Managing Cultural Festivals

Tradition and Innovation in Europe

Elisa Salvador, Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen, Elisa Salvador, Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000562286
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book aims at renewing the attention on a niche field, Cultural Festivals, so important for valorizing cultural traditions and local heritage visibility as well as social well-being. Following the disruptive consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, this fragile sector deserves more attention from public authorities and stakeholders at national and European levels with a suitable and dedicated plan of recovery and valorization.

This book provides a comparative analysis of Cultural Festivals in Europe, taking insights from an international range of high-level scholarly contributors. Individual chapters highlight and analyse challenges around the organisation, management and economics of Cultural Festivals. As a whole, the book provides a comprehensive overview of scholarly research in this area, setting the scene for the future research agenda. Matters related to educational programs and new audience development, as well as challenges related to digitalization, are also included.

The book employs a tradition versus innovation lens to help readers account for the consequences of the digital revolution, new audience development and an educational agenda. The result is a book which will be valuable reading for researchers, academics and students in the fields of event and cultural management and beyond.

Chapters 4 and 9 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I Cultural Festivals Organization and ManagementBetween Tradition and Innovation

1The Tradition of Being InnovativeThe Case of the Venice Biennale and Its Venice International Film Festival

Viktoriya Pisotska, Kerem Gurses and Luca Giustiniano

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127185-3

Change and innovation constitute our stability and tradition.

(Interview, Director General of the Venice Biennale, 2019)

Introduction

Film Festivals play an important role in the global film industry (Rüling, 2009). Every year, more than 3,500 film festivals are held around the world and their number is constantly increasing. The birth of film festivals started as a European phenomenon in an effort to regenerate the post-war European economy and the growth thereof is often explained by the cities’ attempts to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive, increasingly global marketplace (Quinn, 2005). Despite film festivals’ proliferation, their significance has been largely overlooked (Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011) and their research is “still in its infant stage” (Rüling and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2010, p. 319).

Prior to 1932, the concept of film festivals did not exist (Cowie, 2018). That year reports the foundation of the oldest – and one of the most prestigious – film festivals in the world, the Venice International Film Festival (VIFF), later followed by the Moscow International Film Festival (1935) and Cannes (1939). The aim of the VIFF was to raise awareness and promote international cinema in all its forms as art, entertainment and as an industry in the spirit of freedom and dialogue.¹ Aesthetic experimentation, spirit of research and openness are just some of the fundamental values of the VIFF, reflecting the values of the Biennale² under which it operates. On the one hand, the Venice Biennale has become a recognisable cultural institution as a result of its innovative ideas and changes; on the other hand, it has managed to survive wars, protests and many external influences endangering both its stability and existence. This chapter aims to explore how one of the oldest and most innovative cultural institutions and its VIFF deal with the competing demands of innovation and tradition.

The Venice Biennale is a public, cultural institution governed by private law which is allowed to operate according to entrepreneurial principles. Operating at the interface between what is “temporary” and what is “permanent” does, however, lead to unavoidable tensions, the management of which is still under-researched (Bakker et al., 2016; DeFilippi and Sydow, 2016; Stjerne and Svejenova, 2016). Recently, several scholars (e.g., Erdogan, Rondi and De Massis, 2020; Sasaki et al., 2020) have argued that organisational identity and founders’ imprinting values can influence the organisational approach to innovation and tradition. The chapter therefore addresses the following question:

RQ1: How do cultural festivals and their parent cultural institutions deal with the tension between tradition and innovation and what is the role of organisational identity in managing this tension?

Furthermore, in addition to how the VIFF deals with the tension between tradition and innovation, other tensions may arise in a cultural festival embedded in a more permanent flow of organising. Henceforth, we ask:

RQ2: What other tensions can potentially arise in a cultural festival embedded in a more permanent parent institution?

Research methods

The chapter adopts an exploratory case study approach (Yin, 2015), examining the VIFF – an annual event in the cinema sector embedded in the permanent organisation of the Venice Biennale. The VIFF can be considered an extreme case of outstanding success: it is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the most prestigious in the arena of international film festivals. The festival has undergone many adversities and hardships throughout its existence; nevertheless, it has been successful in managing various competing demands, innovation and tradition included. The VIFF (i.e., the temporary part) also constitutes a perfect setting as it facilitates the examination of the tensions arising in the interplay with the Biennale Foundation (i.e., the permanent part).

Data collection

In our methodological framework, we employed: (i) participant observation of the 76th edition of the VIFF, including many informal conversations with Biennale employees and photo-ethnographic observation; (ii) several semi-structured interviews with lead organisational members (i.e., Director General, Deputy Director) and an in-depth narrative interview with the President of the Biennale and (iii) archival sources such as corporate documents, newsletters and media coverage. Different data sources contributed to the triangulation of our results and enhanced the internal validity of our book chapter.

Theoretical background

Nature of film festivals

Film festivals have been examined from a micro-social perspective in relation to individual decision-making, interactional dynamics and how these generate value and creative judgements (Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011; Jones and Maoret, 2018); from a macro perspective, festivals’ institutional role in creative fields remains a topic of interest (Schüssler, Rüling and Wittneben, 2014; Schüßler and Sydow, 2015).

From an institutional standpoint, film festivals constitute repetitive field-configuring and maintaining events. As such, they “set standards, define categories, contribute to the ongoing reassessment of creative activities” (Delacour and Leca, 2011) and shape the development of professions, technologies, markets and industries (Lampel and Meyer, 2008; Rüling, 2009; Rüling and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2010).

