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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471401681 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2002 |
| Series: | Wiley Desktop Editions Series , #4 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.80(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
The Wiley Event Management Series-Series Editor, Dr. Joe Goldblatt, CSEP
Read an Excerpt
Event Risk Management and Safety
By Peter E. Tarlow
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-471-40168-4Chapter One
Risk Management:An Applied and Theoretical Sociological Perspective
Ask not that all troubles/risks cease, for when they do life ends. -Folk saying
IN THIS CHAPTER, WE WILL EXPLORE:
* What events are and what they are not
* Theories of how we use events to facilitate leisure time
* Basic sociological theories used in event risk management
* Postmodernism and event risk management
* The life cycle of a crisis
The Olympic Games are one of the largest "meetings" in the world. People from all over the world gather together to compete for gold medals. Hypothetically, this meeting fosters goodwill and mutual respect. Yet, the history of the Olympic Games shows that ever since Adolf Hitler tried to turn the games into a political statement, the Olympic Games have been a challenge for risk managers. The pinnacle of that risk was the 1972 Munich games when Palestinian terrorists murdered members of the Israeli team. The Atlanta Olympic Games of 2000 were, unfortunately, part of the rule that connected risk to security and serve as an example of how even events dedicated to peace can become acts of war. The bombing at Constitution Park placed a pall over the rest of the Olympic Games. Not only did the bombing kill someone and injure many, but both the FBI and the city of Atlanta had their reputations severely damaged. One ofthe great lessons of the Atlanta Olympic Games is that when risk is not taken seriously enough not only is the event marred, but there is also collateral damage to other institutions and to the host location.
Scholars of risk management, history, and tourism science will long debate the Atlanta Olympic Games. For example, should the park have been left open to the public? Did the FBI merely arrest the wrong man, or was this false arrest a means to calm the public and thus encourage the public to return to the Olympic stadium? Why were the police confused as to where the 911 call originated? Who actually did the bombing? Was this bombing an act of a madman or a planned political statement that can be connected to other Atlanta bombings that took place soon after the Olympic Games? While these questions will become the fabric for both researchers and novelists, there can be little doubt that Atlanta's image suffered greatly, a great deal of money was lost, and Atlanta has had to work hard to recapture its image as the South's most dynamic city. Looking at the Olympic Games as an event provides us with some of our first principles of risk management:
1. Events and meetings are a form of tourism and thus suffer from the same sociological phenomena as tourism.
2. Events and meetings often follow the same patterns, be they mega-events, such as an Olympic Games, or mini-events, such as a community's Fourth of July picnic.
3. Whenever an act of violence occurs within the world of events or meetings, the media are almost certain to report it, forcing the local event industry to be embroiled in acts of crisis management.
4. Perceptions about an event crisis tend to be almost as devastating as the crisis itself.
5. The farther away one is from a crisis location, the worse the crisis will appear to be and the longer the crisis will remain in the collective travel subconscious.
These basic theoretical principles form the foundation for why risk management is so important to every aspect of the tourism industry from attractions to events, from hotels to meetings. Figure 1.1 gives you some idea of how interlocked the events and meetings part of the tourism industry is.
Meetings and events are businesses; in fact, even a family event such as a wedding, christening, or bar mitzvah is a business. Events employ hundreds of people and involve large amounts of money. Event-goers pay money to attend these events, stay in hotels, and eat in public places. People are served by staff that have access to rooms, prepare food, or handle vast amounts of goods at shows. Within this system, then, there are numerous risks. The event cannot afford to have merchandise lifted, to have guests assaulted, or to have money stolen. Not only are events open to risks by staff members, but they also attract large numbers of secondary people. Among these are vendors, restaurants, gas stations and transportation providers, places of lodging, and local store owners. These people are not directly linked to the event, but earn their living due to the event. Indeed, the larger the event, the more likely that it will cause spin-off economic opportunities. All of these factors carry two risks: (1) the risk of a negative occurrence both on site and off site and (2) the negative publicity that comes from this negative occurrence.
