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Organizing Swiss Music Festivals: Balancing Creativity and Financial Viability from Niche Events to Large-Scale Festivals
No full textMusic festivals operate in an increasingly challenging landscape shaped by rising artist fees, growing
competition, limited public funding, and changing audience expectations. In this context, festival
organizers must balance maintaining and innovating their creative identity to attract audiences while
also ensuring long-term financial viability. This case study explores how festival managers in
Switzerland navigate this tension through strategic decision-making, thereby addressing a gap in the
academic literature, particularly as the Swiss music festival context, remains largely unexplored.
Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with organizers from diverse festivals, the research identifies
five key strategic areas: financial risk mitigation, cost control, creative innovation, internal
organizational expertise, and external collaboration. To mitigate financial risk, festivals emphasized
the importance of building reserve funds, securing long-term sponsorships, and using community-based
crowdfunding. Cost management strategies included limiting artist fees, minimizing fixed costs, and
maximizing the use of volunteer labor. Creative innovation was driven by audience-oriented
programming and immersive design. Commercial festivals often used lifestyle trends to enhance their
appeal, while non-profit festivals focused on community-centered programming. Having long-term team
members and post-event evaluations were key for continuity, learning, and future planning. Lastly,
external collaboration proved particularly valuable for non-profit festivals. Coordinating event dates,
sharing resources, and engaging in joint advocacy helped reduce operational challenges and enhanced
their collective influence in cultural policy discussions. Notably, this finding challenges earlier
assumptions that such collaborations are only initiated in times of crisis or under external pressure,
showing instead that they can emerge as a deliberate and strategic choice. Overall, organizers do not
see creative identity and financial viability as opposing goals but as mutually reinforcing, with financial
stability enabling creative risks and unique programming and experiences helping to attract audiences
and sponsors. This study contributes to the festival management literature by offering empirical insights
into how festivals navigate the complex relationship between creativity and financial sustainability
within the underexplored Swiss context. Furthermore, it extends existing theory by illustrating that
collaboration between music festivals can be a proactive strategy. It also offers practical guidance for
organizers seeking to balance innovation with long-term viability
Local Art in an International Market
No full textThe current research examines the presence of a home bias in the Hong Kong market for
contemporary art. Home bias, rooted in the academic fields of marketing and behavioural economics,
reflects consumer preferences for domestic products. Therefore, in the context of this analysis, a home
bias is reflected in a preference for artworks made by Chinese artists. The research approached the
assessment of this concept through three economical measurements provided by the literature: price
developments, descriptive statistics (sales volumes and volatility), and sensitivity to macroeconomic
developments. The analysis draws on a dataset of 7577 auction results from auctions in the modern
and contemporary category held between 2012 and 2024 in the Hong Kong locations of Christie's,
Phillips and Poly Auctions. To analyse the price developments, the research employs a hedonic
regression model incorporating interaction terms. These terms are the composite of dummy variables
reflecting the artists regions of origin and the years between 2012 and 2024, enabling the observation
of region-specific price developments over time. Besides aiming to reveal a home bias, this stage of
the analysis also focusses on whether general region-of-origin effects affect the prices for the regions:
Asia excluding China, Europe and North America. The results of this section indicate that region of
origin effects influence the prices of all regions under consideration. Contradicting a potential home
bias, artworks by Chinese artists are outperformed by those of European artists. However, this
arguably does not reflect a preference for European artworks among local buyers, since European
artworks sold in Hong Kong generally belong to the highest segment of the market where prices are
set on an international stage. The assessment of descriptive statistics revealed that Chinese artworks
consistently account for a disproportionate share of total sold lots across the sample period.
Furthermore, the volatility observed in the returns of artworks by Chinese artists is considerably lower
than those observed for the other regions. To assess the sensitivity to macroeconomic developments, a
Shapley value regression is conducted. This regression enables one to compute the contributions to R-
squared related to the specific independent variables in the model. In the context of the current
research this model was employed to assess the explanatory power local, regional and global GDP-
growth rates have over the returns on artworks by artists from the distinct regions under consideration
and returns in the overall dataset. The results of this analysis indicate that prices in the overall Hong
Kong art market are considerably set by economic developments in China. Combining the results
indicate that Hong Kong hosts a relatively stable and large market for Chinese artworks, while the
market as a whole is rooted in Chinese economic developments. Therefore, the research draws the
conclusion that a home bias is present in the Hong Kong market for contemporary art
The Representation of Women Affected by Sexual Violence
No full textSexual violence remains a pervasive issue that affects millions of women worldwide
and continues to raise urgent social, political, and cultural concerns. In raising the
appropriate level of awareness, the media plays a crucial role in shaping the public's
perceptions of sexual violence. Therefore, this study investigates how women affected by
sexual violence are represented in two ideologically contrasting French news outlets: Le
Monde, known for its center-left orientation, and Le Figaro, associated with a center-right
positioning. Specifically, it focuses on the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old woman who
filed charges against her husband for over two decades of marital rape and sexual abuse. Her
public testimony and the subsequent trial generated significant national and international
attention, making her a unique subject for examining evolving media narratives.
Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this study examines 40
articles through a textual and visual analysis, allowing for an in-depth understanding of how
semiotic tools work together to create meaning. The results of this study identify two main
discourses through which Gisèle Pelicot is represented: a survivor discourse and a victim-
blaming discourse. Ultimately, the survivor discourse portrays Gisèle Pelicot as a resilient
and agentic figure who became a feminist icon. This aligns with broader shifts in media
practices that increasingly portray women affected by sexual violence through empowering
narratives. Conversely, the victim-blaming discourse reproduces more traditional and
conservative narratives by portraying Gisèle Pelicot as complicit and unreliable, notably
through the exposure and scrutiny of her sexuality. Ultimately, these representations
demonstrate that while progress has been made in how women affected by sexual violence
are portrayed, dominant cultural norms and institutional pressures continue to influence
which stories are legitimized, how they are told, and whose voices are amplified by the
media. Specifically, this study contributes to ongoing research on media representations of
sexual violence by demonstrating that contradictory discourses often coexist. This
challenges the tendency of previous research, which often treated such discourses as
mutually exclusive. Additionally, it addresses a gap in empirical research by focusing on a
recent case involving an ordinary French woman affected by domestic sexual violence,
which contrasts with the dominant focus on Anglo-Saxon contexts and high-profile celebrity
cases typically found in media representation studies. Finally, the findings offer practical
implications for media professionals and advocacy groups, encouraging more cautious,
accurate, and ethically responsible reporting on women affected by sexual violence
Freight Rate Volatility and Asset Price Cycles in the Dry Bulk Market: A Post-COVID Analysis for Sale & Purchase Decision-Making”
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Rational vs. emotional appeals: The effect of storytelling on responses in B2B e-mail marketing
No full textThe female CEO’s facial width-to-height ratio and the influence on firm financial performance
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