phenomenology (Draper et al., 2018), and it has been considered essential to develop a phenomenological research agenda in event management to increase the research paradigms traditionally applied to the field (Ziakas & Boukas, 2014).