ABSTRACT
Events have been heralded as an important tool capable of both promoting cities and reinforcing place-promotion strategies. In particular, events that are primarily designed to attract new visitor groups and high-profile media coverage, especially major sporting occasions such as the Olympic Games, are much coveted by destinations. The Olympic Games (both summer and winter) have long been seen as an international category of mega events designed to attract distinct visitor groups, as Chapter 4 by Weed and Chapter 7 by Gammon in this book have demonstrated. Yet the real scale of events at an individual country level and the activity associated with leisure and business travel often remains a neglected area, poorly understood in terms of its scale and volume. A study by the Business Visits and Events Partnership (2010) identified the different sectors comprising the events industry in the UK. It was estimated to have an economic impact of £36 billion and employed 530,000 full-time equivalent staff in 25,000 businesses across the sector (excluding the staging of one-off mega events such as the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games). This illustrates not only the scale of the events industry but underlines the arguments that this sector is often a hidden element of the leisure and tourism infrastructure of countries which have active event sectors spanning a wide range of niches. An industry that encompasses significant numbers of people, be they employees, spectators,
participants or those in the media, inevitably creates and poses different degrees of risk to those involved. Consequently, the challenge for organisations responsible for staging an event (see Chapter 15 by Ferdinand and Williams in this book) is to ensure that they are staged in a manner whereby the well-being of the attendees is cared for in a responsible and safe manner. The concept has an even greater significance if one acknowledges the association by Emery (2010) that the events sector is often beset by a myriad of management problems including ticketing, crowd, legal, financial, weather and political problems. This means events are often subject to significant risk assessment in relation to the budgetary issues, legal issues
(e.g. regulation) and health and safety matters. The Health and Safety Executive (1999) describe five distinct stages where risk assessment can be assessed for events: the build-up stage; the loadin stage; the show; the load-out stage and breakdown stage, where each of these stages poses different types of risk to participants and requires responses to managing safety. The concern with risk assessment is because any of the problems analysed by Emery (2010) may affect safety and security. These problems can impact upon the safety and security of the attendee, especially where the well-known problems such as overcrowding and surges could occur (see Abbott and Geddie 2000) that have led to high-profile accidents and deaths, such as the 2010 Duisbury Love Parade in Germany where nineteen people were killed and 340 were injured, with overcrowding in a tunnel that had only one entry and exit point. Therefore, developing an innovative approach as one tool to address management problems that impinge upon safety and security is a crucial issue to understand in order to reduce risk. Such innovation can have an important spin-off in impacting upon measures which affect safety and security of visitors at events. Therefore, the notion of well-being, developed by Pizam et al. (1997) and Walker and Page (2003), has an important place in the management of events and visitors, although this aspect of event management remains largely neglected in research studies. In relation to visitor well-being, research is underpinned by the concept of tourist safety and security. This chapter commences with a review of the literature on safety and security issues asso-
ciated with events, and then examines the importance of innovation in safety and security measures with reference to the London Olympic Games to be staged in 2012. It is evident that successful events are increasingly associated with security. For example, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games security preparations had, by late 2010, spent more than £95 million of an estimated £600-800 million total budget on such measures (https://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/business/8507768.stm) to ensure appropriate measures are in place for the event. This chapter primarily adopts a case study approach (see, for example, Yin (2009) and Miles and Huberman (1994) for more detail on the application of the case study method in management research) to derive evidence and generalisations in relation to one specific theme that has been overlooked in event research – innovation in private security firms as they engage with the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The contribution of this chapter is to explore the interconnections between events and management processes for the safety and security of participants. In particular, this chapter examines the management of safety and security at mega events through private security firms. This forms an intriguing area of study: the management of the public good within a private sector framework, which within the event literature has not been studied. More specifically, this research engages with the event and wider social science and management literatures by presenting a new perspective, that engaging with mega events may be a driver of innovation for firms, studied in this case through the example of security firms. We argue that there is a need to understand and characterise the security industry since it is an
emerging, complex counter-cyclical and innovative industry (UKTI/DSO 2010) and its analysis is long overdue. Further, most research to date has looked at private security through the lens of the criminologist or political scientist, often limited to an issues-based approach focused on the so-called ‘surveillance society’ or ‘police state’ (see, for example, Fussey et al. (2011) and discussion below of the literature on the surveillance society) or through the functional management approach of the security and risk manager or event organiser. In contrast, the approach taken here is an empirical evidence-based study which aims to characterise innovation in the security industry. In addition, there is both a structural and policy dimension to security which needs to be incorporated in the discussion so that we can fully understand security as a public good ‘without which societies cannot prosper; such benefits are intangible and not easy to
measure’ (Sempere 2010), a problem that also affects research on tourist well-being and its failure to fully develop since the innovative studies of Page and Meyer (1996) and Walker and Page (2003). We posit that the idea of a public good is thus nuanced; the private security sector is engaged in profit-making like other firms but at the same time is delivering a public good; this discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter but we will return to it in the conclusion as an area for future work. However, prior to examining the private security sector it is pertinent to review the literature on tourist safety and security since it provides the conceptual basis for understanding event attendee safety and well-being issues, given that attendees are short-term temporary visitors to a location: the tourism literature offers the best strategic fit with this research area and, in fact, much of the literature in this area has been developed and generated by tourism researchers.
