Description
Marketing management is a business discipline which is focused on the practical application of marketing techniques and the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities. Rapidly emerging forces of globalization have led firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making international marketing highly significant and an integral part of a firm's marketing strategy.
Marketing Study on Marketing Management
Abstract We examine the role of business parties in business markets: why do B2B companies spend such large amounts of money to sponsor events meant for public consumption, such as sporting events, when most of their activity involves selling to other organisations? Drawing from extensive qualitative fieldwork in the world of tennis tournaments, we detail the specific universe of parties that happen backstage, between companies sponsoring these events. This context helps illuminate the critical role of business parties in business networks. Far from being mere recreation at the company's expense, business parties are important opportunities for executives to develop and manage their relationships. We show that a business party functions as a particular kind of ritual by creating a distinct universe with its own language, gestures, and other modes of interaction. Summary statement of contribution Our theoretical contribution to the literature on relationship marketing is to detail the unifying function of business parties in local business markets, where relationships with a variety of organisations are key to a company's success. Our methodological contribution is to illustrate the relevance of anthropological approaches and concepts, such as rituals, to the world of B2B. Keywords anthropology; parties; personal contact; relationship marketing; ritual; socialisation
Introducti on
Since Rook's (1985) seminal paper on the importance of rituals in consumers' lives, ritual has become a prevalent trope for the study of a wide range of consumption phenomena, such as Thanksgiving reunions, Halloween celebrations, high school proms, and other shared occasions (McKechnie & Tynan, 2008; Otnes & Lowrey, 2004; Tinson & Nuttall, 2010; Wallendorf & Arnould, 1991). This attention to rituals can be explained by the increasing awareness that many consumption phenomena are best studied at a collective level. Gatherings of Harley Davidson enthusiasts, for example, are organised around different rituals of socialisation,
© 2013 Westburn Publishers Ltd.
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communion, and celebration that promote group cohesion and help develop a distinctive identity for Harley bikers (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). In the business-to-business (B2B) context, however, the power of rituals remains largely unexplored (exceptions include Cova & Salle, 2000; Rinallo, Borghini, &Golfetto, 2010). We already know the power of rituals within organisations: that Christmas parties and other types of office rituals can foster a sense of organisational community (Monjaret, 2001; Trice & Beyer, 1984). In this paper, we extend this line of inquiry and show that rituals offer important clues for understanding relationships between organisations. More specifically, we explain that business parties function as macro-rituals that facilitate a sense of unity and community between business executives who come from diverse professional backgrounds. Our analysis is based on an in-depth, qualitative examination of a major tennis tournament in the South of France, with additional fieldwork conducted at another French tennis tournament. For both tournaments, we attended and observed the parties organised by sponsoring companies. These sponsors spend hundreds of thousands of Euros every year on organising and attending these events. But apart from the promise of a day outside the office and a chance to mingle with a few tennis stars, we know little about the role and significance of such parties. Our work contributes to the literature on B2B marketing in three ways. First, our paper offers new insights into the formation of inter-organisational relationships and networks. Our study specifically highlights the power of rituals, and especially of business parties, in managing relationships between executives coming from diverse occupational backgrounds. We describe business parties, like the ones happening at tennis tournaments, as distinct universes with specific vocabularies, gestures, and ways of interacting that facilitate the formation of an affective community of organisational actors. Given the importance of these personal relationships for business success, our work offers valuable insights for managers seeking to create and sustain inter-organisational relationships by leveraging the power of rituals. Second, our work shows the methodological relevance of a symbolic approach to the study of B2B. Deshpande and Webster (1989) were amongst the first to call for more research examining the symbolic life of marketing work, especially the critical role of employee socialisation in achieving marketing success. Our work applies this analytical perspective to the world of B2B and shows how paying attention to rituals of interaction, and specifically to business parties, sheds new light on the way business relationships are formed and sustained. This is consistent with recent work taking an anthropological approach to B2B (Rinallo & Golfetto, 2006; Visconti, 2010), and should spur new research exploring the symbolic nature of B2B interactions. Third, our work contributes to the stream of studies on market-making practices (Aráujo, Finch, & Kjellberg, 2010; Zwick & Cayla, 2011). This body of work has developed a renewed perspective, informed by sociology and anthropology, on the practices of marketing professionals at work, and helped us better understand how marketing happens. Our research focuses more specifically on the practices, events and interactions of the B2B world. We show that rituals help sustain relationships between organisational actors and shape business markets. Parties and rituals constitute the invisible infrastructure of B2B markets. While appearing frivolous and wasteful on the surface, parties and rituals are fundamental to the constitution of business markets.
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The role of rituals in business markets
Past research has emphasised that the peculiarity of business markets - that is, markets where buyers and sellers are businesses or other organisations - has to do with the crucial importance of long and stable inter-organisational relationships (Guillet de Monthoux, 1975; Håkansson, 1982), in contrast to the more episodic and short-term interactions in consumer markets. An important stream of literature on relationship marketing addresses this critical issue of managing long-term mutually beneficial relationships between suppliers and customers in business markets (Ford, 1982). In fact, several studies have emphasised the need to build and sustain relationships not just between suppliers and customers, but spanning the entire network of a business market, which involves a vast number of stakeholders (Mattsson, 1997). Thus, the 'markets-as-networks' approach (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995) has helped us understand business markets as webs of relationships where one actor is connected directly and indirectly to a variety of other actors. Håkansson, Ford, Gadde, Snehota, and Waluszewski (2009) explain that, in business markets, organisations are mutually dependent because 'each is vital to and dependent on others that it borders and overlaps' (p. 6). Despite this emphasis on managing relationships in business markets (Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987; Ford, 1982), we still know little about the pattern of interactions between business executives within a network (exceptions include Cunningham & Turnbull, 1982 ; Halinen & Salmi, 2001; Mainela & Ulkuniemi, 2009). Researchers in industrial organisation and marketing have stressed that it is 'the individual who makes contact, becomes acquainted and builds up trust between companies' (Hamfelt & Lindberg, 1987, p. 179), and have called for more research on how interpersonal interactions within a business network can reinforce an atmosphere of trust or, conversely, how individual interactions can damage interorganisational relationships (Haytko, 2004). To sum up, they claim that personal bonds are crucial in relationship marketing (Witkowski & Thibodeau, 1999). In order to facilitate the development of rich interpersonal connections within business markets, some scholars have highlighted the importance of rituals (Borghini, Golfetto, & Rinallo, 2006; Cova & Salle, 2000). Building upon the idea of ritual as 'being the basic social act' (Rappaport, 1999, p. 138), these studies have encouraged businesses to integrate a ritualistic dimension into their management of interpersonal relationships within a network: 'The final aim is to provide a ritual platform able to support the construction, the development and the maintenance of interpersonal contacts' (Cova & Salle, 2000, p. 683). Past research on trade shows and fairs has similarly highlighted that fairs and exhibitions fulfil 'the neo-tribal need of periodically meeting and interacting with similar others belonging to different organizations' (Borghini et al., 2006, p. 1156). Studies by Rinallo et al. (2010) have defined these events as 'relational experiences in a ritualized context' (p. 254). They show that trade fairs and exhibitions cannot be reduced to mere sources of economic advantage; they have to be studied as a primary form of ritualistic experience which supports the development of interpersonal relationships. Looking at the ritual dimension of business gatherings may help us understand why executives spend such large sums of money organising them. A marketing manager at a European aerospace company revealed that more than 80% of her communications budget is spent on trade shows, specifically air shows such as the
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ones held at Le Bourget in France and Farnborough in the UK. Interestingly, the lion's share of the budget is spent on small structures, or 'marquees', set up along an airport's runway where the company hosts expensive, invitation-only events that are more corporate parties than formal business meetings. These marquees host a range of presentations, press events, lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties. All the top aerospace companies (including Airbus, Boeing, and Bombardier) operate one during the major air shows. The Airbus marquee, widely recognised for the quality of its cuisine, is often considered the place to be. Through trade shows and exhibitions, executives are able to build connections with executives who share the same interests, often the same occupational jargon and objectives. This common ground helps executives build strong connections with managers from other firms. Sociologists have already stressed the importance of the homophily principle, which helps explain that 'a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people' (McPherson, Smith- Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p. 416). Events such as the aerospace gatherings described above or the major technological trade shows such as CEBIT are structured to facilitate interactions between people who, by virtue of belonging to the same industry, have much in common (Borghini et al., 2006). However, the homogeneity of trade shows can be problematic in markets where, to succeed, executives have to develop and manage relationships with very diverse stakeholders, such as government administrators, university research centres, and non-governmental organisations. Absent of the benefits of a common occupational community, these relationships among diverse organisational actors are more difficult to build and manage (Ingram & Miller, 2007). Many business deals are built in networks characterised by a wide variety of stakeholders (Björkman & Kock, 1995; Santos-Rivera & Rufin, 2010) but we need more research on the construction and maintenance of these networks. To facilitate their interactions and relationships with 'non-similar others', companies are searching for 'mixers or networking parties, minimally structured social events that bring together guests who do not all know each other and provide a context in which they can interact freely to strengthen existing ties or forge new ones' (Ingram & Miller, 2007, p. 558). These kinds of ritualised contexts present a useful complement to trade shows and exhibitions in helping manage a network of non- similar others. And as our research demonstrates, the ritualistic dimension of mixers and parties is especially conducive to creating bonds between business executives and other actors connected only by a common locality. Our work is anchored in the rich literature on business markets and relationship marketing, which emphasises the importance of networks and interpersonal interactions. What we add is an attention to the power of collective gatherings, rather than dyadic interactions, in shaping the way business executives develop relationships. Looking at the ritualistic dimension of business markets offers an especially promising avenue for studying this collective dimension of the B2B world.
Parties as recreational rituals
Our conceptualisation and operationalisation of rituals in this paper originates in the large stream of social sciences research on the topic (Durkheim, 1915 /1961; Goffman, 1967; Turner, 1969). For the purposes of this paper, we define ritual as a planned set of highly scripted and stylised activities carried out through social
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interaction (cf. Trice & Beyer, 1984). As we will detail later, the business parties we studied fit this definition because they consist of recurring, elaborate, planned events where executives have assigned roles and enact partly scripted behaviours. We define business parties as social gatherings of executives and employees with specific hedonistic purposes. In other words, business parties represent the times when organisational members get together to have fun. Yet as we will show, behind these motives of 'letting off some steam', business parties fulfil other critical functions in organisational and, importantly, interorganisational life. Of particular interest to our research on the B2B world is Durkheim's (1915/1961) insight that rituals help create and deepen relationships between very diverse elements of a community. From this perspective, the role of ritual is to unify a group of actors with disparate goals and values. We find a similar attention to the unifying dimension of rituals in Turner's work, which shows that rituals function as a kind of 'social glue' holding a society together by creating wider networks of association that cross-cut the boundaries of lineages and villages. Rites of passage and initiation also play a socialisation role by serving as vehicles for the stories, values, and beliefs of a community, facilitating the reproduction of collective identities (Turner, 1969, 1982). These insights into the federating and socialising functions of rituals have been applied in organisational theory to talk about the managerial uses of rituals in creating a sense of organisational community (Deal & Kennedy, 1982). Organisational theorists have emphasised how rituals of integration, for example, are sense-making mechanisms that help employees understand what kind of company they work for (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006; Trice & Beyer, 1984). In addition, office rituals such as Christmas and birthday parties help create a sense of 'we-ness' in the firm and give employees a feeling that they belong to a sort of virtual family. In the organisational domain, paying attention to rituals has helped us better grasp the symbolic dimension of organisational life, enabling us to go beyond rationalistic explanations of organisational behaviour. Yet the role of rituals and, more generally, the symbolic dimension of interorganisational exchanges have remained largely unexplored. Taking stock of recent research on rituals in the area of consumer research, Arnould (2001) argued that, 'while the idea of consumer ritual was introduced into the consumer research paradigm over 25 years ago (Rook, 1985), the topic has languished' (p. 384). The same comments could also apply to inter-organisational relationships and the world of B2B. Despite recent research highlighting the importance of rituals in B2B contexts like trade shows (Rinallo et al., 2010), we know little about the ritualistic dimension of business markets, in contrast to the more widespread analysis of rituals in consumer markets. We consider business parties, and specifically the business parties happening during tennis tournaments, to be a rich context for studying the ritualistic dimension of B2B. Much of the work on parties and ceremonies in social sciences has emphasised their ritualistic dimension (Durkheim, 1915 /1961). Trice and Beyer (1984) emphasise that office parties are rites of integration that permit the loosening of various organisational norms, and breathe new life into a community of workers. They mention how one might witness various gestures of affection like hugging and kissing, which are rarely used in regular work settings but which help employees break the spell of everyday office life. They compare office parties to carnivals in that they allow the forging of new informal links between diverse people. These insights about
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parties as ?attening social hierarchies are particularly meaningful for our work on business markets, given the importance of power and hierarchical structures within interorganisational contexts (Håkansson et al., 2009). Given the literature's treatment of business parties as a type of ritual - one of socialisation and integration (Monjaret, 2001; Trice & Beyer, 1984) - we have every reason to take these parties seriously. As research has repeatedly shown, parties and other kinds of breaks in the routine of business life are much more than 'stolen time' (cf. Bouvier, 1989); parties may represent the non-serious part of the business world, but they are also ways of maintaining a social equilibrium in the corporate sphere (Monjaret, 2001; Roy, 1959). And despite the appearance and perhaps even the allure of being unproductive diversions from business as usual, they are often essential to the pursuit of productive activities, offering a kind of social glue between stakeholders both inside and outside the firm. Our approach in this paper is thus to treat parties as significant events in the life of a business network. Our objective is to detail the activities they comprise and to examine the role of ritualised gatherings in facilitating personal relationships in business markets.
