Event Power

How Global Events Manage and Manipulate

Chris Rojek, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780857025180, 9780857025173
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Rojek's argument is a psychological one, although his message is political: global events build on people's needs to feel empowered and jointly engaged in the pursuit of a higher purpose; they allow a break from daily routines, provide an illusion of intimacy and social membership, and create a sense of self-validation and personal gratification. In short, participation in such events makes us feel good.

At the same time, the real effect of global events seems to be the maintenance of global inequality and social injustice, as well as huge profits for the organizations involved in planning, commercializing and securing these happenings. In sketching out this palliative function of global events from the perspective of people's needs on the one hand, and unveiling their puppet masters backstage on the other, Rojek's book presents a compelling account of the role of organized events in modern society."
- Organization Studies

Events dominate our screens, our lives, and increasingly global geopolitics. Analysis of events and their management has remained rooted in leisure and management studies - until now. This break-through book provides an introduction to event management, while also situating events in questions of power and social control.

Rojek powerfully argues that events are essential elements in corporate-state partnerships of ?invisible government? that have revived the romance of charity as to form illusory communities, while cloaking power imbalances and social inequalities. Events are moving politics from the old idea of ?the personal is political? to the new, more seductive notion that ?representation is resistance?. Wielding rich case studies from the World Cup and the Olympics to Live Aid, Burning Man and Mardi Gras, Rojek presents a dazzlingly original account of communication power, social ordering and control. It is essential reading in media & communication studies and across the social sciences.

1

WHAT IS EVENT MANAGEMENT?

Event management refers to the targeting and managing of designed public events geared to invest emotional energies and economic resources to selected goals. Events are a branch of the hospitality, leisure and tourism industries. The field they address concerns aggregate issues known in the trade as Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE). The foremost examples of global events are single-issue international charity-building and consciousness-raising events such as Live Aid (1985), Sport Aid (1986), the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Concert, aka ‘Freedomfest’ (1988), the Indian Ocean Tsunami Relief Concert (2005), Live 8 (2005), Live Earth (2007), the Haiti Relief Concert (2010); and global cyclical events like the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics, Oktoberfests, Burning Man City, annual international literature, film and drama festivals, trade expositions, Carnival, Mardi Gras and heritage festivals.

At the local and national levels, events are also commonplace in the form of neighbourhood festivals, corporate meetings involving the whole workforce, management awaydays, horticultural shows, literary, comedy and film festivals, livestock shows and flower festivals. Event management therefore covers a large territory encompassing the general production, design, publicity and management of events (Getz, 2012).

However, as will become apparent in the course of this study, the scale and variety of events render blanket propositions pointless. In this book the foremost emphasis is upon the analysis of global events. While some of the points made in relation to event planning, strategy and consciousness apply to non-global events, it would be wrong to infer that differences of scale, organisation and level of impact can be ignored. There is all the difference imaginable between organising a jumble sale to save the parish youth club and launching an international programme of attractions, with multinational sponsors, telecast live in support of emergency relief or global consciousness raising.

The focus upon global events in this book reflects the extraordinary profile that they have attained in tackling questions of want, promoting narratives of belonging and imprinting subjective psychology with a sense of shared purpose. They are a highly visible branch of what Ulrich Beck (1992) calls ‘sub-politics’, meaning the social interests and movements that are located outside the field of organised party politics and pressure group lobbying. For large numbers of the population the subsidiary importance implied in the term ‘sub-politics’ is redundant. Personal responses to humanitarian events, international sporting competitions and counter-cultural festivals, like the annual Burning Man event in Nevada, have emerged as one of the most revealing life-scales measuring personal character and integrity. They allow us to weigh both the validity of a cause and the worth of a person.

