Routledge Managing Cultural Festivals: Tradition and Innovation in Europe (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)

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. Review "Cultural festivals are a very important sector and contributes strongly to the vitality of cities. This book offers an interesting overview of European festivals and its richness, but also the challenges facing the sector. In addition, it develops a detailed tool to measure their cultural impact, a tool that can be used in other cultural sectors. I recommend this reading to anyone with an interest in festivals or readers who would like to know more about how to measure the cultural impact." François Colbert, Holder of the Carmelle and Rémi Marcoux Chair in Arts Management, HEC Montréal, Canada"This book provides an excellent resource for those interested in delving into research on cultural festivals. As the editors point out, cultural festivals are vital showcases of local culture and tradition that link to community and societal wellbeing, and as such, they merit deeper investigation. However, changes in technology and the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic have both hit traditional cultural festivals hard, resulting in a need to innovate and change to keep up with the times. This book also addresses challenges faced by cultural festivals regarding their socio-economic impacts and the future relevance of such festivals. The strength of this book is that it provides a great collection of chapters drawn from across Europe focusing on a wide range of cultural festival types (from film festivals to pop culture festivals and from book fairs to music festivals). Highly recommended reading for all festival scholars." Judith Mair, Associate Professor and Discipline Leader of the Tourism Discipline Group at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Australia About the Author Elisa Salvador is Professor (PhD, HDR) of Innovation and Creativity at ESSCA School of Management, France.Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen is Professor of Organization Studies at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.