Research methods
The methodological stance we take in this paper is known as organisational symbolism (Deshpande & Webster, 1989), which attends specifically to the symbolic practices and objects - such as myths, stories, rituals, and ceremonies - that express the underlying character of an organisation. For example, studies of organisational identity have looked at practices such as rituals of integration and objects such as product designs as symbolic ways through which organisational members comprehend what their organisation is about (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). In our work, we pay specific attention to the objects, characters, practices, and stories that circulate during business parties because, just as in any other ritual, these artefacts offer important clues to the latent, underlying meaning of these parties. For example, we know from organisational theorists and anthropologists that wearing certain types of dress can be a way to act out a social identity (Rafaeli & Pratt, 2006) and, like other types of organisational objects, can be powerful for organisational members in identifying with the group they belong to. Likewise, the idiosyncratic objects and practices of the business parties we describe help set them apart, creating a different kind of space and time away from the usual business environment, replacing the hierarchies of business life with a more horizontal community. We carried out the majority of our fieldwork at the Open 13 tournament in Marseille between 2006 and 2011, exploring the event in depth to detail how parties and other gatherings between B2B managers unfold. We complemented this fieldwork with observations at the Lyon Tennis Grand Prix (GPTL) tournament between 2006 and 2010 to see whether our insights into business parties could be transferred to another context with a similar mix of companies and government organisations as sponsors. In both cases, we found that parties were key to creating and sustaining inter-organisational relationships. This is re?ected in the significant amount of time and money spent on participation by the attendees of both tournaments. And yet, despite presenting significant avenues for examining the building and nurturing of business relationships, most of the literature on sporting events has focused on the behaviour of attending fans (e.g., Holt, 1995) or their ability to generate enough mass publicity to increase a brand's reputation (Gwinner & Eaton, 1999). Our particular
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interest was piqued when we saw that companies like Veolia and Bombardier were sponsoring these tournaments. Why would such large industrial firms with no obvious connection to the sport sponsor these events, when most of their other marketing activities focus on state institutions and government organisations? By focusing on a specific tournament, we were able to develop an in-depth account of what happens before, during, and after a business party. Our focus on the Open 13 was also pragmatic because of the privileged access we had gained, allowing us to observe and interview executives at the tournament. One of the co-authors of this paper is a consultant with a company that organises sporting events and has been involved with the organisation of this particular tournament for more than fifteen years. Throughout our data collection and analysis, he played the role of complete participant in the setting (Adler & Adler, 1987), meaning that his involvement afforded an intimate knowledge of the culture and workings of tennis tournaments and the role of parties in these tournaments. He has served as a key informant, helping us better understand what goes on behind the scenes at business parties. This methodological approach is very similar to collaborative ethnographic work, where key informants provide an emic-based perspective, or insider's view, while anthropologists offer an etic-based perspective (Lassiter, 2005). In line with this approach, the other two authors of this paper also played an important role by taking an outsider's look at what goes on in the setting and checking each other's interpretations. The methodological approach we applied to the GPTL tournament in Lyon was similar, but with less privileged access and a focus on interviews rather than participant observation. Our study uses a variety of data collection methods that are typically used in ethnographic case studies (Visconti, 2010), including: 1) action research; 2) in-depth interviews; 3) participant observation; and 4) the collection of archival data about each tennis tournament. First, one author was involved for over five years in the day- to-day organisation of the Open 13 and GPTL and, consistent with an action research approach (Whyte, 1991), kept field notes on the observations he made before, during, and after each tournament. He was the development manager for the organisation of the sporting events, his principal mission being the activation of and follow-up on the evolution of the content of the proposals and activities of the partnerships, as well as the deployment of new modes of communication (new technologies and new media). Second, we conducted 35 interviews with members of participating businesses and the organisers of the two tournaments, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Third, to better understand business parties, we also joined the party. The author who acted as manager provided critical introductions to companies and organising teams, allowing the other authors to take part in meetings, informal conversations, and the business parties themselves at one tournament. In making observations, we focused on one site within the Marseille tennis tournament, a space that the organising team calls the 'Village', which is reserved for the interactions between sponsoring companies.1 Consistent with our symbolic perspective on organisational life, we
1The
major companies partnering with the Open 13 tournament are BNP-Paribas (bank and finance), Bombardier (aircraft and rail vehicles), Onet (cleaning multiservices, extreme environment technologies, security, safety), Peugeot and Seat (cars and vans), Sodexo (catering services, facilities management), and Veolia (water and waste management services). The major institutional partners of the Open 13 are the Conseil général des Bouches-duRhône (council of the Bouches-du-Rhône area), Marseille Provence Métropole (an urban community grouping together the city of Marseille and its suburbs), and Ville de Marseille (city of Marseille). Amongst the major companies which support the GPTL are the Banque Rhône-Alpes (bank and finance) and Perrier-Vittel (soft beverages).
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Table 1 Summary of the empirical material.
Method Action research Description Involvement in the day-to-day organisation of the Open 13 and GPTL tournaments between 2006 and 2011 (2010 for GPTL). Each yearly tournament has a duration of 10 days. Taking part in meetings, informal conversations and, in the case of the 2010 Open 13 tournament, the business parties themselves over the course of 4 days. 36 interviews with members of participating businesses (8 women and 28 men) and the organisers of the two tournaments, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Compilation of local and national press, as well as an on-site newspaper (La Gazette du Village), during the last 6 years (2006-2011).
Participant observation of tournaments/parties In-depth interviews
Archival data
paid particular attention to the symbolic life of the Village and the business parties that transpired: the stories, characters, practices, and objects that structure the life of the Village. Finally, we compiled press clippings and photographs taken at the tournament and added them to our corpus of data to be analysed. We selected some of these photographs to become part of our narrative, as a way to illustrate the space and atmosphere of the party. See Table 1 for a summary of the empirical material and Table 2 for the respondents' profiles. With respect to analysis and interpretation, we followed ethnographic conventions, continually moving among specific transcripts, artefacts, and the evolving data set, which included photos and videos. We iteratively developed patterned regularities in the data and a rich description of the Open 13 culture. One of the patterned regularities we specifically focused on was the practices of parties inside the business party. Thus we paid specific attention to the maintenance and evolution of these parties. Indeed, the tournaments are changing events: the structure of the Village and the parties that are organised remain in perpetual evolution in order to stimulate interactions between people. From one year to the next, the size and type of the spaces varies and new parties are introduced as older ones are eliminated. However, it is possible to highlight certain continuities in these events, as shown in Table 3. Such elements remained rather stable over the period of investigation (2006 to 2011) - some of which had been initiated long before the beginning of our investigation - and thus serve as a solid framework for analysis. The analysis and interpretation of the vast amount of data collected through our diverse methods concentrated on what was happening during these micro-parties and what was relevant for the development of relationships. To achieve fruitful analysis, our data were organised to correspond to three distinct phases:
• Getting ready to party; • Time to party!; • What remains after the party.
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Table 2 List of informants.
Name Open13 Marseille Julien Busson Jean-François Caujolle Patrick Caujolle Dominique Ciotti Cédric Denonfoux Lionel Fassi Gilbert Gaudin Richard Joly Elodie Malatrait-Singer Max Massa Alain Masson Philippe Meysselle Armand Mikaelian Gender M M M F M M M M F M M M M Seat Open 13 Open 13 Veolia Onet La Provence (press) Conseil Général 13 Peugeot Open 13 Onet Sodexo BNP Paribas Marseille Provence Métropole Peugeot Seat Veolia Conseil Général 13 Conseil Général 13 BNP Paribas Sodexo BNP Paribas Open 13 Adecco Perrier-Vittel Peugeot Le Progrès (press) Peugeot Peugeot GPTL GPTL Banque Rhône-Alpes GPTL BNP Paribas BNP Paribas GPTL GPTL Firm Role Director, Events and Partnerships Director Marketing Director Communications Manager Events Coordinator Manager of Partnerships Communications Director for the Departmental Council Regional Partnership Director Public Relations Manager Chairman of the Board Partnership Director Regional Director Events Consultant, Mayor's Office Sponsoring Director Public Relations Manager Sponsoring and Public Relations Director Departmental Council - Sports Sports Director - Departmental Council Regional Partnership Director Events Director Sponsoring Director Manager of the Business Village Regional Director Partnership Director Regional Marketing Director Partnership Director Regional Partnership Director Sponsoring Director Tournament Director Partnership Director Communications Director Public Relations Manager Regional Partnership Director Sponsoring Director Managing Director Tournament Press Secretary
Catherine Montfort Tiphaine Paillard Christian Pillot Antoine Rouzaud Jean-Louis Santoni Christophe Schaeffer Jean-Claude Secchi Alain Terno Henry Vergnon GPTL LYON Matthias Bauland Axel Carrée Jean-Michel Gohier Jean-Pierre Guillot Richard Joly Catherine Montfort Gilles Moretton Stéphane Mort-Sire Huguette Pontois Marie Roussille Christophe Schaeffer Alain Terno Anthony Thiodet Alexia Volatier
F F M M M M M M M M M M M M F M M F F M M M F
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Table 3 Summary of the micro-parties observed at the Open 13, 2006-2011.
Parties Open 13 Marseille Official Party Women's Day Magic Night
Description VIP party organised by the President of the Conseil Général. Fashion show and gift ceremony for female executives and their spouses. Magician doing tricks and shows in the Village.
History Created 1999. Created 1999. Created 1999. Discontinued since 2008 (sponsoring companies wanted something new). Created 2001. Created 2001.
Mayor Election Olympique de Marseille Party Fastest Service Trophy Petanque Games
Election of the Village mayor and exchange of gifts between partners. Party with soccer players and executive staff of the Olympique de Marseille football team. Event sponsored by companies involved in the service industry, for the fastest server in the tennis tournament. Petanque tournament involving tennis players and sponsors.
Created 2004.
Casino Night
Roulette table and other table games.
Created 2005. Discontinued since 2009 (crowd management became an issue). Created 2006. Discontinued since 2009.
This chronological sequence was used strictly to facilitate the representation of our results and not to build a process model. Then, for each of the three phases, we combined 'big stories' stemming from interviews and archives with 'small stories' derived from participant observation and action research. in accordance with the canons of narrative inquiry (Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006). At various points during the analytic process, we challenged our interpretations. We presented our framework of the micro-practices together with the stories, characters, and objects to the manager in charge of the Open 13 tournament for evaluation and criticism throughout the period of investigation. Finally, he read and commented on the initial manuscript draft, thus assessing the credibility (i.e., the internal validity) of our results. We insured the transferability (i.e., the external validity) of our findings by analysing them in parallel using the GPTL tournament, as mentioned above. In some cases, the contrast between the two tournaments helped in highlighting some of the unique practices of the Open 13, such as the size of the badges for example. The fieldwork and data from the GPTL tournament were also useful for investigating the ritualistic dimension of such business parties in greater depth.
Findings
Our findings are presented chronologically, according to the sequence described above, to explain the experience of business executives attending a tennis tournament, beginning with anticipation of the event, followed by the experience
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of the event itself, and finishing with impressions and thoughts about the tournament once it is over. Our approach is consistent with anthropological analyses of rituals that focus on the way rituals unfold and the effects of specific rituals on a community (Geertz, 1973).
Getting ready to party Anticipating the party Several weeks before the Open 13 tournament begins, the executives we spoke to look at their calendars to organise their week at the tournament. They start making phone calls to schedule appointments with other executives, get in touch with old friends to make sure they are going to be there, and generally start planning their time at the tournament. Many businesses in the region of Marseille look forward to the Open 13 with great anticipation. In the following quote, the founder and director of the tournament describes this phenomenon:
People have become increasingly interested in and focused on the Open 13, meaning that it's not something that can be overlooked anymore. Without being pretentious, it really is something that people look forward to in the calendar of sporting events, not only because of the quality of the people involved but also because of what it means during the week when it runs, the friendly atmosphere in the corporate Village created during the tournament week. (Patrick Caujolle, Marketing Director, Open 13).
Although the business parties at the tennis tournaments we observed have been around for a while (the Open 13 since 1993 and the GPTL since 1987), they continue to generate a good deal of excitement among participants. The organisers build this anticipation by refraining from scheduling any meetings or reunions between sponsoring businesses before the tournament. They may keep in touch with partners and occasionally meet with the organisations individually, but it is not until the Open 13 itself that the community of business partners gets a chance to interact. As a result, many of the business executives we spoke with during the tournament mentioned having waited eagerly for the tournament to begin so they could reconvene with colleagues and acquaintances they had not seen in a while. It has already been shown that an important dimension of consumption experiences has to do with the anticipation of consumption (Arnould, Price, & Zinkhan, 2002). Anticipation is likewise critical in the world of B2B in helping build up excitement and momentum. Adding to this anticipation and excitement is the fact that tennis tournaments are annual events that typically only last a week or two. They are brief but intense moments of reunion. At the GPTL, an informant contrasted the soccer season, which lasts almost a year, with the short duration of tennis tournaments:
This has become a big event for Lyon and in fact it's already a key feature of the yearly calendar. There are other events in the city like when the football team plays, although this happens all year long, or when the basketball team plays, which is more seasonal. On the other hand, this is an event that lasts just one week, meaning that companies must hurry to be there. Plus I think it affects more people, it's just a bigger operation. (Alexia Volatier, Press Secretary, GPTL)
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As noted by our informant, the ephemeral nature of tennis tournaments sets them apart from other sporting events, many of which occur throughout an entire season. Finally, business parties taking place at tournaments are cyclical, occurring every year at the same time. This cyclical dimension of parties is important because it fosters the renewal of business relationships every year. Business parties structure business life by offering a space and time to regenerate and sustain relationships in the B2B world. As we have already noted, the management of the relationship requires regular regeneration. Business parties taking place at sporting events like tennis tournaments are part of this regenerative effort executives must integrate into their planning. Creating the space of the party At the Open 13, the space of the party is the Village, a zone of 4000 square meters wherein each of the eight main business sponsors has a large marquee to itself, to invite members of other businesses to and have their meals, discuss the tournament, watch it on their television screen, or catch up on family and other aspects of their personal lives. At the centre of the Village, the organisers typically set up an area called the 'forum', which is a space dedicated to common activities such as games, conferences, celebrations, and ceremonies that are designed to facilitate interaction between businesses. The space of the Village is structured to downplay the economic and professional dimensions of the tournament in favour of a festive atmosphere. Unlike at trade fairs or exhibitions, there are no large signs indicating the different parts of the Village. Instead, the signs are discrete and the hostesses of the tournament guide people through what can often seem like a maze. This is a deliberate decision on the part of the organisers to break from the formality of the trade fair or salon and create a space that is more improvised, organic, and personal. Consistent with this idea of the space as a personal rather than purely economic environment, at the Open 13, business partners are given the opportunity to co- produce the space and, probably because of this involvement, many report a sense of ownership. For example, the organisers of the Open 13 let companies participate in the choice of furniture and décor for their own marquees within the Village. 'This Village is a bit like our home', explained the regional manager for Peugeot, one of the main business partners. The communications manager for the Conseil général des Bouches-du-Rhône said he felt as though he were 'decorating [his] own home'. This collective involvement in the creation of the Village, supported by the organisers of the tournament, helps create a communal atmosphere. An executive working for Onet detailed the advantages of furnishing the marquee at the Open 13 to resemble the company's offices, and participating in the creation of the space:
The Village means that we have to move our company for a week. Other events are traditional and don't let us improvise things like a visit from a particular individual or a special or innovative operation like hosting some partner or the other. In short, we feel quite at home. (Cédric Denonfoux, Events Coordinator, Onet)
This quote and those of other informants talking about the Village space as their 'home' re?ect how business executives think about their place in the Village as a space that is very much like home, where they feel like they are among family members.