Indeed, there is a case that it is most useful to think of them as components of lifestyle architecture through which we now build competent, relevant, credible images of ourselves. Lifestyle architecture is critical in the question of holding a tenable self-image, and pivotal in portraying ourselves as competent, credible actors in social networks.¹ Not least, because to show support for a cause or identify unimpeachably with corporate or national values affords a short cut to recognition, acceptance and impact. Demonstrating support for an event ‘says it all’ about who you are and what you aspire to be.

At the social rather than psychological level, events are part of the urge to interrogate and utilise space and time to define occasions as special and worthy of commemoration. As such, they are frequently taken to be a sign of the health of the community and the vitality of ethics of responsibility. However, the expansion and size of some global events raise separate concerns about issues of social ordering, performative labour, task-centred regulation, manipulation and communication power. Events are powerful, short-hand mechanisms of social theming. They confer a readily comprehensible brand and glamour upon event management, organisation and participation.

Politicisation has emerged as a keynote theme in the contemporary analysis of events. In other words, event consolidation and the responses to events have become important proof of personal worth and social membership. Global events, which are also known as mega-events (Roche, 2000, 2002), involve the building of sports stadiums, hotels, blasting highways and constructing slip roads that often require the eviction of inner-city populations and the destruction of areas of outstanding natural beauty. The FIFA World Cup in South Africa (2010), the Beijing Olympics (2008) and, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 5, the Vancouver Winter Olympics (2010), produced widespread evictions and protest.

Some events celebrate lifestyles and beliefs that have been traditionally marginalised or stereotyped in negative ways. For example, the annual Gay and Lesbian Sydney Mardi Gras originated as a political protest in 1978. It was designed as the legitimate, transitory occupation of inner-city space to celebrate both the validity of nonconformist sexual values and to air the values of the counter-culture against the prejudice and narrowness of the heterosexual establishment (Forsyth, 2001). The event is telecast globally and draws a network public of 300,000. Less well reported is the continuing undercurrent of heterosexual resentment at the temporary annexation of urban space for the celebration of nonconformist sexual values. On closer inspection, events which are portrayed by the mainstream media as enhancing social integration often carry an undertow of social tension and spatial resistance (Mason and Lo, 2009: 97). There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that this undertow was a significant factor in the decision to drop the ‘Gay and Lesbian’ prefix and redefine the event as the Sydney Mardi Gras dedicated to the new event slogan of ‘the freedom to be’ (Munro, 2011).

As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 9 when we consider the question of event appropriation, the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, which has grown into one of the world’s foremost hallmark events, has generated controversy from activists who claim that it has been cut adrift from its roots. The Brazilian tourist industry and government present the Carnival as the distillation of national identity and a positive image of Brazilian miscegenation. However, the lower income levels of the black population, whose traditions are associated with inventing the samba form of dance and exhibition upon which the Rio Carnival is based, now find themselves priced out of full participation (Sheriff, 1999).

Because drama, theatre and melodrama are integral to the event form, events illustrate in unusually graphic ways how the display of fellowship inadvertently produces conflict and how messages of global unity are exposed as media gloss. In modern cultural settings where a person’s connection with others is often fragile and provisional, events exhibit unity and solidarity. By validating the self, the ideology of emotionalism that is central in event planning and management conjures up a form of emulsified spirituality that makes us feel personally affirmed and relevant. By being recognised as a small but necessary cog in a wheel at the company general meeting or donating $50 to feed Africa during a concert relief telethon, we publicly exhibit social credibility and self-worth.

The therapeutic aspect of event participation is a fundamental reason for the vast expansion in event visibility over the last three decades. Events provide a forum for public recognition and personal confirmation. People nail their colours to the mast, not merely by supporting a good cause, but being seen to do so. Increasingly, this visual dimension requires a record in the form of an image captured on a mobile phone, SLR camera, iPad, lap-top or video recorder. Psychologically speaking, global events allow the individual to briefly enter into the romance of charity while submitting, in the rest of life, to the dominant, implacable logic required by acquisitive, divisive political economy.

