Conceptualising 'Event'

It was Don Getz (2012) who first suggested the field of events management needed to move beyond operational concerns to the study of (his term) ‘planned events’, that began using the phrase “event studies”: developing a typology of events in the process. Significantly, what drives the conceptualisation of event for Getz is less an attempt to grasp what the term refers to and more a wish to ground a study of events that supports the dominant paradigmatic frame within which current events management operates. Despite his overview of the use of event in different fields of scholarship, he still locates event studies as a field of research with events management and tourism at its heart; commodifying event within what Bob Jessop (2010, see also Sum & Jessop 2015) refers to as the prevailing cultural political economy. Even Chris Rojek (2013) a recent critic of events management, does so without even attempting to say what event refers to.