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Figure 1 Map of the Open 13 Village (2011 tournament).
Veolia Conseil Général 13
La Provence
JC Decaux Players
1
Gerflor
2
Onet
Open Club Marseille City Open Club
4
MPM
Pasino
Open Club
3
Peugeot AGF
Conference
TV BNP Paribas Sodexo
OPEN 13
Map legend: 1 = Petanque ground. 2 = Fashion show catwalk (Women's Day). 3 = Casino tables (roulette and other tables). 4 = Olympique de Marseille party.
It is a place of business that bears the promise of future transactions, but it is also a communal space. Here we are reminded of the idea of the 'third space' (Oldenburg, 1989), a hybrid space between home and work that allows the pursuit of economic opportunities in a familiar environment. What we end up with in Lyon and Marseille is a space that breaks from that of regular business because it is ephemeral, unstructured, and co-produced by a community of business partners rather than a single organisation. These three dimensions help to establish the collegial atmosphere of the Village, an aspect that was mentioned during several of the interviews we conducted. Importantly, these characteristics of the space also make it especially conducive to another kind of relationship between business partners, one that is more horizontal and communal than the hierarchies and power relationships typical of the B2B world. Overall, the characteristics of tennis tournaments we have described here already bear some resemblance to other rituals. In their brevity, intensity, and cyclical nature, business parties at tournaments are similar to agricultural rites, which provide a calendrical scheme for organising a society's activities (Caillois, 1950) and regenerate the life of the community through the sharing of an intense festive moment. In the creation of a space that is outside of regular business interactions, a hybrid space
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between business and home, business parties also offer a frame for a distinct set of rules, a distinct language - in short, a distinct mode of interaction.
Time to party! Rituals A tennis tournament like the Open 13, and more specifically life inside the Village during the week of the tournament, might best be understood as a type of macro- ritual comprising myriad micro-rituals or 'rites of interaction' (Goffman, 1967). Cova and Salle (2000) proposed that rituals be understood according to two types: macro- rituals, which are elaborate procedures (ceremonies) imbuing the feeling of 'we-ness', such as trade shows; and micro-rituals, which are simple procedures facilitating everyday contact and negotiating personal identity, such as exchanging business cards. With this distinction in mind, we describe some of these micro-rituals here, such as the election of a Village mayor and its accompanying ceremonies of gift-giving, and the pre-dinner aperitif , where business partners share food and drinks. Together, such occasions help create a macro-ritual of communitybuilding and renewal. One of the first rituals in the life of the Village is the election of the Village mayor. The mayor is a business executive who represents the different sponsoring companies and serves as a liaison to the organisers of the tournament (see Figures 2 and 3). The election consists of a series of events that tend to unfold according to a loosely defined pattern. Typically, executives from the sponsoring companies meet for a meal a few months before the start of the tournament. During the gathering, the mayor from the previous year talks about the activities and events that worked the previous year, and the ones that did not. During the meal, one or several of the executives present, usually communication or sponsoring directors, announce their candidacy for the mayor position, presenting a brief programme based on their ideas about the Village and how to improve life in the Village. On the first day of the tournament, the different companies vote in the election, which is followed by an exchange of gifts between partners (see Figure 4). From
Figure 2 Election of the Village 'mayor'.
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Figure 3 Gathering around the Village 'mayor'.
Figure 4 Exchange of gifts between partners.
then on, at the start of each day of the tournament, the mayor, accompanied by the organisers, gathers together all the business partners to discuss their activities for that day. During this gathering, partners share information about the personalities present at the tournament and have the opportunity to catch up on topics like business, family, and sports. Importantly, after the election, the Village mayor becomes a sort of representative for the business partners, a tribal leader voicing their needs and concerns. Another local ritual of introduction at the Open 13 is the aperitif , a French tradition of sharing drinks and food before a meal. We saw many executives invite
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others to 'share an aperitif ' as a way to start a conversation (micro-ritual). To facilitate this social rite, the organisers of the Open 13 decided in 2008 to abandon the Village's traditional sit-down dinners in favour of informal gatherings with bar tables and stools where executives could have drinks, share some food, and converse freely. Thisis particularly suited to the context of a tournament where important matches often take place in the evenings. Visitors typically come to the tournament after work, have an aperitif , watch part of a tennis match, and then have dinner before returning tothe match. The tournament is also an opportunity for many rituals of gift-giving, which are occasions to sustain relationships through reciprocal exchanges. For example, in 2010, managers from the BNP - a major French bank sponsoring the Open 13 - gifted polo shirts to executives of companies in the Village. They used some of the official tournament clothing, but added a subtle mark with the name of the bank on the shirts. At the end of the tournament, the organising team also typically offers pieces of the tennis court - chunks of the synthetic material used to build the court itself - to the sponsoring organisations after it has been dismantled. These pieces are framed and offered to corporate partners, who display them at their company offices. Through these artefacts, the tournament becomes part of the corporation's history, playing a role in sustaining the links between business partners when they all go back to business as usual.
Objects and dress One object that is particularly symbolic is the badge worn by business executives. The badge gives access to the Village, so it is a prized marker that business executives proudly display at the tournament. In spite of its significance, the badge is extremely subdued and subtle at the Open 13. It is smaller than at other tennis tournaments, displaying the first and last names of the visitor, but never the company name or the position the executive holds in the organisation. In contrast, at the GPTL, the badges are bigger and feature the name of the company, and even sometimes the position of the executive, because the event is decidedly more oriented towards business meetings and conversations. An object familiar in business life that is surprisingly absent from these parties (at least at the Open 13, where we carried out most of our observations) is the business card. We rarely saw executives exchanging business cards at the Open 13. As a case in point, when the company Research in Motion (RIM), which manufactures BlackBerry devices, decided to hold a competition where entrants dropped their business cards in a fish bowl, only a few participated, despite the fact that RIM was offering its latest product as a prize. Some of the executives we met actually mentioned enjoying not having to introduce themselves through business cards. One of our informants who works for the city of Marseille emphasised the advantages of being introduced by other individuals rather than through an exchange of business cards:
Here I don't have to get out my business card like I would do at a trade fair or an official meeting; if I need to meet someone, the organisers know everyone and know how to introduce us discreetly, even to the politicians and economic decisionmakers. (Armand Mikaelian, Events Consultant, Mayor's Office)
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Here, it is important to note our informant's description of being introduced 'discreetly, even to the politicians and economic decision-makers'. Many of the companies present at both the Open 13 and the GPTL sell products and services to local institutions (the region of Provence, the district of Bouches-du-Rhône, and various cities). A sporting event is an opportunity for these companies to develop and nurture connections with this government institutional network, a necessity that might otherwise be difficult to manage. Because sporting events are often sponsored by these institutions, they present a unique environment in which representatives of such institutions may be approached as hosts rather than as targets for future business. Language One of the distinctive features of the Open 13 is the use of nicknames for several key actors of the tournament, including executives who are regular visitors. For example, a senior executive from one of the French companies sponsoring the tournament becomes Mitch during the tournament because of his resemblance to actor David Hasselhoff, who played the role of Mitch Buchannon in the television series Baywatch. Another executive, known for his ?irtatious proclivities, is nicknamed Tiger, in reference to Tiger Woods' infidelities. Most of the members of the organising team are also given nicknames by the corporate partners. This practice of nicknaming is typical of the customary role-play that these executives engage in, effectively taking on a new identity for just one week, once a year. It also echoes many other ritualistic settings (e.g., Turner, 1982) in which the sharing of a specific language helps create an affinity between the participants of that universe, a sort of identification, understood as the feeling of being similar, of belonging to a group with its own vocabulary. Augé (1999) talks about the ability of rituals to create 'a universe of recognition, where the intimate sharing of language and references creates a form of momentary identity' (p. 73). The Open 13 is a good illustration of this, as it functions as 'a universe of recognition' where nicknames and specific gestures, which are never codified, allow members to feel like they are part of a distinct community. Gestures The body language of the visitors in the Open 13 Village also evokes the feeling of a community, one that exists in between home and business. When they meet, many of the business partners do a special type of handshake usually seen on tennis courts at the end of a match. Often, they also greet each other with a kiss on the cheek, a widespread custom in Marseille, although it is customarily reserved for friends and relatives. As with other types of business parties, there is a register of gestures that are considered normal within the frame of the Village, but less so outside of that particular space. To follow Goffman's (1967) insights into interaction rituals, special handshakes and kisses symbolise a specific kind of frame, more informal and complicit than regular business interactions, where business executives enact and reinforce a specific kind of executive camaraderie. The gestures and jokes that circulate at the Open 13 also indicate a decidedly male form of camaraderie. Tiger Woods jokes and firm handshakes suggest that the symbolic universe of the community created here is more masculine than feminine. Compared to other B2B contexts (de Cohen & Deterding, 2009) and the
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environment of other sporting events (Sartore & Cunningham, 2007), the Open 13 is probably less dominated by men: approximately 50% of the organising staff are women, and various activities during the tournament are designed specifically with the presence of women executives in mind (e.g., a fashion show, and a party for Valentine's Day). Regardless, while we have emphasised the diversity of business executives interacting, that diversity is merely relative; most executives interacting in the Village of the Open 13 are indeed male, white collar, privileged, and Caucasian. Likewise, most of the executives we interviewed for this project are men. Here we are reminded of the sociological insight that rituals can also be an opportunity for dominant social groups to strengthen their elite position. While scholars have stressed that parties and rituals can become an arena where non-elites can articulate 'alternative and non-official attitudes and values' (Lukes, 1975, pp. 301-302), we find that the way the Open 13 and GPTL villages are structured (as enclosed areas for a business elite) helps to create a feeling of belonging to a privileged group that is 'in the know' and, for all its efforts to be democratic, one that is re?ective of a predominantly masculine business world. However, we saw this changing over the six years of our observation as more and more businesswomen were seen participating in the Village, thus gradually putting to rest the image of a place where women are relegated to inferior roles such as hostesses or wives in attendance. Characters and stories One of the key factors in creating the collective history of such occasions is the appeal of leaders and other charismatic figures who personify the event. Some of the senior executives and CEOs who have been at the Open 13 for a long time, such as the CEO of Sodexo, Pierre Bellon, are especially sought after by executives wishing to share sports and business anecdotes. These instances of storytelling are particularly popular with business executives. In our field notes we have recorded instances where people at the Open 13 would talk about the arrival of a charismatic CEO, and about how executives from different companies would leave their marquees to rally around him and hear his stories. These small groups of people may talk about tennis and other sports, but more importantly these are opportunities to talk about business issues in a relaxed and congenial environment. For example, during an informal conversation between several of the Open 13 partners, a senior executive at French services company Sodexo, mentioned in passing that one of his biggest Brazilian clients, a very powerful Brazilian CEO, was a huge tennis fan. An executive from the French bank BNP, a sponsor of major tennis tournaments, saw this anecdote as an opportunity to court the Brazilian businessman, by using the bank's connections in the tennis world. A few months later, the French bank was inviting that same Brazilian millionaire to attend a Davis cup match between France and Brazil. During the event, the Brazilian executive got a chance to meet with the whole Brazilian tennis team, including his own favourite tennis player, Gustavo Kuerten. Following this intense courtship, a year later, the Brazilian CEO had switched banks and become one of the French bank's biggest clients in South America. These and other examples demonstrate that, more than mere side discussions, these conversations can be critical to the executives sponsoring the tournament. For example, executives often learn details about regional business life, upcoming projects, and other key information that they would not necessarily hear about through official channels or in more formal meetings. Small gatherings inside the
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Village are opportunities for executives to catch up on what has happened during the past year and what significant business events have taken place. Sometimes, a tennis trainer might join these gatherings and fuel them with stories about what happens 'behind the scenes'. For executives, this ability to share in the inner workings of a sporting event is a unique opportunity because it makes them feel like they are part of a business community that is both 'in the know' and apart from the general crowd of spectators. This access to certain stories about what goes on behind the scenes is also a way to establish a hierarchy within the community: executives who have more access to the tournament's organisers and its key charismatic figures gain a status within this univers e that may not necessarily re?ect their position in the business world. Within this hierarchy, there are always charismatic leaders - what we see as a sort of tribal leader - around whom the community of businesses rallies. Both the Open 13 and the GPTL have just such a leader. Business partners often mentioned their interest in these tournaments being cemented through their admiration for the tennis tournament manager - in the case of the GPTL, Gilles Moretton.
You know what it's like at this kind of event, people start by buying places and inviting customers and it keeps going further up the hierarchy and then one day someone asked us to become the fifth partner so our president got involved and Gilles Moretton told his whole story, a personal story about how he created the thing, and there's no doubt that we found all of that really attractive and convincing. So that's why we gave our answer within a day. (Huguette Pontois, Communications Director, Banque Rhône-Alpes)
At the Open 13, business partners would seek the presence of Jean-François Caujolle, the director of the tournament, gathering around him to hear stories about the players and the backstage stories of the tournament. But as if to make himself more highly sought after, Caujolle appears only sporadically in the Village. He tries to avoid spending a lot of time with business partners, instead letting them organise the Village as they wish. Overall, what we have described is a system of stories, gestures, language and practices which help transform the Open 13 into a sort of macro-ritual. These symbols are also codes to newcomers if they want to fit in, and they are sources of faux pas. For instance, executives from one of the newer sponsoring companies of the Open 13, an employment services company, approached human resources managers from other sponsoring companies to present and sell their services. The overtly mercantile nature of the sales pitch broke the code of interactions to which sponsoring companies implicitly subscribe to. Experienced executives 'in the know' shunned the executives from the new sponsor, and they are yet to fully find their place within the Open 13 community. We have other similar examples, illustrating the importance of understanding the frame or culture of the tennis tournament in order to fit in, develop relationships, and become a member of the community. What remains after the party A sense of communitas What remains after the party is a 'communitas' of executives and corporations who have gone through an intense, festive time in what we have described as a
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macro-ritual. In Turner's (1969) work, communitas can be considered in opposition to structured and formal relationships, creating a generic bond and a sentiment of 'humankindness' between people. According to Turner (1982), the feeling of communitas involves 'a ?ash of mutual understanding on the existential level, and a gut understanding of synchronicity' (p. 48). We conceptualise business parties as moments where a new kind of inter- organisational relationship is promoted, one that is based on sharing an intense and cyclical moment, a space and time that comes only once a year. This idea was re?ected in the way that some of our informants described the Open 13 and the GPTL as times when they felt as though their family had been reconstituted. A business partner at the GPTL mentioned feeling like she was coming back to the family home:
You know what it's like when people meet once a year and then you go there every Sunday or Friday to see how our stands are shaping up, that's quite normal. Plus there is the work being done and then suddenly we show up all at once, it's like a family reunion. And on the first day, the Monday, it's great. I've always said that it's like going on vacation, arriving at a holiday house and meeting up with all of your family. (Huguette Pontois, Communications Director, Banque Rhône-Alpes)
Likewise, an executive attending the Open 13 described the feeling of belonging to a family:
At the Open 13 we are all part of a family; everybody knows each other and we spend a week together with the organisers, the players, the umpires, the other partners, without even noticing that we are working in the Palais des Sports in Marseille. (Alain Terno, Sponsoring Director, BNP Paribas).
