ABSTRACT
Events as a subject area spans a variety of interdisciplinary areas as we saw inChapter 4 byMikeWeed. One of the less well-known and debated areas in the research literature is the relationship between leisure and events, particularly the events-public leisure nexus. Any attempt to understand the role of leisure in society must be prepared for a ‘moveable feast’. As society shifts and alters, so leisure demand, provision and consumption inevitably change in response. This is also relevant for the leisure-event nexus. However, it is at least conceivable that this debate on leisure and society is not all one way and that changing leisure, in turn, has the capacity to change society. For this reason, if no other, the relationships between society and public leisure events are worthy of consideration given the growing significance of events as a dimension of the cultural industries of cities and other places and their contribution to public leisure, as reflected in leisure strategies. Discussions about leisure often begin with its role and meaning in people’s lives (where we
live, what we do, our tastes, who we choose to spend time with) and the way in which it influences, and is influenced by, society. Sociologists use the concept of lifestyles to explain ‘selfconcept’ (DeCrop 2006: 11): that is, how we explain to ourselves, and to others, who we are. The growing consumption of leisure events – sporting, cultural, visual arts, music, festivals, heritage, etc. – has resonance with contemporary tourists being described as accumulators of ‘social and cultural capital’ (Shaw and Williams 2004: 132). Given the relatively well-developed literature around the leisure phenomenon, it is certainly possible that leisure studies has something useful to contribute to explaining the motivations, experiences and behaviours of event attendees (Getz 2007). And indeed, this has been the case (see, for example, Jackson 2005 and Li and Petrick 2006) but there may be a further question to be explored: does leisure theory have something to contribute to event effectiveness and event evaluation? A significant and stubborn difficulty around public sector event provision has been the
measurement of anticipated benefits. Initially, considerable attention was given to establishing the economic benefits of individual events (Getz 1989; Long and Perdue 1990; Crompton and McKay 2001; Tyrrell and Johnston 2001) though there was little agreement that such approaches were reliable, cost-effective, accurate or comparable (Dwyer et al. 2000; Jura Consultants and Gardiner & Theobold 2001; Craig 2006; Jones 2008; Bowdin et al. 2011). More recently
there have been attempts to capture frequently lauded social and environmental benefits from events (Arts Council Wales 2007) such as the ‘the triple bottom line’ (a term coined by John Elkington in 1994 to mean that business should consider ‘people, planet, profit’) and other potentials, such as social capital and entrepreneurship (O’Sullivan et al. 2008). However, a report to the Scottish Cultural Commission (Ruiz 2004) claimed that, despite the almost universal agreement for the need for a better system of evaluation, the complexity and nuances of the task mean that it remains, at best, problematic. Despite the challenge of measuring outputs, contemporary cities have recently been described
as demonstrating a ‘desire for eventfulness’ and as moving towards a state of ‘festivalisation’, with texts promising to reveal how to ‘develop and manage an eventful city’ in order to optimise contributions to ‘economic and social prosperity’ (Richards and Palmer 2010: 2). However, evaluating public event outcomes is now widely recognised as a complex task fraught with multiple potential pitfalls, any of which could either singly, or in combination, undermine a reliable understanding of what objectives have been set or achieved (O’Sullivan et al. 2009). Consequently, with the measurement of public event outcomes so notoriously challenging, there is a danger that public policy decision-making on events might be less evidence-based, more wishful thinking. This chapter has two key purposes. First, it seeks to explore some of the benefits of leisure with
particular reference to public sector leisure events. Second, it considers whether leisure theory might have something to offer the understanding of what outcomes public sector leisure events can reasonably be expected to deliver, and consequently, how these might be more effectively assessed and understood.