Film festivals are temporary, spatially and socially bounded organisations, relying upon mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) decides the criteria upon which to grant its accreditation to international film festivals seen as events bringing together films of the world and taking place over a limited period of time in a specific city (Mezias et al., 2011).

Film festivals are not just events, or a nexus of multiple events (Rüling and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2010), but they can be considered as projects, being “organized at a specific place for a specific period of time and then replicated in subsequent editions over time” (Uriarte et al., 2019, p. 319).

Film festivals can also fit the notion of project networks to some extent. DeFillippi and Sydow (2016) define project networks as a set of relationships, where: (1) no single actor may act as a legitimate authority for the network as a whole; (2) no definite criteria by which the boundary of the network may be identified and controlled and (3) there are temporarily limited and dynamically changing projects. In fact, film project membership is dynamic and often embedded in a more durable network of relations between permanent organisations and institutions. In addition, no film project is an island; its management is influenced by the shadow of past projects, in addition to future project opportunities (Engwall, 2003). The literature reflects contrasting views about the existence of a single legitimate authority in film festivals. Whereas Delacour and Leca (2011) argue that creative fields are characterised by a structure of power in which dominant actors impose, structure and stabilise their visions in the fields, both Rüling and Strandgaard Pedersen (2010) and Peranson (2008) claim the dependence of film festivals on multiple stakeholders’ relations and different interest groups. In the context of the Venice Biennale, there is a central permanent organisation represented by the Foundation of the Biennale.

Previous research has investigated the long-established association between cities and cultural festivals (Quinn, 2005; Ooi and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2010), the latter contributing to local development by generating income, supporting existing and nascent businesses (Mitchell and Wall, 1986; O’Sullivan and Jackson, 2002), attracting tourists and improving the host city’s image (Getz, 1991, 2008; Grappi and Montanari, 2011). Acknowledging the societal and economic importance of festivals and following the definition proposed by Salvador and Strandgaard Pedersen (2020, p. 1), which is itself based on Allix’s (1922) definition of fairs, a film festival is

a temporary township, superimposed at intervals upon a permanent place (town or city), which in important, though not regularly defined, social and symbolic ways, contributes to the local or global needs of a particular entity (e.g., industry, city, region, nation) and its group of members.

This book chapter explores the case of VIFF, a temporary festival organisation, which is embedded in the permanent Biennale Foundation, a context which remains scarcely researched (Uriarte et al., 2019).

Innovation and tradition

The embeddedness of temporary systems in more permanent ones leads to the emergence of “tensions, contradictions, synergies” such as stability and change, or tradition and innovation (Bakker et al., 2016; DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016), intensified by multiple institutional logics, such as art and commerce (Rüling and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2010; Uriarte et al., 2019).

Alternatively, the tension between tradition and innovation can be considered tension between stability and change (e.g., Erdogan, Rondi and De Massis, 2020; Suddaby and Jaskiewicz, 2020). If, on the one hand, tradition requires stability, on the other hand innovation requires change. The existing literature suggests that FCEs, film festivals included, are catalysts of institutional and organisational changes (Anand and Watson, 2004; Wilshusen and MacDonald, 2017). However, although traditions often appear to be old and invariant, they can be quite recent and invented in response to current circumstances (Hobsbawm and Range, 1983). In other words, traditions also have an inherently dynamic nature, an aspect that will be subsequently explored. Assuming that tradition is related to stability, several scholars have suggested that change is ontologically inseparable from the concept of stability, meaning it is impossible to describe one without the other (Schad et al., 2016). Scholars adhering to duality theories highlight the relationship between stability and change rather than stressing their contradictions, defining them as self-enabling and necessary for organisations to function effectively (e.g., Farjoun, 2010).

Other studies (e.g., Vrontis, Bresciani and Giacosa, 2016; Erdogan, Rondi and De Massis, 2020) have stressed the importance of both change and stability, or innovation and tradition, in achieving competitive advantages and organisational survival. For instance, Vrontis, Bresciani and Giacosa (2016), by exploring the case of an Italian family wine business, highlight the role of the territory in combining innovation and tradition and, therefore, achieve and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Furthermore, Erdogan, Rondi and De Massis (2020) stress the role of imprinting by previous generations in influencing a company’s approach to tradition and innovation. The authors propose four strategies to manage the tradition and innovation paradox in family firms: (1) protecting the heritage – by combining a segregation approach to innovation (i.e., a separation between iconic products and new products and processes) with a preservation approach to tradition (i.e., a continuous commitment to the founder’s values, beliefs and craftsmanship); (2) maintaining the essence – by combining an integration approach to innovation (i.e., a reinterpretation of traditional products) and a preservation approach to tradition; (3) restoring the legacy – by blending an integration approach to innovation and the revival approach to tradition (i.e., when some traditional elements have faded over time and there is regret about the loss) and (4) embracing nostalgia – by combining a segregation approach to innovation with a revival approach to tradition. Thus, Erdogan, Rondi and De Massis (2020) propose the construction of temporal symbiosis to indicate an organisation’s capability to simultaneously adopt retrospective and prospective approaches to using its resources to concurrently achieve tradition and innovation.

The concept of traditions has recently reappeared in research concerning organisational identity (Ravasi and Schult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of appendices
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Cultural Festivals – Quos Vadis in Research and Practice
• Introduction: Managing Cultural Festivals: Context, Challenges and New Avenues of Research
• Part I Cultural Festivals Organization and Management: Between Tradition and Innovation
• Part II Challenges of Cultural Festivals in the Digital Age
• Part III Value and Impacts of Cultural Festivals at Local and Regional Level
• Index