The fact that these executives mention 'family', 'home', and 'holiday' in the same breath, and do so while talking about tennis tournaments, is particularly surprising and suggests a dimension of B2B that has rarely been talked about. The way some of the executives we talked to felt about these tennis tournaments and experienced the space was very affective. Rather than being secondary to the success of the business party, these feelings of communitas or of reuniting with family are indispensable to successful business interactions, both during the tennis tournament and outside it. For example, one of our informants explained how having a space and time outside of regular business activity provided an opportunity for a different kind of sales approach that is less direct:
At a certain point in time, you need to meet your contacts again, talk things through with them and revive your relationship. These are people we see regularly but when this happens in a setting that is more festive and less businesslike, it's an opportunity to talk things over in less serious settings, a different environment that makes it easier to get things done since you can get to know people better in this kind of setting. Where something new has happened, we need to be able to explain the approach we have taken, but this doesn't necessarily have to be done around a table using a PowerPoint presentation. It's at this level that events of this kind can be quite useful and evolve in a way that makes them quite strong. (Axel Carrée, Partnership Director, Perrier-Vittel)
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For Perrier-Vittel and many of the other firms in our sample, the space of the business tournament allows for a different kind of relationship-building, based on relaxed interactions, which allow talk about business without the pressure of the sales pitch or the highly structured PowerPoint presentation to which Axel refers. In other words, the relaxed and affective dimension of the tournaments we studied is crucial because it allows a different, complementary type of relationship marketing. Beyond the week of the tournament, year after year, the communitas seems to last. This is despite the fact that no formal reunions are held outside the tournament. Illustrating the resilience of the communitas, the business partners of the Open 13 expressed solidarity with the organisers during a series of damaging incidents. In 2010, a labour dispute erupted between the tournament organisers and a former employee. The dispute was reported in several newspapers and damaged the reputation of the Open 13. Several weeks later, Andy Murray, one of the stars of the tournament, pulled out at the last minute, citing 'personal reasons'. Another star, Juan Martin Del Potro, also backed out of the tournament because of an injury. This was a significant blow to the organisers because these two players were the only ones at the tournament from among the top ten players in the world. Throughout these events, however, the corporate partners remained supportive, and several called the organisers to express this support. Their language in these conversations was meaningful because they continually used the plural pronoun 'we' when talking about the tournament's crisis, as in: 'It is really a shame that we cannot get Murray this year again'. The relationships formed at the Open 13, and the set of codes and symbols animating these relationships, seem to last well after the tournament. For example, when they meet in non-tennis-party settings, many executives still call each other using the nicknames they gained during the tournament (e.g. Tiger; Mitch). Some of them also continue to wear the limited edition shirts and polos that the organisers distribute to sponsoring companies. By continue to wear these shirts and their nicknames long after the tournament is over, sponsoring executives signal their membership and their commitment to the community. Lastly, longstanding partners rarely drop the tournament suddenly, as the sense of communitas tends to compel them to act in what is generally perceived as a courteous manner. For instance, Peugeot, a loyal partner at the Open 13 since 1993, withdrew in 2010 for economic reasons. The company's regional executive did not, however, want to completely drop out of the Village, and even though Seat took Peugeot's place as lead partner, Peugeot's regional management team tried, albeit discreetly, to keep a small stand open and to retain access to the Village. The regional director told us that the loss of the Open 13 partnership had broken a routine that he had worked hard to promote to a number of important customers; his company was no longer present at what had become 'the place to be' in February in Marseille. Evaluating the effectiveness of the party We find that most corporate partners have a difficult time justifying their investments in the tournaments. Or rather, they have a hard time justifying these investments when using the quantitative framework that is typically used by corporations to measure return on marketing investment. After the tournament, many corporate partners actually contact the organising team to ask for figures about the tournament in order to justify their tournament expenses. For example, one year, a partner
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inquired about the number of handicapped people working for the tournament to determine whether the expense could be deemed 'corporate social responsibility'. Most years, the organising team has had to hire an independent research firm to calculate the media exposure that the tournament provides for companies. Largely, this justifying exercise relies on audience figures. They ask for such figures as the number of spectators, the size of the television audience, the number of celebrities present at the event, and other statistics to measure the event's success. In addition, corporate partners ask for videos and photographs to serve as tangible evidence of the fruits of their investment. To meet these demands, the organising team organises for a film crew and a professional photographer to record life in the Village. Such images become part of the partners' archives in case they must later prove the worthiness of their expenses. Executives construe the tournament as a kind of event with mass appeal, not a venue offering access to politicians and other key economic agents. For example, the company Sodexo asked the organising team of the Open 13 to display their logo on the tournament's web page, with the rationale that the number of website visitors and pages viewed was an outcome that could be measured. By carefully selecting images and singling out key audience members, organisations reframe their role in the tournament as sponsors, and reinforce the dominant representation of sporting events as opportunities for developing a company's corporate reputation. Many companies in our study participate in this game of requalification, transforming the tournament into a mass-market event, even though they care little about the marketing ramifications of sponsoring the event. But while they frame their sponsorship in terms of reputation and image building, their main motives are elsewhere. Many of the sponsors we met seemed indifferent about television exposure because it was only very indirectly related to their business. The case of the company Bombardier is a prime example. As a manufacturer of aircraft and rail vehicles, Bombardier benefits very little from having advertisements displayed around tennis courts and on television because most of its business is with other businesses and institutions. This does not mean that the companies we interviewed do not care about the organisational effectiveness of participating in these events. Our findings highlight the difficulty of measuring the financial impact of business parties, but interviews with executives also revealed that they valued these parties for their inter-organisational effectiveness. An informant from Sodexo talked about the Open 13 as an opportunity to meet the region's key decision-makers within a single week:
Every year I meet new people from the whole South-East region of France, and I learn new things about how methods are changing within their organisation, the way hierarchical structures are changing. In fact, while spending a fun time together, the Open 13 has become a time when we access new opportunities to relate to our partners, in a way that did not exist before. (Jean-Claude Secchi, Events Director, Sodexo)
Similarly, an executive from BNP talked about the way the Open 13 helped him secure a large account:
Some of the executives we invite, they are really passionate about tennis, and follow different tournaments around the world. This is an opportunity for them
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to meet players in a kind of intimate space. One of these executives, of Brazilian origin, recently decided to come over and switch his company to our bank, and he made that decision on the day we organised a dinner [for him]. (Alain Terno, Sponsoring Director, BNP France)
It should be kept in mind that these executives are ones who have selected this specific event because it fits their purposes. In the case of both the Open 13 and the GPTL, we find that the local nature of the event is especially important, in the way that our informant from Sodexo talks about meeting executives from the south-east of France and getting to understand the evolution of different organisations. He talks about the event as being another way to relate to other organisations, in that such an event creates a space and time that not only facilitates the discussion of business in a way that is less direct or confrontational than usual, but also gives B2B executives a better sense of where their clients are at. In other words, a main contribution of our findings is to show that these parties work economically because they are hedonic and festive. And while this festive aspect of B2B relationships is hard to describe or measure - and hence largely unaccounted for by the academic literature - it is a fundamental component of the B2B world.
Discussion and implications
It is known that personal bonds, an important component in many inter- organisational relationships, are crucial in business marketing (Witkowski & Thibodeau, 1999). Our results allow a deeper understanding of how executives participate in business parties in order to facilitate their interactions and relationships with external actors in a local /regional context where homophily is not the rule (McPherson et al., 2001). Indeed, business parties facilitate the creation and deepening of relationships among a wide variety of actors. We find that very few companies' interest in business parties like the Open 13 stems from a need for public visibility. It is particularly telling that the organisers of the Open 13 were never able to attract a mobilephone operator or a consumer-oriented electronics company like Sony to become a corporate partner. Instead, most of the companies sponsoring the Open 13 or the GPTL are involved in selling projects-to-order or solutions through bidding processes (Cova, Ghauri, & Salle, 2002). Companies such as Bombardier, Onet, and Sodexo need to sustain relationships with many different kinds of market participants, including senior members of local institutions and government. Free from the restrictions of formal presentations and face-to-face meetings where they are just another provider bidding for a contract, the exchange of stories and jokes enables a form of mutual understanding and camaraderie that can otherwise be hard to develop. In contrast to the salon or trade fair, the business party at a tennis tournament is not a time during which individuals confront each other and compete on behalf of their companies; it is a time when professional barriers and defences are lowered and where individuals socialise around mutual interests. While trade shows are based on the neo-tribal need to periodically meet and interact with similar others belonging to similar organisations (Borghini et al., 2006), the parties at tennis tournaments rely on eschewing industry concerns and sharing a fun time with non-similar others.
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At a salon or trade fair, executives can share the tricks of their trade and exchange war stories. In the case of a local business network, however, rituals help generate a feeling of communitas developed through shared emotions (Maffesoli, 1996), something which can profoundly affect the relationships and perceptions of relationships that actors form. The aperitifs, the rituals of gift-giving, and the jargon that emerges at the Open 13 and the GPTL are the means through which the network constructs a collective memory and a structure of affinity. Business parties create a sort of virtual community that cuts across industry classifications and hierarchical boundaries. This type of event seems to provide a kind of hidden infrastructure that is central to economic life, yet is largely invisible because it is formed backstage, in spaces like business parties. Thus, one answer to our question 'Why do executives spend such large sums of money organising business parties?' seems to be related to the maintenance of a community of decision-makers coming from diverse backgrounds and organisations. We must nevertheless acknowledge some qualifications to this particular instance of community creation. While we noted the presence of rituals involving women, the gestures (e.g., special handshakes) and language we observed at the Open 13 re?ect a m asculine imaginary permeating a culture of chie?y male decision-makers partying and interacting together. In addition, the business parties we observed function by being elitist, in that only a privileged few can become members of this communitas of decision-makers. In that sense, business parties function like other forms of rituals - through communion and exclusion, solidarity and selection - to create a certain kind of community (Turner, 1969). Future research will need to address whether other rituals can help create other forms of community, more diverse and less elitist, to create more diversity in the world of business relationships. Another important contribution of this paper is to show how business parties function and how they organise around the objects, characters, practices, and stories that circulate during the time of the party. Our ethnographic approach allows for a deep understanding of how these parties exist and endure and how they are moments where business partners try to (re)create a feeling of communitas. The cyclical dimension of parties such as annual tennis tournaments is important because it promotes the renewal of business relationships every year. Thus, it lends a structure to business life by offering a space and time to regenerate and sustain relationships. Unlike at trade fairs or exhibitions, the space where the business party takes place downplays the economic and professional dimensions and creates a more improvised, organic, festive atmosphere. This space becomes one of communitas as soon as the annual rite of passage of the election of the mayor of the Village is enacted. This rite allows participants to enter into a liminal phase and transforms the area of the party into a liminoid zone (Tuner, 1982) - a favourable ground for the (re)creation of the communitas. Within this liminoid zone, and during the entire sporting event, small business parties such as the aperitif and the exchange of gifts play the role of micro-rituals (see examples in Table 3). In order to function correctly and to be established firmly in the context of the macroritual, these micro-rituals mobilise artefacts such as objects and dress (no professional badge, no business card); language (use of nicknames); gestures (a full register of gestures that are considered normal within the frame of the business party, but less so outside of that particular space, including a special type of handshake); characters (leaders and other charismatic figures who personify the event); and stories (stories about what happens 'behind the scenes').
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Rituals have been shown to reinforce social bonds and social cohesion (Leach, 1968), yet the ritualistic dimension of inter-organisational life has rarely been studied (exceptions include Borghini et al., 2006; Cova & Salle, 2000). It is especially important for managers to understand how rituals work. From our interviews, we gathered that most marketing managers possess an intuitive understanding of the power of rituals. They understand that the sharing of an intense moment when a business and a client look in the same direction is a powerful tool for establishing a bond. Future research should go beyond our analysis of the importance of rituals to examine what makes an inter-organisational ritual succeed or fail. To do so, future research should take a more comparative approach than the one we have taken here, analysing different types of events where business executives gather. In our interviews with marketing, public relations, and communication managers in B2B firms, we gathered many such comparisons, such as between cultural events like theatre outings with clients, and sporting events where they are not only spectators but also participants in the event itself. One of the executives we interviewed talked about the deep bonds he has built with other executives in other organisations by running marathons with them. Again, an analysis of such events as rituals could be especially fruitful, and might draw from the vast literature on sporting events as specific types of rituals (Birrell, 1981). Because festive times are important, scholars also need to take parties and games more seriously in future research. As Ingram and Miller (2007, p. 559) note, '[p]arties like professional mixers are not all fun and games. They are forums for initiating acquaintanceships, cementing friendships, and introducing others and are therefore paths to more substantive goals'. We would add that parties are above all fun and games, but that these games should be analysed as meaningful rituals of interaction and integration. At the heart of B2B are relationships within a network (Håkansson et al., 2009), and fun and games are vital to maintaining such relationships. Finally, we want to emphasise our methodological contribution to the literature on business markets. More than twenty years ago, Deshpande and Webster (1989) championed organisational symbolism and its relevance to studying marketing phenomena, but thus far studies of the symbolic life of organisations have largely been left to management scholars studying organisational culture and identity (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Our work answers these earlier calls for more symbolic research in marketing, and proposes an application of this approach to inter-organisational settings. We have analysed practices of interaction, objects, and language as ways through which executives sustain business relationships and create a communitas of professionals during a tennis tournament. But we also believe this approach to be especially promising and relevant to many areas of the B2B world. Many studies in this domain have taken economic and behavioural approaches, and while these approaches have great value, a sociological and cultural view of inter-organisational relationships would help us to better understand the social meaning of inter - organisational exchanges. For example, the methodological and analytical approach we have taken here could prove to be very useful in examining the bidding process, with its ritualised phases (e.g., request for proposal, bidders' conference, bidding, and negotiating), the traditional exchange of gifts and greeting cards between businesses for Christmas, and the organisation of increasingly spectacular business conferences. Anthropological studies of these exchanges represent a promising avenue for future research that takes more seriously the fun, festive, emotional, and theatrical dimensions of business life.
