Languages in Event Managment
The Association for Tourism and Leisure Research and Education (ATLAS) is dedicated to the global exchange of knowledge. One potential barrier to knowledge exchange is language, particularly as the academic literature is increasingly dominated by English. In the Event Management field this was underlined by a recent paper by Yeung and Thomas (2021), which showed that nature speakers from a small number of English speaking countries dominate publications listed in Scopus on event management.
As was pointed out in a recent reply to Thomas and Yeung (Richards, 2021), Scopus and other such systems are predominantly geared towards English language publications, and this bias is strengthened by the pressure to published in ranked journals, which also tend to publish in English. However, there is also a wealth of scholarship published in other languages, which does not become visible because of these language barriers. Even if texts in other languages can now be machine-translated, unless scholars are aware of sources in other languages these will not be used. A recent discussion of these issues on Academia indicated an interest in addressing these issues by increasing the visibility of event management research in other languages. This can also help to identify global themes in research, as well as tracing specific national, regional or linguistic areas of focus.
As a first step in creating an international, multilingual database, members of the group carried out a search for literature on ‘event management’ in their own language and country/region. This search was based on sources other than SCOPUS (which mainly lists sources in English), including search systems that feature other languages (including Google Scholar), or searches in journal databases directly to uncover publications. The period of publication covered is from 2009-2019, the period also covered by Yeung and Thomas. We have compiled these sources into a master database for the project.
For each source, the following information is available:
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Author(s)
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Title
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Year
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Journal name
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Volume
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Issue number
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Start Page and End Page
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DOI/ web Link
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Subject category (according to Getz and Page typology)
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Country of first author
Each source is also classified according to the ‘core phenomenon’ of Getz and Page’s (2016a, p. 597) typology of planned events and venues:
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Personal antecedents and decision-making
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Event experiences and meanings
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Outcomes and the impacted (e.g. impacts and the people and groups impacted)
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Patterns and processes
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Planning, design and management
This database allowed us to extend and improve Yeung and Thomas’ analysis, and to compare the focus of event management research in different countries and regions in terms of subject area. The results of this analysis have been published as:
Greg Richards, Dianine Censon, Daniela Gračan, Mossa Haressy, Alžbeta Kiráľová, Elena Marulc, Giulia Rosetti, Marina Barkiđija Sotošek & Davide Sterchele (2022). Event management literature: Exploring the missing body of knowledge. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2022.2128810
This paper is open access, and can be downloaded here.
For any further questions, please contact Greg Richards, project coordinator on behalf of ATLAS.
References
Richards, G. (2021) Pulling the long tail of event management research. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2021.1890755
Yeung, E. and Thomas, R. (2021). The ‘long tail’ of event management research: evidence from the field’s main journals. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2020.1862855.
