'These Things Don't Happen by Magic': Charismatic autonomy in festival production in the English East Midlands
type: CreativeWork
description: Festivals are special times in social life. They interrupt everyday life for periods of celebration. But festivals don’t happen by magic; they are the result of on-going, hidden work by festival producers. Urban arts festivals are multifaceted social phenomena reliant on complex place-based and cultural interest networks. They navigate values and norms with varied identity, place, economic and social meanings. This thesis questions how this largely invisible work shapes urban life, who undertakes this labour, what motivates them, who else is involved and how producers’ underlying value systems influence their effects in regional urban areas in England. In order to address the complexity of festivals as sites and artefacts, research for this thesis was multi-method. Ethnographic methods, cultural production and institutional concepts were synthesised with policy analysis and crystallised into a tripartite Weberian ideal type framework. The typology distinguished between festival’s primary purposes linked to their hetero-regulatory interest groups: arts curation based on aesthetic judgement; commercial priorities within creative industry sectors; and civic outcomes linked to public policies. Three case-studies, one of each type, were researched using thick description techniques to identify themes. The thesis is split into a theoretical section followed by ethnographic research to develop three case-studies: Buxton International Festival, Leicester Comedy Festival and Derby Festé. It asks if festivals are hetero-regulated institutions or autonomous, charismatic actors within their localities and concludes the case-studies were strongly influenced by their founders’ professional habitus within their artistic fields. Although responsive to structural heteronomy in their respective cities, they all resisted pressures to commercialise or lower artistic standards. The thesis concludes festivals are sites where values are negotiated throughout the production cycle and histo…
abstract: Festivals are special times in social life. They interrupt everyday life for periods of celebration. But festivals don’t happen by magic; they are the result of on-going, hidden work by festival producers. Urban arts festivals are multifaceted social phenomena reliant on complex place-based and cultural interest networks. They navigate values and norms with varied identity, place, economic and social meanings. This thesis questions how this largely invisible work shapes urban life, who undertakes this labour, what motivates them, who else is involved and how producers’ underlying value systems influence their effects in regional urban areas in England. In order to address the complexity of festivals as sites and artefacts, research for this thesis was multi-method. Ethnographic methods, cultural production and institutional concepts were synthesised with policy analysis and crystallised into a tripartite Weberian ideal type framework. The typology distinguished between festival’s primary purposes linked to their hetero-regulatory interest groups: arts curation based on aesthetic judgement; commercial priorities within creative industry sectors; and civic outcomes linked to public policies. Three case-studies, one of each type, were researched using thick description techniques to identify themes. The thesis is split into a theoretical section followed by ethnographic research to develop three case-studies: Buxton International Festival, Leicester Comedy Festival and Derby Festé. It asks if festivals are hetero-regulated institutions or autonomous, charismatic actors within their localities and concludes the case-studies were strongly influenced by their founders’ professional habitus within their artistic fields. Although responsive to structural heteronomy in their respective cities, they all resisted pressures to commercialise or lower artistic standards. The thesis concludes festivals are sites where values are negotiated throughout the production cycle and histo…
author: Jordan, Jennie
license: https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/f26164b2-3247-4bab-b690-9823e71b0b64/download
date published: 2019-08
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:18:27Z
provider: De Montfort University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: De Montfort University