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Acknowledgements
References
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doc_970352517.docx
Marketing management is a business discipline which is focused on the practical application of marketing techniques and the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities. Rapidly emerging forces of globalization have led firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making international marketing highly significant and an integral part of a firm's marketing strategy.
Marketing Study on Marketing Management
Abstract We examine the role of business parties in business markets: why do B2B companies spend such large amounts of money to sponsor events meant for public consumption, such as sporting events, when most of their activity involves selling to other organisations? Drawing from extensive qualitative fieldwork in the world of tennis tournaments, we detail the specific universe of parties that happen backstage, between companies sponsoring these events. This context helps illuminate the critical role of business parties in business networks. Far from being mere recreation at the company's expense, business parties are important opportunities for executives to develop and manage their relationships. We show that a business party functions as a particular kind of ritual by creating a distinct universe with its own language, gestures, and other modes of interaction. Summary statement of contribution Our theoretical contribution to the literature on relationship marketing is to detail the unifying function of business parties in local business markets, where relationships with a variety of organisations are key to a company's success. Our methodological contribution is to illustrate the relevance of anthropological approaches and concepts, such as rituals, to the world of B2B. Keywords anthropology; parties; personal contact; relationship marketing; ritual; socialisation
Introducti on
Since Rook's (1985) seminal paper on the importance of rituals in consumers' lives, ritual has become a prevalent trope for the study of a wide range of consumption phenomena, such as Thanksgiving reunions, Halloween celebrations, high school proms, and other shared occasions (McKechnie & Tynan, 2008; Otnes & Lowrey, 2004; Tinson & Nuttall, 2010; Wallendorf & Arnould, 1991). This attention to rituals can be explained by the increasing awareness that many consumption phenomena are best studied at a collective level. Gatherings of Harley Davidson enthusiasts, for example, are organised around different rituals of socialisation,
© 2013 Westburn Publishers Ltd.
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communion, and celebration that promote group cohesion and help develop a distinctive identity for Harley bikers (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995). In the business-to-business (B2B) context, however, the power of rituals remains largely unexplored (exceptions include Cova & Salle, 2000; Rinallo, Borghini, &Golfetto, 2010). We already know the power of rituals within organisations: that Christmas parties and other types of office rituals can foster a sense of organisational community (Monjaret, 2001; Trice & Beyer, 1984). In this paper, we extend this line of inquiry and show that rituals offer important clues for understanding relationships between organisations. More specifically, we explain that business parties function as macro-rituals that facilitate a sense of unity and community between business executives who come from diverse professional backgrounds. Our analysis is based on an in-depth, qualitative examination of a major tennis tournament in the South of France, with additional fieldwork conducted at another French tennis tournament. For both tournaments, we attended and observed the parties organised by sponsoring companies. These sponsors spend hundreds of thousands of Euros every year on organising and attending these events. But apart from the promise of a day outside the office and a chance to mingle with a few tennis stars, we know little about the role and significance of such parties. Our work contributes to the literature on B2B marketing in three ways. First, our paper offers new insights into the formation of inter-organisational relationships and networks. Our study specifically highlights the power of rituals, and especially of business parties, in managing relationships between executives coming from diverse occupational backgrounds. We describe business parties, like the ones happening at tennis tournaments, as distinct universes with specific vocabularies, gestures, and ways of interacting that facilitate the formation of an affective community of organisational actors. Given the importance of these personal relationships for business success, our work offers valuable insights for managers seeking to create and sustain inter-organisational relationships by leveraging the power of rituals. Second, our work shows the methodological relevance of a symbolic approach to the study of B2B. Deshpande and Webster (1989) were amongst the first to call for more research examining the symbolic life of marketing work, especially the critical role of employee socialisation in achieving marketing success. Our work applies this analytical perspective to the world of B2B and shows how paying attention to rituals of interaction, and specifically to business parties, sheds new light on the way business relationships are formed and sustained. This is consistent with recent work taking an anthropological approach to B2B (Rinallo & Golfetto, 2006; Visconti, 2010), and should spur new research exploring the symbolic nature of B2B interactions. Third, our work contributes to the stream of studies on market-making practices (Aráujo, Finch, & Kjellberg, 2010; Zwick & Cayla, 2011). This body of work has developed a renewed perspective, informed by sociology and anthropology, on the practices of marketing professionals at work, and helped us better understand how marketing happens. Our research focuses more specifically on the practices, events and interactions of the B2B world. We show that rituals help sustain relationships between organisational actors and shape business markets. Parties and rituals constitute the invisible infrastructure of B2B markets. While appearing frivolous and wasteful on the surface, parties and rituals are fundamental to the constitution of business markets.
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The role of rituals in business markets
Past research has emphasised that the peculiarity of business markets - that is, markets where buyers and sellers are businesses or other organisations - has to do with the crucial importance of long and stable inter-organisational relationships (Guillet de Monthoux, 1975; Håkansson, 1982), in contrast to the more episodic and short-term interactions in consumer markets. An important stream of literature on relationship marketing addresses this critical issue of managing long-term mutually beneficial relationships between suppliers and customers in business markets (Ford, 1982). In fact, several studies have emphasised the need to build and sustain relationships not just between suppliers and customers, but spanning the entire network of a business market, which involves a vast number of stakeholders (Mattsson, 1997). Thus, the 'markets-as-networks' approach (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995) has helped us understand business markets as webs of relationships where one actor is connected directly and indirectly to a variety of other actors. Håkansson, Ford, Gadde, Snehota, and Waluszewski (2009) explain that, in business markets, organisations are mutually dependent because 'each is vital to and dependent on others that it borders and overlaps' (p. 6). Despite this emphasis on managing relationships in business markets (Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987; Ford, 1982), we still know little about the pattern of interactions between business executives within a network (exceptions include Cunningham & Turnbull, 1982 ; Halinen & Salmi, 2001; Mainela & Ulkuniemi, 2009). Researchers in industrial organisation and marketing have stressed that it is 'the individual who makes contact, becomes acquainted and builds up trust between companies' (Hamfelt & Lindberg, 1987, p. 179), and have called for more research on how interpersonal interactions within a business network can reinforce an atmosphere of trust or, conversely, how individual interactions can damage interorganisational relationships (Haytko, 2004). To sum up, they claim that personal bonds are crucial in relationship marketing (Witkowski & Thibodeau, 1999). In order to facilitate the development of rich interpersonal connections within business markets, some scholars have highlighted the importance of rituals (Borghini, Golfetto, & Rinallo, 2006; Cova & Salle, 2000). Building upon the idea of ritual as 'being the basic social act' (Rappaport, 1999, p. 138), these studies have encouraged businesses to integrate a ritualistic dimension into their management of interpersonal relationships within a network: 'The final aim is to provide a ritual platform able to support the construction, the development and the maintenance of interpersonal contacts' (Cova & Salle, 2000, p. 683). Past research on trade shows and fairs has similarly highlighted that fairs and exhibitions fulfil 'the neo-tribal need of periodically meeting and interacting with similar others belonging to different organizations' (Borghini et al., 2006, p. 1156). Studies by Rinallo et al. (2010) have defined these events as 'relational experiences in a ritualized context' (p. 254). They show that trade fairs and exhibitions cannot be reduced to mere sources of economic advantage; they have to be studied as a primary form of ritualistic experience which supports the development of interpersonal relationships. Looking at the ritual dimension of business gatherings may help us understand why executives spend such large sums of money organising them. A marketing manager at a European aerospace company revealed that more than 80% of her communications budget is spent on trade shows, specifically air shows such as the
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ones held at Le Bourget in France and Farnborough in the UK. Interestingly, the lion's share of the budget is spent on small structures, or 'marquees', set up along an airport's runway where the company hosts expensive, invitation-only events that are more corporate parties than formal business meetings. These marquees host a range of presentations, press events, lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties. All the top aerospace companies (including Airbus, Boeing, and Bombardier) operate one during the major air shows. The Airbus marquee, widely recognised for the quality of its cuisine, is often considered the place to be. Through trade shows and exhibitions, executives are able to build connections with executives who share the same interests, often the same occupational jargon and objectives. This common ground helps executives build strong connections with managers from other firms. Sociologists have already stressed the importance of the homophily principle, which helps explain that 'a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people' (McPherson, Smith- Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p. 416). Events such as the aerospace gatherings described above or the major technological trade shows such as CEBIT are structured to facilitate interactions between people who, by virtue of belonging to the same industry, have much in common (Borghini et al., 2006). However, the homogeneity of trade shows can be problematic in markets where, to succeed, executives have to develop and manage relationships with very diverse stakeholders, such as government administrators, university research centres, and non-governmental organisations. Absent of the benefits of a common occupational community, these relationships among diverse organisational actors are more difficult to build and manage (Ingram & Miller, 2007). Many business deals are built in networks characterised by a wide variety of stakeholders (Björkman & Kock, 1995; Santos-Rivera & Rufin, 2010) but we need more research on the construction and maintenance of these networks. To facilitate their interactions and relationships with 'non-similar others', companies are searching for 'mixers or networking parties, minimally structured social events that bring together guests who do not all know each other and provide a context in which they can interact freely to strengthen existing ties or forge new ones' (Ingram & Miller, 2007, p. 558). These kinds of ritualised contexts present a useful complement to trade shows and exhibitions in helping manage a network of non- similar others. And as our research demonstrates, the ritualistic dimension of mixers and parties is especially conducive to creating bonds between business executives and other actors connected only by a common locality. Our work is anchored in the rich literature on business markets and relationship marketing, which emphasises the importance of networks and interpersonal interactions. What we add is an attention to the power of collective gatherings, rather than dyadic interactions, in shaping the way business executives develop relationships. Looking at the ritualistic dimension of business markets offers an especially promising avenue for studying this collective dimension of the B2B world.
Parties as recreational rituals
Our conceptualisation and operationalisation of rituals in this paper originates in the large stream of social sciences research on the topic (Durkheim, 1915 /1961; Goffman, 1967; Turner, 1969). For the purposes of this paper, we define ritual as a planned set of highly scripted and stylised activities carried out through social
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interaction (cf. Trice & Beyer, 1984). As we will detail later, the business parties we studied fit this definition because they consist of recurring, elaborate, planned events where executives have assigned roles and enact partly scripted behaviours. We define business parties as social gatherings of executives and employees with specific hedonistic purposes. In other words, business parties represent the times when organisational members get together to have fun. Yet as we will show, behind these motives of 'letting off some steam', business parties fulfil other critical functions in organisational and, importantly, interorganisational life. Of particular interest to our research on the B2B world is Durkheim's (1915/1961) insight that rituals help create and deepen relationships between very diverse elements of a community. From this perspective, the role of ritual is to unify a group of actors with disparate goals and values. We find a similar attention to the unifying dimension of rituals in Turner's work, which shows that rituals function as a kind of 'social glue' holding a society together by creating wider networks of association that cross-cut the boundaries of lineages and villages. Rites of passage and initiation also play a socialisation role by serving as vehicles for the stories, values, and beliefs of a community, facilitating the reproduction of collective identities (Turner, 1969, 1982). These insights into the federating and socialising functions of rituals have been applied in organisational theory to talk about the managerial uses of rituals in creating a sense of organisational community (Deal & Kennedy, 1982). Organisational theorists have emphasised how rituals of integration, for example, are sense-making mechanisms that help employees understand what kind of company they work for (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006; Trice & Beyer, 1984). In addition, office rituals such as Christmas and birthday parties help create a sense of 'we-ness' in the firm and give employees a feeling that they belong to a sort of virtual family. In the organisational domain, paying attention to rituals has helped us better grasp the symbolic dimension of organisational life, enabling us to go beyond rationalistic explanations of organisational behaviour. Yet the role of rituals and, more generally, the symbolic dimension of interorganisational exchanges have remained largely unexplored. Taking stock of recent research on rituals in the area of consumer research, Arnould (2001) argued that, 'while the idea of consumer ritual was introduced into the consumer research paradigm over 25 years ago (Rook, 1985), the topic has languished' (p. 384). The same comments could also apply to inter-organisational relationships and the world of B2B. Despite recent research highlighting the importance of rituals in B2B contexts like trade shows (Rinallo et al., 2010), we know little about the ritualistic dimension of business markets, in contrast to the more widespread analysis of rituals in consumer markets. We consider business parties, and specifically the business parties happening during tennis tournaments, to be a rich context for studying the ritualistic dimension of B2B. Much of the work on parties and ceremonies in social sciences has emphasised their ritualistic dimension (Durkheim, 1915 /1961). Trice and Beyer (1984) emphasise that office parties are rites of integration that permit the loosening of various organisational norms, and breathe new life into a community of workers. They mention how one might witness various gestures of affection like hugging and kissing, which are rarely used in regular work settings but which help employees break the spell of everyday office life. They compare office parties to carnivals in that they allow the forging of new informal links between diverse people. These insights about
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parties as ?attening social hierarchies are particularly meaningful for our work on business markets, given the importance of power and hierarchical structures within interorganisational contexts (Håkansson et al., 2009). Given the literature's treatment of business parties as a type of ritual - one of socialisation and integration (Monjaret, 2001; Trice & Beyer, 1984) - we have every reason to take these parties seriously. As research has repeatedly shown, parties and other kinds of breaks in the routine of business life are much more than 'stolen time' (cf. Bouvier, 1989); parties may represent the non-serious part of the business world, but they are also ways of maintaining a social equilibrium in the corporate sphere (Monjaret, 2001; Roy, 1959). And despite the appearance and perhaps even the allure of being unproductive diversions from business as usual, they are often essential to the pursuit of productive activities, offering a kind of social glue between stakeholders both inside and outside the firm. Our approach in this paper is thus to treat parties as significant events in the life of a business network. Our objective is to detail the activities they comprise and to examine the role of ritualised gatherings in facilitating personal relationships in business markets.
