Field-configuring events: Arenas for innovation and learning?

Abstract

Field-configuring events and their impact upon organizations, networks and organizational fields have become an important focal point for research. Since the coining of the term (Meyer, Gaba, and Colwell 2005; Lampel and Meyer 2008), the body of research on events such as trade fairs, conferences, or festivals has grown in different disciplinary contexts, particularly management and organization studies and economic geography. The general gist of these studies is that interactions at temporally and spatially bounded sites are marked by “predictable unpredictability” (Lampel 2011) and “allow disparate constituents to become aware of their common concerns, join together, share information, coordinate their actions, shape or subvert agendas, and mutually influence field structuration” (Anand and Jones 2008, 1037). Research on organized events more broadly has a longer tradition in the two disciplines. Previous work in management and organization studies has analyzed events such as board meetings, strategy meetings or committees on an organizational level as sites for strategy making (e.g. Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008). On a field level, Rao (1994) has examined certification contests as a way of legitimization new organizational forms and Zilber (2007) studied conferences as occasions for making sense of disrupted industry. Research on creative industries has perceived events such as festivals or award ceremonies as sites for the negotiation of values (e.g. Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen 2011). In economic geography, trade fairs have been conceptualized as temporary clusters (Maskell, Bathelt, and Malmberg 2006) and cyclical events (Power and Jansson 2008), playing an important role in structuring global business exchanges. This literature has elucidated that trade fairs not only afford opportunities for acquiring knowledge through face-to-face interaction, but also for obtaining information by observing and monitoring other participants (Bathelt and Schuldt 2010). Trade fairs, it is argued, create a dense ecology of information and communication flows that provides opportunities for the exploration of market trends and the generation and maintenance of networks (e.g. Schuldt and Bathelt 2011).