The embedding process of community ventures: creating a music festival in a rural community

Abstract

Community entrepreneurship is a potentially powerful mechanism to improve the well-being of rural communities. To mobilize inhabitants for collective action, an emerging community venture must be embedded within a local community. Yet, the embedding process of community ventures is not well understood. Accordingly, this study explores how a community entrepreneur (CE) embedded an emerging community venture into a rural community and simultaneously stimulated social change in the community. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a CE who created a jazz music festival in a rural Norwegian community, a dynamic conceptual framework was developed that highlights the roles and mechanisms that support the embedding process. The CE promoted social change by introducing external impulses to the local community and assumed a bridging role between the villagers and external actors in the embedding process. Some villagers assumed local embedding roles, while several external actors assumed external embedding roles. I identified four strategies that were used to increase the embeddedness of the community venture in the rural community and one strategy that was used by the CE to deembed the venture in order to avoid constraints imposed by the local community. The importance of the different roles and mechanisms changed over time.

Expanding the Domain of Festival Research: A Review and Research Agenda

“…Studies measuring the impact of festivals have concentrated on their economic benefits and have only recently begun to consider the wider benefits of festivals, including their sociocultural and community outcomes (Organ et al 2015;Vestrum 2014). Not only do economic impacts dominate festival research, but these are also often exaggerated to justify the existence of the festival and garner support, mostly in the form of financial contributions (Crompton and McKay 1994;Jackson et al 2005).…”

“…Consequently, temporal considerations have yet to receive significant research attention. Even though almost all studies in this review were set within the positivist paradigm (Burrell and Morgan 1979), some recent examples have embraced alternative paradigms, including critical realism (Jepson et al 2013;Vestrum 2014) and interpretivism (Frost and Laing 2015;Stadler et al 2013). To develop the field of festival research, we advocate further paradigmatic diversity.…”

“…In a study of indigenous festivals in Australia, Whitford and Ruhanen (2013) found strong support for the sociocultural benefits of festivals on their host communities, such as capacity building through the development of social capital, cultural preservation and reconciliation. Social impacts were found to be dependent upon levels of engagement by the community (Jepson et al 2013;Vestrum 2014) with a direct link between knowledge and engagement and with community empowerment fostering a more positive attitude towards the festival.…”

“…Social impacts were found to be dependent upon levels of engagement by the community (Jepson et al . ; Vestrum ) with a direct link between knowledge and engagement and with community empowerment fostering a more positive attitude towards the festival.…”

The impact of (jazz) festivals

“…) than from the classical/opera literature, the latter of which have 'traditionally been concerned with works and composers rather than the performance and concert context' (Doctor et al 2007: 6). Another finding is the high proportion of tourism studies literature for jazz festivals (for example, Saleh and Ryan 1993;Formica and Uysal 1996;Saayman and Rossouw 2010;Bracalente et al 2011), indicating the use of jazz festivals as a means for attracting tourists and sponsorship, and for other social and cultural benefits (for example, Curtis 2010;Keogh 2014;Vestrum 2014). The Cape Town International Jazz Festival, for example has a threefold purpose: to provide a jazz experience for the tourists and visitors, to develop the community and to grow the local economy (Saayman and Rossouw 2010: 255).…”