Research methods
The methodological stance we take in this paper is known as organisational symbolism (Deshpande & Webster, 1989), which attends specifically to the symbolic practices and objects - such as myths, stories, rituals, and ceremonies - that express the underlying character of an organisation. For example, studies of organisational identity have looked at practices such as rituals of integration and objects such as product designs as symbolic ways through which organisational members comprehend what their organisation is about (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). In our work, we pay specific attention to the objects, characters, practices, and stories that circulate during business parties because, just as in any other ritual, these artefacts offer important clues to the latent, underlying meaning of these parties. For example, we know from organisational theorists and anthropologists that wearing certain types of dress can be a way to act out a social identity (Rafaeli & Pratt, 2006) and, like other types of organisational objects, can be powerful for organisational members in identifying with the group they belong to. Likewise, the idiosyncratic objects and practices of the business parties we describe help set them apart, creating a different kind of space and time away from the usual business environment, replacing the hierarchies of business life with a more horizontal community. We carried out the majority of our fieldwork at the Open 13 tournament in Marseille between 2006 and 2011, exploring the event in depth to detail how parties and other gatherings between B2B managers unfold. We complemented this fieldwork with observations at the Lyon Tennis Grand Prix (GPTL) tournament between 2006 and 2010 to see whether our insights into business parties could be transferred to another context with a similar mix of companies and government organisations as sponsors. In both cases, we found that parties were key to creating and sustaining inter-organisational relationships. This is re?ected in the significant amount of time and money spent on participation by the attendees of both tournaments. And yet, despite presenting significant avenues for examining the building and nurturing of business relationships, most of the literature on sporting events has focused on the behaviour of attending fans (e.g., Holt, 1995) or their ability to generate enough mass publicity to increase a brand's reputation (Gwinner & Eaton, 1999). Our particular
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interest was piqued when we saw that companies like Veolia and Bombardier were sponsoring these tournaments. Why would such large industrial firms with no obvious connection to the sport sponsor these events, when most of their other marketing activities focus on state institutions and government organisations? By focusing on a specific tournament, we were able to develop an in-depth account of what happens before, during, and after a business party. Our focus on the Open 13 was also pragmatic because of the privileged access we had gained, allowing us to observe and interview executives at the tournament. One of the co-authors of this paper is a consultant with a company that organises sporting events and has been involved with the organisation of this particular tournament for more than fifteen years. Throughout our data collection and analysis, he played the role of complete participant in the setting (Adler & Adler, 1987), meaning that his involvement afforded an intimate knowledge of the culture and workings of tennis tournaments and the role of parties in these tournaments. He has served as a key informant, helping us better understand what goes on behind the scenes at business parties. This methodological approach is very similar to collaborative ethnographic work, where key informants provide an emic-based perspective, or insider's view, while anthropologists offer an etic-based perspective (Lassiter, 2005). In line with this approach, the other two authors of this paper also played an important role by taking an outsider's look at what goes on in the setting and checking each other's interpretations. The methodological approach we applied to the GPTL tournament in Lyon was similar, but with less privileged access and a focus on interviews rather than participant observation. Our study uses a variety of data collection methods that are typically used in ethnographic case studies (Visconti, 2010), including: 1) action research; 2) in-depth interviews; 3) participant observation; and 4) the collection of archival data about each tennis tournament. First, one author was involved for over five years in the day- to-day organisation of the Open 13 and GPTL and, consistent with an action research approach (Whyte, 1991), kept field notes on the observations he made before, during, and after each tournament. He was the development manager for the organisation of the sporting events, his principal mission being the activation of and follow-up on the evolution of the content of the proposals and activities of the partnerships, as well as the deployment of new modes of communication (new technologies and new media). Second, we conducted 35 interviews with members of participating businesses and the organisers of the two tournaments, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Third, to better understand business parties, we also joined the party. The author who acted as manager provided critical introductions to companies and organising teams, allowing the other authors to take part in meetings, informal conversations, and the business parties themselves at one tournament. In making observations, we focused on one site within the Marseille tennis tournament, a space that the organising team calls the 'Village', which is reserved for the interactions between sponsoring companies.1 Consistent with our symbolic perspective on organisational life, we
1The
major companies partnering with the Open 13 tournament are BNP-Paribas (bank and finance), Bombardier (aircraft and rail vehicles), Onet (cleaning multiservices, extreme environment technologies, security, safety), Peugeot and Seat (cars and vans), Sodexo (catering services, facilities management), and Veolia (water and waste management services). The major institutional partners of the Open 13 are the Conseil général des Bouches-duRhône (council of the Bouches-du-Rhône area), Marseille Provence Métropole (an urban community grouping together the city of Marseille and its suburbs), and Ville de Marseille (city of Marseille). Amongst the major companies which support the GPTL are the Banque Rhône-Alpes (bank and finance) and Perrier-Vittel (soft beverages).
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Table 1 Summary of the empirical material.
Method Action research Description Involvement in the day-to-day organisation of the Open 13 and GPTL tournaments between 2006 and 2011 (2010 for GPTL). Each yearly tournament has a duration of 10 days. Taking part in meetings, informal conversations and, in the case of the 2010 Open 13 tournament, the business parties themselves over the course of 4 days. 36 interviews with members of participating businesses (8 women and 28 men) and the organisers of the two tournaments, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. Compilation of local and national press, as well as an on-site newspaper (La Gazette du Village), during the last 6 years (2006-2011).
Participant observation of tournaments/parties In-depth interviews
Archival data
paid particular attention to the symbolic life of the Village and the business parties that transpired: the stories, characters, practices, and objects that structure the life of the Village. Finally, we compiled press clippings and photographs taken at the tournament and added them to our corpus of data to be analysed. We selected some of these photographs to become part of our narrative, as a way to illustrate the space and atmosphere of the party. See Table 1 for a summary of the empirical material and Table 2 for the respondents' profiles. With respect to analysis and interpretation, we followed ethnographic conventions, continually moving among specific transcripts, artefacts, and the evolving data set, which included photos and videos. We iteratively developed patterned regularities in the data and a rich description of the Open 13 culture. One of the patterned regularities we specifically focused on was the practices of parties inside the business party. Thus we paid specific attention to the maintenance and evolution of these parties. Indeed, the tournaments are changing events: the structure of the Village and the parties that are organised remain in perpetual evolution in order to stimulate interactions between people. From one year to the next, the size and type of the spaces varies and new parties are introduced as older ones are eliminated. However, it is possible to highlight certain continuities in these events, as shown in Table 3. Such elements remained rather stable over the period of investigation (2006 to 2011) - some of which had been initiated long before the beginning of our investigation - and thus serve as a solid framework for analysis. The analysis and interpretation of the vast amount of data collected through our diverse methods concentrated on what was happening during these micro-parties and what was relevant for the development of relationships. To achieve fruitful analysis, our data were organised to correspond to three distinct phases:
• Getting ready to party; • Time to party!; • What remains after the party.
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Table 2 List of informants.
Name Open13 Marseille Julien Busson Jean-François Caujolle Patrick Caujolle Dominique Ciotti Cédric Denonfoux Lionel Fassi Gilbert Gaudin Richard Joly Elodie Malatrait-Singer Max Massa Alain Masson Philippe Meysselle Armand Mikaelian Gender M M M F M M M M F M M M M Seat Open 13 Open 13 Veolia Onet La Provence (press) Conseil Général 13 Peugeot Open 13 Onet Sodexo BNP Paribas Marseille Provence Métropole Peugeot Seat Veolia Conseil Général 13 Conseil Général 13 BNP Paribas Sodexo BNP Paribas Open 13 Adecco Perrier-Vittel Peugeot Le Progrès (press) Peugeot Peugeot GPTL GPTL Banque Rhône-Alpes GPTL BNP Paribas BNP Paribas GPTL GPTL Firm Role Director, Events and Partnerships Director Marketing Director Communications Manager Events Coordinator Manager of Partnerships Communications Director for the Departmental Council Regional Partnership Director Public Relations Manager Chairman of the Board Partnership Director Regional Director Events Consultant, Mayor's Office Sponsoring Director Public Relations Manager Sponsoring and Public Relations Director Departmental Council - Sports Sports Director - Departmental Council Regional Partnership Director Events Director Sponsoring Director Manager of the Business Village Regional Director Partnership Director Regional Marketing Director Partnership Director Regional Partnership Director Sponsoring Director Tournament Director Partnership Director Communications Director Public Relations Manager Regional Partnership Director Sponsoring Director Managing Director Tournament Press Secretary
Catherine Montfort Tiphaine Paillard Christian Pillot Antoine Rouzaud Jean-Louis Santoni Christophe Schaeffer Jean-Claude Secchi Alain Terno Henry Vergnon GPTL LYON Matthias Bauland Axel Carrée Jean-Michel Gohier Jean-Pierre Guillot Richard Joly Catherine Montfort Gilles Moretton Stéphane Mort-Sire Huguette Pontois Marie Roussille Christophe Schaeffer Alain Terno Anthony Thiodet Alexia Volatier
F F M M M M M M M M M M M M F M M F F M M M F
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Table 3 Summary of the micro-parties observed at the Open 13, 2006-2011.
Parties Open 13 Marseille Official Party Women's Day Magic Night
Description VIP party organised by the President of the Conseil Général. Fashion show and gift ceremony for female executives and their spouses. Magician doing tricks and shows in the Village.
History Created 1999. Created 1999. Created 1999. Discontinued since 2008 (sponsoring companies wanted something new). Created 2001. Created 2001.
Mayor Election Olympique de Marseille Party Fastest Service Trophy Petanque Games
Election of the Village mayor and exchange of gifts between partners. Party with soccer players and executive staff of the Olympique de Marseille football team. Event sponsored by companies involved in the service industry, for the fastest server in the tennis tournament. Petanque tournament involving tennis players and sponsors.
Created 2004.
Casino Night
Roulette table and other table games.
Created 2005. Discontinued since 2009 (crowd management became an issue). Created 2006. Discontinued since 2009.
This chronological sequence was used strictly to facilitate the representation of our results and not to build a process model. Then, for each of the three phases, we combined 'big stories' stemming from interviews and archives with 'small stories' derived from participant observation and action research. in accordance with the canons of narrative inquiry (Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006). At various points during the analytic process, we challenged our interpretations. We presented our framework of the micro-practices together with the stories, characters, and objects to the manager in charge of the Open 13 tournament for evaluation and criticism throughout the period of investigation. Finally, he read and commented on the initial manuscript draft, thus assessing the credibility (i.e., the internal validity) of our results. We insured the transferability (i.e., the external validity) of our findings by analysing them in parallel using the GPTL tournament, as mentioned above. In some cases, the contrast between the two tournaments helped in highlighting some of the unique practices of the Open 13, such as the size of the badges for example. The fieldwork and data from the GPTL tournament were also useful for investigating the ritualistic dimension of such business parties in greater depth.
Findings
Our findings are presented chronologically, according to the sequence described above, to explain the experience of business executives attending a tennis tournament, beginning with anticipation of the event, followed by the experience
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of the event itself, and finishing with impressions and thoughts about the tournament once it is over. Our approach is consistent with anthropological analyses of rituals that focus on the way rituals unfold and the effects of specific rituals on a community (Geertz, 1973).
Getting ready to party Anticipating the party Several weeks before the Open 13 tournament begins, the executives we spoke to look at their calendars to organise their week at the tournament. They start making phone calls to schedule appointments with other executives, get in touch with old friends to make sure they are going to be there, and generally start planning their time at the tournament. Many businesses in the region of Marseille look forward to the Open 13 with great anticipation. In the following quote, the founder and director of the tournament describes this phenomenon:
People have become increasingly interested in and focused on the Open 13, meaning that it's not something that can be overlooked anymore. Without being pretentious, it really is something that people look forward to in the calendar of sporting events, not only because of the quality of the people involved but also because of what it means during the week when it runs, the friendly atmosphere in the corporate Village created during the tournament week. (Patrick Caujolle, Marketing Director, Open 13).
Although the business parties at the tennis tournaments we observed have been around for a while (the Open 13 since 1993 and the GPTL since 1987), they continue to generate a good deal of excitement among participants. The organisers build this anticipation by refraining from scheduling any meetings or reunions between sponsoring businesses before the tournament. They may keep in touch with partners and occasionally meet with the organisations individually, but it is not until the Open 13 itself that the community of business partners gets a chance to interact. As a result, many of the business executives we spoke with during the tournament mentioned having waited eagerly for the tournament to begin so they could reconvene with colleagues and acquaintances they had not seen in a while. It has already been shown that an important dimension of consumption experiences has to do with the anticipation of consumption (Arnould, Price, & Zinkhan, 2002). Anticipation is likewise critical in the world of B2B in helping build up excitement and momentum. Adding to this anticipation and excitement is the fact that tennis tournaments are annual events that typically only last a week or two. They are brief but intense moments of reunion. At the GPTL, an informant contrasted the soccer season, which lasts almost a year, with the short duration of tennis tournaments:
This has become a big event for Lyon and in fact it's already a key feature of the yearly calendar. There are other events in the city like when the football team plays, although this happens all year long, or when the basketball team plays, which is more seasonal. On the other hand, this is an event that lasts just one week, meaning that companies must hurry to be there. Plus I think it affects more people, it's just a bigger operation. (Alexia Volatier, Press Secretary, GPTL)
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As noted by our informant, the ephemeral nature of tennis tournaments sets them apart from other sporting events, many of which occur throughout an entire season. Finally, business parties taking place at tournaments are cyclical, occurring every year at the same time. This cyclical dimension of parties is important because it fosters the renewal of business relationships every year. Business parties structure business life by offering a space and time to regenerate and sustain relationships in the B2B world. As we have already noted, the management of the relationship requires regular regeneration. Business parties taking place at sporting events like tennis tournaments are part of this regenerative effort executives must integrate into their planning. Creating the space of the party At the Open 13, the space of the party is the Village, a zone of 4000 square meters wherein each of the eight main business sponsors has a large marquee to itself, to invite members of other businesses to and have their meals, discuss the tournament, watch it on their television screen, or catch up on family and other aspects of their personal lives. At the centre of the Village, the organisers typically set up an area called the 'forum', which is a space dedicated to common activities such as games, conferences, celebrations, and ceremonies that are designed to facilitate interaction between businesses. The space of the Village is structured to downplay the economic and professional dimensions of the tournament in favour of a festive atmosphere. Unlike at trade fairs or exhibitions, there are no large signs indicating the different parts of the Village. Instead, the signs are discrete and the hostesses of the tournament guide people through what can often seem like a maze. This is a deliberate decision on the part of the organisers to break from the formality of the trade fair or salon and create a space that is more improvised, organic, and personal. Consistent with this idea of the space as a personal rather than purely economic environment, at the Open 13, business partners are given the opportunity to co- produce the space and, probably because of this involvement, many report a sense of ownership. For example, the organisers of the Open 13 let companies participate in the choice of furniture and décor for their own marquees within the Village. 'This Village is a bit like our home', explained the regional manager for Peugeot, one of the main business partners. The communications manager for the Conseil général des Bouches-du-Rhône said he felt as though he were 'decorating [his] own home'. This collective involvement in the creation of the Village, supported by the organisers of the tournament, helps create a communal atmosphere. An executive working for Onet detailed the advantages of furnishing the marquee at the Open 13 to resemble the company's offices, and participating in the creation of the space:
The Village means that we have to move our company for a week. Other events are traditional and don't let us improvise things like a visit from a particular individual or a special or innovative operation like hosting some partner or the other. In short, we feel quite at home. (Cédric Denonfoux, Events Coordinator, Onet)
This quote and those of other informants talking about the Village space as their 'home' re?ect how business executives think about their place in the Village as a space that is very much like home, where they feel like they are among family members.
