ALL THE FUN OF THE FESTIVAL

Featuring Professor Martin Parker, WBS and Dr Eric Jensen, Department of Sociology

Music festivals bring their own specific organisational challenges. As ‘pop up’ events they require very different planning and structures from static businesses. Two Warwick academics have looked at the festival from different viewpoints – Professor Martin Parker from the perspective of organisation studies and Dr Eric Jensen from the transient and voluntary labour force.

Glastonbury, V, Leeds, Glyndebourne – when the sun comes out so do the music festivals. Attending a rock festival is a rite of passage for teenagers and, with aural programmes to suit all ages, there’s a summer festival for every taste.

Professor Martin Parker from Warwick Business School studies the variety of ways human beings come together in order to make and do things. As he says, “humans are good at putting together various types of organisations”. Up to a certain point in history humans were nomadic and spent a fairly short period of time in each place they frequented. With the advent of farming so became the beginnings of formal organisation. The agricultural state became the city state with buildings for different purposes. The market, the town hall and so on all had a specific place and existed in a spatially-stable form.

The exception was the nomadic organisations that continued to persist, usually in the field of entertainment. From travelling festivals to small troupes these organisational forms remained untethered. In the nineteenth century they became larger and more complex. Complicated technologies began to be transported by means of the train. Travelling circuses could be unfolded for an evening, host ten thousand people, then be dismantled and transported again overnight.

The circus provides a model for thinking about contemporary music festival. Nearly every summer weekend in the UK a music festival is erected with all its services of a stage, lighting, toilets, seating and catering facilities and so on, but the organisers have to be capable of taking it all back down in a short space of time.

According to Prof Parker, festivals face three main organisational challenges:

• Space - They literally move though spaces and have to have the correct transport arrangements in place.
• Time - The coordination required for festivals is quite difficult – every piece of equipment and performer has to be in the right place at the right time for the event to take place.
• People - A whole variety of occupations are represented at a festival, from singers and musicians to security guards and admin staff. There will be a wide variety of contracts and payroll systems to deal with.

It’s most likely that the company providing the portaloos at Glastonbury will also supply other festivals, as will the security guard employment agencies and the fast food caterers. Each business will be a specialist in its (temporary) field. Festivals then, according to Prof Parker, “are not so much one organisation but a coalition of smaller ones that continue disassembling and reassembling themselves”.

Another thing music festivals have in common is flexible labour. The organisational flexibility relies on being able to attract a reservoir of labour. Dr Eric Jensen in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick has researched festivals in conjunction with Nicola Buckley at the University of Cambridge. Their research for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) “showed that the increasing popularity of festivals around Britain is only possible with the help of an army of willing, but unpaid university student volunteers”.

A recurring theme from the research, voiced by both organisers and student volunteers, is that one of the advantages of student volunteers is they are easier and less intimidating for some festival visitors to approach. Visitors found their enthusiasm and knowledge particularly valuable. Organisers, whilst mainly positive, expressed that volunteers’ level of public responsibility and dedication were sometimes below expectations. Some organisers needed to provide basic training to their volunteers.

Despite not being paid, 92 per cent of students surveyed say that they would volunteer again. Why? Dr Eric Jensen points out training opportunities can be valuable for students’ future careers. “It is important for both universities and funding bodies to understand that the provision of volunteering opportunities within festivals is resource-intensive. Despite how it might seem, student volunteers are not free labour. If they are to be used most effectively staff time, training and resources are required and these activities require funding and careful planning and attention.” There’s also of course the attraction of seeing the music for free.

Yet, says Prof Parker, there is another element to the equation – the myth and romance of the mobile organisation. There is, he says, something about the mobile festival that has a particular kind of romance and danger associated with it. The big name acts are people in a different world from us. The whole festival experience is like a carnival, being a place almost out of time and space. All sorts of communal behaviour is allowed that wouldn’t occur in the everyday humdrum of life. Once the festival is over the venue is folded away and disappears as if it, and the experience, never existed, rather like a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Martin Parker is Professor of Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School. He joined Warwick in 2010 after working at Staffordshire, Keele and Leicester universities. His training is mostly in sociology, with some anthropology and cultural studies, and he has a particular interest in various meanings of the word 'culture'. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Organization.

Dr Eric Jensen teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He has two main research specialisms: public engagement with science; and science in the media. His research on the impacts of public engagement with science for visitors and audiences cuts across a wide range of settings, from zoos to museums to festivals. His research on science in the media has included a detailed investigation of coverage of the issue of therapeutic cloning in the US and UK.

By Penelope Jenkins