| Popis: |
The meetings industry, government bodies, and scholars within tourism studies have identified the need to understand the broader impact of business events. To succeed in this endeavour, we consider it necessary to develop analytical frameworks that are sensitive to the particularities of the analysed event, sector and stakeholder group. In this paper, we focus on the academic sector and offer two connected analyses. Firstly, an empirically-grounded typology of academic events. We identify four differentiating dimensions of academic events: size, academic focus, participants and tradition and based on these dimensions we develop a typology of academic events that includes: congress, specialty conference, symposium and practitioners’ meeting. Secondly, we outline the academic impact of attending these four types of events. For this purpose, the concept of credibility cycles is used as an analytical framework for examining academic impact. We suggest that academic events should be conceptualized and evaluated as open marketplaces that facilitate conversion of credibility. Data was obtained from interviews with 22 researchers at three Danish universities. The study concludes that there are significant differences between the events in terms of their academic impact. Moreover, the outcome for the individual scholar depends on the investment being made. Finally, the study calls for a future research agenda on beyond tourism benefits based on interdisciplinary collaborations. |