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Figure 1 Map of the Open 13 Village (2011 tournament).
Veolia Conseil Général 13
La Provence
JC Decaux Players
1
Gerflor
2
Onet
Open Club Marseille City Open Club
4
MPM
Pasino
Open Club
3
Peugeot AGF
Conference
TV BNP Paribas Sodexo
OPEN 13
Map legend: 1 = Petanque ground. 2 = Fashion show catwalk (Women's Day). 3 = Casino tables (roulette and other tables). 4 = Olympique de Marseille party.
It is a place of business that bears the promise of future transactions, but it is also a communal space. Here we are reminded of the idea of the 'third space' (Oldenburg, 1989), a hybrid space between home and work that allows the pursuit of economic opportunities in a familiar environment. What we end up with in Lyon and Marseille is a space that breaks from that of regular business because it is ephemeral, unstructured, and co-produced by a community of business partners rather than a single organisation. These three dimensions help to establish the collegial atmosphere of the Village, an aspect that was mentioned during several of the interviews we conducted. Importantly, these characteristics of the space also make it especially conducive to another kind of relationship between business partners, one that is more horizontal and communal than the hierarchies and power relationships typical of the B2B world. Overall, the characteristics of tennis tournaments we have described here already bear some resemblance to other rituals. In their brevity, intensity, and cyclical nature, business parties at tournaments are similar to agricultural rites, which provide a calendrical scheme for organising a society's activities (Caillois, 1950) and regenerate the life of the community through the sharing of an intense festive moment. In the creation of a space that is outside of regular business interactions, a hybrid space
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between business and home, business parties also offer a frame for a distinct set of rules, a distinct language - in short, a distinct mode of interaction.
Time to party! Rituals A tennis tournament like the Open 13, and more specifically life inside the Village during the week of the tournament, might best be understood as a type of macro- ritual comprising myriad micro-rituals or 'rites of interaction' (Goffman, 1967). Cova and Salle (2000) proposed that rituals be understood according to two types: macro- rituals, which are elaborate procedures (ceremonies) imbuing the feeling of 'we-ness', such as trade shows; and micro-rituals, which are simple procedures facilitating everyday contact and negotiating personal identity, such as exchanging business cards. With this distinction in mind, we describe some of these micro-rituals here, such as the election of a Village mayor and its accompanying ceremonies of gift-giving, and the pre-dinner aperitif , where business partners share food and drinks. Together, such occasions help create a macro-ritual of communitybuilding and renewal. One of the first rituals in the life of the Village is the election of the Village mayor. The mayor is a business executive who represents the different sponsoring companies and serves as a liaison to the organisers of the tournament (see Figures 2 and 3). The election consists of a series of events that tend to unfold according to a loosely defined pattern. Typically, executives from the sponsoring companies meet for a meal a few months before the start of the tournament. During the gathering, the mayor from the previous year talks about the activities and events that worked the previous year, and the ones that did not. During the meal, one or several of the executives present, usually communication or sponsoring directors, announce their candidacy for the mayor position, presenting a brief programme based on their ideas about the Village and how to improve life in the Village. On the first day of the tournament, the different companies vote in the election, which is followed by an exchange of gifts between partners (see Figure 4). From
Figure 2 Election of the Village 'mayor'.
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Figure 3 Gathering around the Village 'mayor'.
Figure 4 Exchange of gifts between partners.
then on, at the start of each day of the tournament, the mayor, accompanied by the organisers, gathers together all the business partners to discuss their activities for that day. During this gathering, partners share information about the personalities present at the tournament and have the opportunity to catch up on topics like business, family, and sports. Importantly, after the election, the Village mayor becomes a sort of representative for the business partners, a tribal leader voicing their needs and concerns. Another local ritual of introduction at the Open 13 is the aperitif , a French tradition of sharing drinks and food before a meal. We saw many executives invite
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others to 'share an aperitif ' as a way to start a conversation (micro-ritual). To facilitate this social rite, the organisers of the Open 13 decided in 2008 to abandon the Village's traditional sit-down dinners in favour of informal gatherings with bar tables and stools where executives could have drinks, share some food, and converse freely. Thisis particularly suited to the context of a tournament where important matches often take place in the evenings. Visitors typically come to the tournament after work, have an aperitif , watch part of a tennis match, and then have dinner before returning tothe match. The tournament is also an opportunity for many rituals of gift-giving, which are occasions to sustain relationships through reciprocal exchanges. For example, in 2010, managers from the BNP - a major French bank sponsoring the Open 13 - gifted polo shirts to executives of companies in the Village. They used some of the official tournament clothing, but added a subtle mark with the name of the bank on the shirts. At the end of the tournament, the organising team also typically offers pieces of the tennis court - chunks of the synthetic material used to build the court itself - to the sponsoring organisations after it has been dismantled. These pieces are framed and offered to corporate partners, who display them at their company offices. Through these artefacts, the tournament becomes part of the corporation's history, playing a role in sustaining the links between business partners when they all go back to business as usual.
Objects and dress One object that is particularly symbolic is the badge worn by business executives. The badge gives access to the Village, so it is a prized marker that business executives proudly display at the tournament. In spite of its significance, the badge is extremely subdued and subtle at the Open 13. It is smaller than at other tennis tournaments, displaying the first and last names of the visitor, but never the company name or the position the executive holds in the organisation. In contrast, at the GPTL, the badges are bigger and feature the name of the company, and even sometimes the position of the executive, because the event is decidedly more oriented towards business meetings and conversations. An object familiar in business life that is surprisingly absent from these parties (at least at the Open 13, where we carried out most of our observations) is the business card. We rarely saw executives exchanging business cards at the Open 13. As a case in point, when the company Research in Motion (RIM), which manufactures BlackBerry devices, decided to hold a competition where entrants dropped their business cards in a fish bowl, only a few participated, despite the fact that RIM was offering its latest product as a prize. Some of the executives we met actually mentioned enjoying not having to introduce themselves through business cards. One of our informants who works for the city of Marseille emphasised the advantages of being introduced by other individuals rather than through an exchange of business cards:
Here I don't have to get out my business card like I would do at a trade fair or an official meeting; if I need to meet someone, the organisers know everyone and know how to introduce us discreetly, even to the politicians and economic decisionmakers. (Armand Mikaelian, Events Consultant, Mayor's Office)
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Here, it is important to note our informant's description of being introduced 'discreetly, even to the politicians and economic decision-makers'. Many of the companies present at both the Open 13 and the GPTL sell products and services to local institutions (the region of Provence, the district of Bouches-du-Rhône, and various cities). A sporting event is an opportunity for these companies to develop and nurture connections with this government institutional network, a necessity that might otherwise be difficult to manage. Because sporting events are often sponsored by these institutions, they present a unique environment in which representatives of such institutions may be approached as hosts rather than as targets for future business. Language One of the distinctive features of the Open 13 is the use of nicknames for several key actors of the tournament, including executives who are regular visitors. For example, a senior executive from one of the French companies sponsoring the tournament becomes Mitch during the tournament because of his resemblance to actor David Hasselhoff, who played the role of Mitch Buchannon in the television series Baywatch. Another executive, known for his ?irtatious proclivities, is nicknamed Tiger, in reference to Tiger Woods' infidelities. Most of the members of the organising team are also given nicknames by the corporate partners. This practice of nicknaming is typical of the customary role-play that these executives engage in, effectively taking on a new identity for just one week, once a year. It also echoes many other ritualistic settings (e.g., Turner, 1982) in which the sharing of a specific language helps create an affinity between the participants of that universe, a sort of identification, understood as the feeling of being similar, of belonging to a group with its own vocabulary. Augé (1999) talks about the ability of rituals to create 'a universe of recognition, where the intimate sharing of language and references creates a form of momentary identity' (p. 73). The Open 13 is a good illustration of this, as it functions as 'a universe of recognition' where nicknames and specific gestures, which are never codified, allow members to feel like they are part of a distinct community. Gestures The body language of the visitors in the Open 13 Village also evokes the feeling of a community, one that exists in between home and business. When they meet, many of the business partners do a special type of handshake usually seen on tennis courts at the end of a match. Often, they also greet each other with a kiss on the cheek, a widespread custom in Marseille, although it is customarily reserved for friends and relatives. As with other types of business parties, there is a register of gestures that are considered normal within the frame of the Village, but less so outside of that particular space. To follow Goffman's (1967) insights into interaction rituals, special handshakes and kisses symbolise a specific kind of frame, more informal and complicit than regular business interactions, where business executives enact and reinforce a specific kind of executive camaraderie. The gestures and jokes that circulate at the Open 13 also indicate a decidedly male form of camaraderie. Tiger Woods jokes and firm handshakes suggest that the symbolic universe of the community created here is more masculine than feminine. Compared to other B2B contexts (de Cohen & Deterding, 2009) and the
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environment of other sporting events (Sartore & Cunningham, 2007), the Open 13 is probably less dominated by men: approximately 50% of the organising staff are women, and various activities during the tournament are designed specifically with the presence of women executives in mind (e.g., a fashion show, and a party for Valentine's Day). Regardless, while we have emphasised the diversity of business executives interacting, that diversity is merely relative; most executives interacting in the Village of the Open 13 are indeed male, white collar, privileged, and Caucasian. Likewise, most of the executives we interviewed for this project are men. Here we are reminded of the sociological insight that rituals can also be an opportunity for dominant social groups to strengthen their elite position. While scholars have stressed that parties and rituals can become an arena where non-elites can articulate 'alternative and non-official attitudes and values' (Lukes, 1975, pp. 301-302), we find that the way the Open 13 and GPTL villages are structured (as enclosed areas for a business elite) helps to create a feeling of belonging to a privileged group that is 'in the know' and, for all its efforts to be democratic, one that is re?ective of a predominantly masculine business world. However, we saw this changing over the six years of our observation as more and more businesswomen were seen participating in the Village, thus gradually putting to rest the image of a place where women are relegated to inferior roles such as hostesses or wives in attendance. Characters and stories One of the key factors in creating the collective history of such occasions is the appeal of leaders and other charismatic figures who personify the event. Some of the senior executives and CEOs who have been at the Open 13 for a long time, such as the CEO of Sodexo, Pierre Bellon, are especially sought after by executives wishing to share sports and business anecdotes. These instances of storytelling are particularly popular with business executives. In our field notes we have recorded instances where people at the Open 13 would talk about the arrival of a charismatic CEO, and about how executives from different companies would leave their marquees to rally around him and hear his stories. These small groups of people may talk about tennis and other sports, but more importantly these are opportunities to talk about business issues in a relaxed and congenial environment. For example, during an informal conversation between several of the Open 13 partners, a senior executive at French services company Sodexo, mentioned in passing that one of his biggest Brazilian clients, a very powerful Brazilian CEO, was a huge tennis fan. An executive from the French bank BNP, a sponsor of major tennis tournaments, saw this anecdote as an opportunity to court the Brazilian businessman, by using the bank's connections in the tennis world. A few months later, the French bank was inviting that same Brazilian millionaire to attend a Davis cup match between France and Brazil. During the event, the Brazilian executive got a chance to meet with the whole Brazilian tennis team, including his own favourite tennis player, Gustavo Kuerten. Following this intense courtship, a year later, the Brazilian CEO had switched banks and become one of the French bank's biggest clients in South America. These and other examples demonstrate that, more than mere side discussions, these conversations can be critical to the executives sponsoring the tournament. For example, executives often learn details about regional business life, upcoming projects, and other key information that they would not necessarily hear about through official channels or in more formal meetings. Small gatherings inside the
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Village are opportunities for executives to catch up on what has happened during the past year and what significant business events have taken place. Sometimes, a tennis trainer might join these gatherings and fuel them with stories about what happens 'behind the scenes'. For executives, this ability to share in the inner workings of a sporting event is a unique opportunity because it makes them feel like they are part of a business community that is both 'in the know' and apart from the general crowd of spectators. This access to certain stories about what goes on behind the scenes is also a way to establish a hierarchy within the community: executives who have more access to the tournament's organisers and its key charismatic figures gain a status within this univers e that may not necessarily re?ect their position in the business world. Within this hierarchy, there are always charismatic leaders - what we see as a sort of tribal leader - around whom the community of businesses rallies. Both the Open 13 and the GPTL have just such a leader. Business partners often mentioned their interest in these tournaments being cemented through their admiration for the tennis tournament manager - in the case of the GPTL, Gilles Moretton.
You know what it's like at this kind of event, people start by buying places and inviting customers and it keeps going further up the hierarchy and then one day someone asked us to become the fifth partner so our president got involved and Gilles Moretton told his whole story, a personal story about how he created the thing, and there's no doubt that we found all of that really attractive and convincing. So that's why we gave our answer within a day. (Huguette Pontois, Communications Director, Banque Rhône-Alpes)
At the Open 13, business partners would seek the presence of Jean-François Caujolle, the director of the tournament, gathering around him to hear stories about the players and the backstage stories of the tournament. But as if to make himself more highly sought after, Caujolle appears only sporadically in the Village. He tries to avoid spending a lot of time with business partners, instead letting them organise the Village as they wish. Overall, what we have described is a system of stories, gestures, language and practices which help transform the Open 13 into a sort of macro-ritual. These symbols are also codes to newcomers if they want to fit in, and they are sources of faux pas. For instance, executives from one of the newer sponsoring companies of the Open 13, an employment services company, approached human resources managers from other sponsoring companies to present and sell their services. The overtly mercantile nature of the sales pitch broke the code of interactions to which sponsoring companies implicitly subscribe to. Experienced executives 'in the know' shunned the executives from the new sponsor, and they are yet to fully find their place within the Open 13 community. We have other similar examples, illustrating the importance of understanding the frame or culture of the tennis tournament in order to fit in, develop relationships, and become a member of the community. What remains after the party A sense of communitas What remains after the party is a 'communitas' of executives and corporations who have gone through an intense, festive time in what we have described as a
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macro-ritual. In Turner's (1969) work, communitas can be considered in opposition to structured and formal relationships, creating a generic bond and a sentiment of 'humankindness' between people. According to Turner (1982), the feeling of communitas involves 'a ?ash of mutual understanding on the existential level, and a gut understanding of synchronicity' (p. 48). We conceptualise business parties as moments where a new kind of inter- organisational relationship is promoted, one that is based on sharing an intense and cyclical moment, a space and time that comes only once a year. This idea was re?ected in the way that some of our informants described the Open 13 and the GPTL as times when they felt as though their family had been reconstituted. A business partner at the GPTL mentioned feeling like she was coming back to the family home:
You know what it's like when people meet once a year and then you go there every Sunday or Friday to see how our stands are shaping up, that's quite normal. Plus there is the work being done and then suddenly we show up all at once, it's like a family reunion. And on the first day, the Monday, it's great. I've always said that it's like going on vacation, arriving at a holiday house and meeting up with all of your family. (Huguette Pontois, Communications Director, Banque Rhône-Alpes)
Likewise, an executive attending the Open 13 described the feeling of belonging to a family:
At the Open 13 we are all part of a family; everybody knows each other and we spend a week together with the organisers, the players, the umpires, the other partners, without even noticing that we are working in the Palais des Sports in Marseille. (Alain Terno, Sponsoring Director, BNP Paribas).