In these opening pages another aspect of event culture must be remarked upon, not least because it appears to have gone unnoticed in the professional event management literature.² Events provide a compelling material analogue for the peer-to-peer, open-sourcing and advance of creative commons that has become such an exciting and prominent feature of the digital economy. The event is the material embodiment of new forms of cooperative labour, social recognition and social networking that are now commonplace on the internet (Baym and Burnett, 2009; Turner, 2009: 82–3). Like the net, events seem to represent people power. This carries unmistakable anti-corporatist, anti-government and anti-consumerist overtones. Cooperative labour, volunteering, social recognition and social networking through the digital economy are popularly represented as a ‘break’ from traditional modes of production and associated systems of politics. Similarly, events are often portrayed as part of the new politics, unlocking the power of the people in the digital age.

The Importance of Performative Labour

The concept of performative labour is especially important in understanding event management and event consciousness. It is widely used in studies of the workplace, especially those relating to the hospitality and tourist industries (Crang, 1994; Edensor, 2001; Hochschild, 1983). Nonetheless, while these studies go a long way to clarifying the concept, they omit to do justice to its importance by confining it to the shallow orbit of the work setting. For example, Alan Bryman (2004: 103) defines performative labour as ‘the rendering of work by managements and employees alike as akin to a theatrical performance in which the workplace is construed as similar to a stage’. In a book of many insights, he applies the concept specifically to the Disney theme park industry where Disney personnel use surprisingly tightly formulated and well-honed ‘people skills’ (rather than old-fashioned empathy, hospitality and spontaneity) to regulate crowd behaviour. As Bryman (2004) and other commentators make abundantly clear, the concept of performative labour has become pivotal in the sociology of Western employment market economies because of the growth of the service sector. Blyton and Jenkins (2007) calculate that seven out of ten workers in the advanced economies of the West are now employed in service work. This work is intimately connected with performative labour since it is based on communication, knowledge, information and broader ‘people skills’.

However, central to the meaning of performative labour is the idea that communication, knowledge and information are integral to all forms of human interaction. In the digital economy, where data relating to personal life enhancement and modes of people skills are ubiquitous through television, the internet and the media, access to performative labour resources is continuously available. These resources are vital, not only in landing and keeping a job, but in developing effective relations with your partner, your parents, your children, your next door neighbour and so on. The internet, the iPad and mobile phone are now foundries of performative labour training which are of equivalent importance to schooling and the workplace.

In this study I want to expand the concept of performative labour from the workplace setting to apply it to a central means of status differentiation and social impact in popular culture.³ In doing so, I draw to some extent on the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who deploys the concept of performativity in explaining how social identities and practices are moulded and disciplined. Butler’s work chiefly addresses the relationship between performativity and gendered power differences. Concretely, it focuses upon how female embodiment and character are coerced to assume specific values privileged by patriarchy. While Butler’s work is a useful resource, the emphasis she places upon the relationship between performance and gender is too restrictive. I submit that performative labour is now so generalised in society that it is essential for understanding all forms of social interaction. For a multiplicity of reasons, personal life has become increasingly preoccupied with standing out from the crowd and making social impact.⁴ We not only desire to believe that we are different, we need to register social impact as a mark of personal validation. Important questions of the meaning of personal authenticity and trust follow from this, but, for reasons of space, for the most part, they will be treated as separate from the core considerations in this book (but see Bauman, 2000; Sennett, 2003).

This way of thinking about the growing importance of social impact has been found useful in a number of fields that have nothing to do with event management. To take a dramatic example, the sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer (2003) has argued that the foundational element in terrorism is what he calls ‘performance violence’. A conscious part of planning and executing a terrorist incident is the use of extreme violence to register maximum impact upon social consciousness. Personal validation does not lie first and foremost in the violent act, rather it resides in the incident being recognised as ‘mind numbing’, ‘mesmerising’ political theatre for an audience. The network public in question is of course connected to each other and to the incident through the global communication network. The camera has become fundamental in weighing up the social worth of an action. Just as extensive TV coverage ‘validates’ a suicide bomber, a kiss at a concert for emergency relief has more personal meaning if it is filmed.