For example, let us look at a simple event, the family wedding. Weddings ought to be both simple and almost risk free. From a theoretical perspective, everyone shares a common joy, people are either family or friends of the bride and groom, and we suppose that from the caterer to the couple all want the same outcome. Yet, anyone who has ever attended a wedding knows that it is filled with risks. From the two families fighting, to the caterer serving the wrong food, to paint on chairs, to the loss of a wedding license, there is barely a wedding that occurs without some risk and some crisis.
As an event professional, it is important that you understand that it is significantly less expensive to manage a risk prior to the event than to deal with the crisis after it has occurred. Note also that in the world of events and meetings, safety and security issues often merge. Both safety and security are issues that must concern the event risk manager. In today's world of instant biochemical threats, it is dangerous not to view safety and security as two sides of the same coin.
According to the Travel Industry Association and the World Tourism Organization, in the coming decades event managers can expect to see greater numbers of people traveling to concerts, conventions, meetings, and sports activities. The growth of the leisure industry will increase risk, and the need to manage that risk is becoming an ever-greater challenge to the entire tourism/leisure industry. Before we can even begin to examine some of the issues in managing risk, it is essential to review how leisure time is changing in the United States. Over the last decade, scholars have noted that leisure time has taken on the following characteristics:
* Shorter vacation periods
* Competition determined not by distance but by cost of travel to destination
* Greater access to information due to the Internet and the World Wide Web
* Greater exchange of "word of mouth" information between people who have never met each other
* New opportunities for cybercriminals (Tarlow and Muehsam, 1992)
Throughout the world, both in developed and in emerging nations, risk managers in tourism and travel, and meetings and events must face and seek ways to confront crises prior to their occurrence. Risks to the events and tourism industries may come in many forms. Some of these risks are due to issues of potential violence, health and safety concerns, or unique and unexpected weather events such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes/typhoons. As Gui Santana has noted, "Crises in the tourism industry can take many shapes and forms: from terrorism to sexual harassment, white collar crime to civil disturbance, a jet crashing into a hotel to cash flow problems, guest injury to strikes, bribery to price fixing, noise to vandalism, guest misuse of facilities to technology change ..." (Santana, 1999).
Whether they are natural or man-made crises, writers such as Gui Santana have argued that "there is no doubt that the travel and tourism industry is especially susceptible and vulnerable to crisis." Furthermore, Santana goes on to state that "Tourism is often unable to rebound as quickly as other businesses, since much of a destination's attraction is derived from its image" (Santana, 1999). The risk of these crises is the very social cancer that can eat away at the events industry. Postmodern tourism is often driven by events and therefore the industry must improve its risk management practices to destroy this potential disease.
The current period seems to be prone to great sociological mood swings. What may be seen as a risk or a crisis in one year may be ignored by the media in another year. The age of instant communication via satellite television and computers means that there is now selective knowledge and ignorance. Never have individuals around the world had greater access to information and never has there been greater levels of "information overload." What this plethora of information means is that we now have more information on how to handle risks and to prevent crises, and that the consequences of failure can be more devastating than ever before.
To begin our understanding of the role of risk management in the event and tourism industries, it is important that we review some of the historical perspectives that have shaped the role of risk management in the world of events and tourism. Historically oriented sociologists have observed the similarities that link the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. For example, Stjepan Mestrovic (1991) notes that just as at the end of the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia, and many around the world, live in a bifurcated world filled with a combination of hope and despair.
Event risk managers, then, must work in a world that can be very confusing as well as trying. As John Urry has noted, "Making theoretical sense of fun, pleasure, and entertainment has proved a difficult task for social scientists. There is relatively little substance to the sociology of tourism" (Urry, 1990, p. 7). To confound matters, postmodern scholars point to the blurring of sociological categories in the daily lives of people living in the developed countries:
Postmodernist vacations are usually stressful; there are few exotic places left in the world, and most vacation spots promise to deliver the same bland product-fun ... one could just as well spend one's time in a shopping mall. In fact, shopping frequently becomes the primary activity in postmodernist vacations. (Mestrovic, 1991, p. 25)
Examples of these forces in the world of tourism and events can be seen in the multiple conflicts that challenge the risk management specialist. How much freedom is given to a guest who may be engaged in risky behavior? How does one deal with the risks involved when a tourism or leisure event takes on a political tone?
