Festival volunteer management. Welcoming locals and non-locals. An autoethnographic study

Abstract

The research at hand is a qualitative autoethnographic multi-sited research on festival volunteer management and namely – the way festival volunteer management relies on local and non-local volunteers. Research was conducted on the basis of two festivals in northern Norway – TIFF (Tromsø) and “Barents Spektakel” (Kirkenes). In order to answer research question, “How does the volunteer management of the festivals perform reliance on local and non-local volunteers?”, there were two autoethnographic fieldworks conducted, where the researcher acquired three-roles repertoire as both the data gathering method and the way to narrate this research; aside from that, methods of participant observation, field notes and semi-structured interviews were used. The results of this research represented strong reliance of “Barents Spektakel” volunteer management on the mix of both local and non-local volunteers in terms of border-crossing profile of the festival, while TIFF volunteer management represented lower level of reliance on whether local or non-local volunteers, focusing on other volunteers´ characteristics. The choice of this topic was connected to both personal experience in event volunteering and strong interest in peculiarities of volunteer management as a set of processes, and the role that local and non-local volunteers play in terms of that. Peculiarities of festival volunteer management were not researched often or broadly and in-depth, neither was a reliance on local and non-local volunteers observed through the prism of the festival volunteer management, what makes the topic actual and creates enriched prospective for further research.