In part, my interest in expanding the concept of performative labour goes back to the work on ‘performative utterances’ by the late J.L. Austin. For Austin (1962) when words are articulated in appropriate contexts they have the power of enforcement. For example, when an employer makes an offer of employment in the workplace it has an effect. It changes your identity. You cease to become an applicant for the post. You become an employee and generally, you perform the role that you have obtained through the job selection process. In this sense talk is action.⁵

In the present study the term performative labour will be applied to forms of behaviour designed to exhibit integrity, compassion, solidarity, competence, credibility, relevance and other types of status differentiation and social impact. As such, I depart from Austin in as much as I do not restrict the concept of performative utterances to speech acts. A much broader notion of social linguistics informs what I understand by performative labour. To be sure, this includes speech, but it also encompasses dress, grooming, manners, attitudes, values, politics, brinkmanship, flirting and other techniques of impression management.

Further, I maintain that performative utterances are primarily motivated by the object of building and managing confidence and achieving social impact in interpersonal relationships. No relationship between brokering confidence and being honest is assumed. Performative utterances are designed to be noticed and build trust. They are not necessarily related to virtue or sincerity. The purpose of these various techniques is to acquire recognition as a person of ‘the right sort’, ‘good character’, ‘appealing’, ‘sexy’ or ‘sound’.

Because social impact depends so much upon being in the know and looking right, according to the mores of the peer groups to which one is attached, performative labour is now a perpetual, seven days a week undertaking. The articulation of choices about matters like diet, transportation, clothing, posture, car ownership, attitudes to sexism, racism, gainful employment, terrorism, animal rights, climate change, etc., are designed and exchanged as utterances that express wants of personal impact. Performative labour is the visual and linguistic means through which people convey what they take to be, or wish to be seen as, the mark of their inner personalities.

That theatre is inherent in performative labour has long been recognised by sociologists. Although the concept predated the work of Erving Goffman, his (1961, 1963) extensive writings on dramaturgy and the presentation of the self make transparent use of the concepts of performance, gaining advantage and making social impact. From Goffman we acquire the idea that the self is not bounded by subjectivity. Rather it is enmeshed with complex and multi-layered codes and symbolic networks of affirmation, solidarity and differentiation. These codes are much extended and additionally nuanced in the digital age where personal scripts, forms of grooming and impact strategies owe as much to para-social relations developed through television and web as primary relations (Horton and Wohl, 1956).⁶ Even participation abounds in rich ethnographic material that exhibits scripts for emoting in public, acknowledging solidarity and engineering performance to achieve personal impact.

Essential to my use of the concept of performative labour then is the notion of theatre. That is, I do not hold that it is necessary for people to believe in the values and attitudes that they articulate. Rather I see the articulation of these matters as what might be called cultural chips exchanged in the roulette wheel of social encounters with the end in mind of making a notable and, usually, positive impression. Social impact is the name of the game (Rojek, 2010, 2012).

The same rule of thumb applies to event culture. On one level, the disinterest, social inclusiveness and concern for suffering and corporate solidarity expressed in events are genuine responses to issues and emergencies. I don’t wish to be understood as proposing that events do not enhance social consciousness or raise funds. Nor are they simply exercises in unrealistic pedagogy and wishful forms of cultural litera...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: The goodwill newsletter
• 1 What is event management?
• 2 What are the main types of event?
• 3 Why is ‘moral regulation’ relevant?
• 4 How is event cognition formulated?
• 5 How are global events organised?
• 6 What do cyclical events do?
• 7 Why are we drawn to events?
• 8 What is event consciousness?
• 9 What do single-issue events do?
• 10 Why are events so emotional?
• 11 What is event appropriation?
• 12 Does event management have a future?
• References
• Author index
• Subject index