Some of the major differences between life at the end of the nineteenth century and life at the end of the twentieth century indicate that we not only classify leisure in different ways, but that the risks involved in the pursuit of leisure have changed. Christopher Lasch has written about some of these changes, For example, he notes:
The first envisioned the democratization of leisure and consumption; the second the democratization of work. If culture was a function of affluence and leisure, then universal abundance ... held out the best hope of cultural democracy. (Lasch, 1991, pp. 355-356)
Leisure is no longer viewed as simply idle time for the rich. Indeed, a simple list of some of the ways that we spend our leisure time would surprise our grandparents and great-grandparents. Following is a list of some of the events that occupy our time:
* Family and human life cycle events, such as weddings, family reunions, and barbecues
* Community events, such as school picnics, business outings, and holiday celebrations
* Organized shopping exhibitions
* Civil and political events
* Business meetings and conferences
* Sports events, ranging from Little League to the Olympic Games
* Concerts
* Religious gatherings and pilgrimages
* Local and national political gatherings
* Fairs and festivals
The preceding list demonstrates one of the major problems of risk management in the meetings and events industry. In the modern world, there is a great deal of spillover from a leisure activity to a business activity. Classical nineteenth-century authors of leisure such as Veblen enjoyed clear distinctions between leisure and work. In the twenty-first century, these distinctions no longer exist. One example is the major religious pilgrimage known as the hajj. On this journey, millions of Muslims travel to Mecca. How do we classify this event? Is it tourism, travel, business, or convention? Certainly all of the risks that are inherent in the other four entities mentioned are also part of the hajj. From the moment the traveler sets out for Mecca, he or she is subject to risk, be it in the form of clean water, sleeping facilities, safe travel, or crowd control. This spillover from one field to another is called "dedifferentiation." In today's modern world, it is hard to dedifferentiate between what was once a simple family gathering and what is today a small convention.
Today's mobile society has a very different view of leisure from that of past societies. "Leisure for them [us] closely resembles work, since much of it consists of strenuous and for the most part solitary exercise. Even shopping, their ruling passion, takes on the character of a grueling ordeal: 'Shop till you drop!'" (Lasch, 1991, p. 521). This dedifferentiation between work and play, as exemplified by the shop/drop syndrome, is one of the theoretical underpinnings to the understanding of risk management. As Urry observes in his work on postmodernism, "Postmodernism problematises the distinction between representations and reality ... or what Baudrillard famously argues, what we increasingly consume are signs or representations" (Urry, 1990, p. 85). Risk management's job, then, is to keep substance from forming into the basis of a crisis, and if such a crisis should occur to contain its secondary effects.
The onset of the information age in the twentieth century has closely paralleled the growth of the travel and tourism industry. Mass tourism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. It was only with the end of World War II that travel, like so many products, entered the modern world of mass production. This success story also contains within it the seeds of crises. With millions of people traveling daily, and with the onset of the information age, word-of-mouth/computer information spreads rapidly, diseases are carried from one nation to the next, and the potential for violent cross-fertilization, both in ideas and actions, becomes ubiquitous.
Continues...
Excerpted from Event Risk Management and Safety by Peter E. Tarlow Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Chapter 1 Risk Management: An Applied and Theoretical Sociological Perspective 1
Chapter 2 Risk Assessment 29
Chapter 3 Alcohol and Events 61
Chapter 4 Crowd Control 85
Chapter 5 Emergencies 111
Chapter 6 Critical Issues for Event Safety 141
Chapter 7 Outdoor Events: Stage Safety, Pyrotechnics, Parades and Demonstrations 169
Chapter 8 Tomorrow's Event Risk Management 201
Appendix 1 Web Resources 233
Appendix 2 Alcohol and Beverage Commission Addresses and Telephone/Fax Numbers by State 239
Appendix 3 Organizations for Event Risk Managers 247
Appendix 4 References 249
Appendix 5 Glossary of Pyrotechnic Terms 257
Index 263