Festival Stakeholders: Exploring Relationships and Dependency Through a Four-Country Comparison

Abstract

The importance of stakeholders to festival organizations and the issue of dependence on key stakeholders are studied through a four-country comparison. Respondents from Sweden, Norway, Scotland, and Australia mostly indicated that they did not feel overly dependent on any category of stakeholder, but did reveal the existence of several general patterns of stakeholder relationships that are linked to dependency. The public sector was predominant in terms of perceived stakeholder importance, but also clearly revealed were a customer-first relationship and a supplier-first (mostly venues) pattern. Perceived dependence on corporate sponsors in the sampled countries was uniformly low. Tourism and event management implications and theoretical advances are discussed in the conclusions, including suggestions for future research.