The fact that these executives mention 'family', 'home', and 'holiday' in the same breath, and do so while talking about tennis tournaments, is particularly surprising and suggests a dimension of B2B that has rarely been talked about. The way some of the executives we talked to felt about these tennis tournaments and experienced the space was very affective. Rather than being secondary to the success of the business party, these feelings of communitas or of reuniting with family are indispensable to successful business interactions, both during the tennis tournament and outside it. For example, one of our informants explained how having a space and time outside of regular business activity provided an opportunity for a different kind of sales approach that is less direct:
At a certain point in time, you need to meet your contacts again, talk things through with them and revive your relationship. These are people we see regularly but when this happens in a setting that is more festive and less businesslike, it's an opportunity to talk things over in less serious settings, a different environment that makes it easier to get things done since you can get to know people better in this kind of setting. Where something new has happened, we need to be able to explain the approach we have taken, but this doesn't necessarily have to be done around a table using a PowerPoint presentation. It's at this level that events of this kind can be quite useful and evolve in a way that makes them quite strong. (Axel Carrée, Partnership Director, Perrier-Vittel)
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For Perrier-Vittel and many of the other firms in our sample, the space of the business tournament allows for a different kind of relationship-building, based on relaxed interactions, which allow talk about business without the pressure of the sales pitch or the highly structured PowerPoint presentation to which Axel refers. In other words, the relaxed and affective dimension of the tournaments we studied is crucial because it allows a different, complementary type of relationship marketing. Beyond the week of the tournament, year after year, the communitas seems to last. This is despite the fact that no formal reunions are held outside the tournament. Illustrating the resilience of the communitas, the business partners of the Open 13 expressed solidarity with the organisers during a series of damaging incidents. In 2010, a labour dispute erupted between the tournament organisers and a former employee. The dispute was reported in several newspapers and damaged the reputation of the Open 13. Several weeks later, Andy Murray, one of the stars of the tournament, pulled out at the last minute, citing 'personal reasons'. Another star, Juan Martin Del Potro, also backed out of the tournament because of an injury. This was a significant blow to the organisers because these two players were the only ones at the tournament from among the top ten players in the world. Throughout these events, however, the corporate partners remained supportive, and several called the organisers to express this support. Their language in these conversations was meaningful because they continually used the plural pronoun 'we' when talking about the tournament's crisis, as in: 'It is really a shame that we cannot get Murray this year again'. The relationships formed at the Open 13, and the set of codes and symbols animating these relationships, seem to last well after the tournament. For example, when they meet in non-tennis-party settings, many executives still call each other using the nicknames they gained during the tournament (e.g. Tiger; Mitch). Some of them also continue to wear the limited edition shirts and polos that the organisers distribute to sponsoring companies. By continue to wear these shirts and their nicknames long after the tournament is over, sponsoring executives signal their membership and their commitment to the community. Lastly, longstanding partners rarely drop the tournament suddenly, as the sense of communitas tends to compel them to act in what is generally perceived as a courteous manner. For instance, Peugeot, a loyal partner at the Open 13 since 1993, withdrew in 2010 for economic reasons. The company's regional executive did not, however, want to completely drop out of the Village, and even though Seat took Peugeot's place as lead partner, Peugeot's regional management team tried, albeit discreetly, to keep a small stand open and to retain access to the Village. The regional director told us that the loss of the Open 13 partnership had broken a routine that he had worked hard to promote to a number of important customers; his company was no longer present at what had become 'the place to be' in February in Marseille. Evaluating the effectiveness of the party We find that most corporate partners have a difficult time justifying their investments in the tournaments. Or rather, they have a hard time justifying these investments when using the quantitative framework that is typically used by corporations to measure return on marketing investment. After the tournament, many corporate partners actually contact the organising team to ask for figures about the tournament in order to justify their tournament expenses. For example, one year, a partner
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inquired about the number of handicapped people working for the tournament to determine whether the expense could be deemed 'corporate social responsibility'. Most years, the organising team has had to hire an independent research firm to calculate the media exposure that the tournament provides for companies. Largely, this justifying exercise relies on audience figures. They ask for such figures as the number of spectators, the size of the television audience, the number of celebrities present at the event, and other statistics to measure the event's success. In addition, corporate partners ask for videos and photographs to serve as tangible evidence of the fruits of their investment. To meet these demands, the organising team organises for a film crew and a professional photographer to record life in the Village. Such images become part of the partners' archives in case they must later prove the worthiness of their expenses. Executives construe the tournament as a kind of event with mass appeal, not a venue offering access to politicians and other key economic agents. For example, the company Sodexo asked the organising team of the Open 13 to display their logo on the tournament's web page, with the rationale that the number of website visitors and pages viewed was an outcome that could be measured. By carefully selecting images and singling out key audience members, organisations reframe their role in the tournament as sponsors, and reinforce the dominant representation of sporting events as opportunities for developing a company's corporate reputation. Many companies in our study participate in this game of requalification, transforming the tournament into a mass-market event, even though they care little about the marketing ramifications of sponsoring the event. But while they frame their sponsorship in terms of reputation and image building, their main motives are elsewhere. Many of the sponsors we met seemed indifferent about television exposure because it was only very indirectly related to their business. The case of the company Bombardier is a prime example. As a manufacturer of aircraft and rail vehicles, Bombardier benefits very little from having advertisements displayed around tennis courts and on television because most of its business is with other businesses and institutions. This does not mean that the companies we interviewed do not care about the organisational effectiveness of participating in these events. Our findings highlight the difficulty of measuring the financial impact of business parties, but interviews with executives also revealed that they valued these parties for their inter-organisational effectiveness. An informant from Sodexo talked about the Open 13 as an opportunity to meet the region's key decision-makers within a single week:
Every year I meet new people from the whole South-East region of France, and I learn new things about how methods are changing within their organisation, the way hierarchical structures are changing. In fact, while spending a fun time together, the Open 13 has become a time when we access new opportunities to relate to our partners, in a way that did not exist before. (Jean-Claude Secchi, Events Director, Sodexo)
Similarly, an executive from BNP talked about the way the Open 13 helped him secure a large account:
Some of the executives we invite, they are really passionate about tennis, and follow different tournaments around the world. This is an opportunity for them
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to meet players in a kind of intimate space. One of these executives, of Brazilian origin, recently decided to come over and switch his company to our bank, and he made that decision on the day we organised a dinner [for him]. (Alain Terno, Sponsoring Director, BNP France)
It should be kept in mind that these executives are ones who have selected this specific event because it fits their purposes. In the case of both the Open 13 and the GPTL, we find that the local nature of the event is especially important, in the way that our informant from Sodexo talks about meeting executives from the south-east of France and getting to understand the evolution of different organisations. He talks about the event as being another way to relate to other organisations, in that such an event creates a space and time that not only facilitates the discussion of business in a way that is less direct or confrontational than usual, but also gives B2B executives a better sense of where their clients are at. In other words, a main contribution of our findings is to show that these parties work economically because they are hedonic and festive. And while this festive aspect of B2B relationships is hard to describe or measure - and hence largely unaccounted for by the academic literature - it is a fundamental component of the B2B world.
Discussion and implications
It is known that personal bonds, an important component in many inter- organisational relationships, are crucial in business marketing (Witkowski & Thibodeau, 1999). Our results allow a deeper understanding of how executives participate in business parties in order to facilitate their interactions and relationships with external actors in a local /regional context where homophily is not the rule (McPherson et al., 2001). Indeed, business parties facilitate the creation and deepening of relationships among a wide variety of actors. We find that very few companies' interest in business parties like the Open 13 stems from a need for public visibility. It is particularly telling that the organisers of the Open 13 were never able to attract a mobilephone operator or a consumer-oriented electronics company like Sony to become a corporate partner. Instead, most of the companies sponsoring the Open 13 or the GPTL are involved in selling projects-to-order or solutions through bidding processes (Cova, Ghauri, & Salle, 2002). Companies such as Bombardier, Onet, and Sodexo need to sustain relationships with many different kinds of market participants, including senior members of local institutions and government. Free from the restrictions of formal presentations and face-to-face meetings where they are just another provider bidding for a contract, the exchange of stories and jokes enables a form of mutual understanding and camaraderie that can otherwise be hard to develop. In contrast to the salon or trade fair, the business party at a tennis tournament is not a time during which individuals confront each other and compete on behalf of their companies; it is a time when professional barriers and defences are lowered and where individuals socialise around mutual interests. While trade shows are based on the neo-tribal need to periodically meet and interact with similar others belonging to similar organisations (Borghini et al., 2006), the parties at tennis tournaments rely on eschewing industry concerns and sharing a fun time with non-similar others.
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At a salon or trade fair, executives can share the tricks of their trade and exchange war stories. In the case of a local business network, however, rituals help generate a feeling of communitas developed through shared emotions (Maffesoli, 1996), something which can profoundly affect the relationships and perceptions of relationships that actors form. The aperitifs, the rituals of gift-giving, and the jargon that emerges at the Open 13 and the GPTL are the means through which the network constructs a collective memory and a structure of affinity. Business parties create a sort of virtual community that cuts across industry classifications and hierarchical boundaries. This type of event seems to provide a kind of hidden infrastructure that is central to economic life, yet is largely invisible because it is formed backstage, in spaces like business parties. Thus, one answer to our question 'Why do executives spend such large sums of money organising business parties?' seems to be related to the maintenance of a community of decision-makers coming from diverse backgrounds and organisations. We must nevertheless acknowledge some qualifications to this particular instance of community creation. While we noted the presence of rituals involving women, the gestures (e.g., special handshakes) and language we observed at the Open 13 re?ect a m asculine imaginary permeating a culture of chie?y male decision-makers partying and interacting together. In addition, the business parties we observed function by being elitist, in that only a privileged few can become members of this communitas of decision-makers. In that sense, business parties function like other forms of rituals - through communion and exclusion, solidarity and selection - to create a certain kind of community (Turner, 1969). Future research will need to address whether other rituals can help create other forms of community, more diverse and less elitist, to create more diversity in the world of business relationships. Another important contribution of this paper is to show how business parties function and how they organise around the objects, characters, practices, and stories that circulate during the time of the party. Our ethnographic approach allows for a deep understanding of how these parties exist and endure and how they are moments where business partners try to (re)create a feeling of communitas. The cyclical dimension of parties such as annual tennis tournaments is important because it promotes the renewal of business relationships every year. Thus, it lends a structure to business life by offering a space and time to regenerate and sustain relationships. Unlike at trade fairs or exhibitions, the space where the business party takes place downplays the economic and professional dimensions and creates a more improvised, organic, festive atmosphere. This space becomes one of communitas as soon as the annual rite of passage of the election of the mayor of the Village is enacted. This rite allows participants to enter into a liminal phase and transforms the area of the party into a liminoid zone (Tuner, 1982) - a favourable ground for the (re)creation of the communitas. Within this liminoid zone, and during the entire sporting event, small business parties such as the aperitif and the exchange of gifts play the role of micro-rituals (see examples in Table 3). In order to function correctly and to be established firmly in the context of the macroritual, these micro-rituals mobilise artefacts such as objects and dress (no professional badge, no business card); language (use of nicknames); gestures (a full register of gestures that are considered normal within the frame of the business party, but less so outside of that particular space, including a special type of handshake); characters (leaders and other charismatic figures who personify the event); and stories (stories about what happens 'behind the scenes').
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Rituals have been shown to reinforce social bonds and social cohesion (Leach, 1968), yet the ritualistic dimension of inter-organisational life has rarely been studied (exceptions include Borghini et al., 2006; Cova & Salle, 2000). It is especially important for managers to understand how rituals work. From our interviews, we gathered that most marketing managers possess an intuitive understanding of the power of rituals. They understand that the sharing of an intense moment when a business and a client look in the same direction is a powerful tool for establishing a bond. Future research should go beyond our analysis of the importance of rituals to examine what makes an inter-organisational ritual succeed or fail. To do so, future research should take a more comparative approach than the one we have taken here, analysing different types of events where business executives gather. In our interviews with marketing, public relations, and communication managers in B2B firms, we gathered many such comparisons, such as between cultural events like theatre outings with clients, and sporting events where they are not only spectators but also participants in the event itself. One of the executives we interviewed talked about the deep bonds he has built with other executives in other organisations by running marathons with them. Again, an analysis of such events as rituals could be especially fruitful, and might draw from the vast literature on sporting events as specific types of rituals (Birrell, 1981). Because festive times are important, scholars also need to take parties and games more seriously in future research. As Ingram and Miller (2007, p. 559) note, '[p]arties like professional mixers are not all fun and games. They are forums for initiating acquaintanceships, cementing friendships, and introducing others and are therefore paths to more substantive goals'. We would add that parties are above all fun and games, but that these games should be analysed as meaningful rituals of interaction and integration. At the heart of B2B are relationships within a network (Håkansson et al., 2009), and fun and games are vital to maintaining such relationships. Finally, we want to emphasise our methodological contribution to the literature on business markets. More than twenty years ago, Deshpande and Webster (1989) championed organisational symbolism and its relevance to studying marketing phenomena, but thus far studies of the symbolic life of organisations have largely been left to management scholars studying organisational culture and identity (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Our work answers these earlier calls for more symbolic research in marketing, and proposes an application of this approach to inter-organisational settings. We have analysed practices of interaction, objects, and language as ways through which executives sustain business relationships and create a communitas of professionals during a tennis tournament. But we also believe this approach to be especially promising and relevant to many areas of the B2B world. Many studies in this domain have taken economic and behavioural approaches, and while these approaches have great value, a sociological and cultural view of inter-organisational relationships would help us to better understand the social meaning of inter - organisational exchanges. For example, the methodological and analytical approach we have taken here could prove to be very useful in examining the bidding process, with its ritualised phases (e.g., request for proposal, bidders' conference, bidding, and negotiating), the traditional exchange of gifts and greeting cards between businesses for Christmas, and the organisation of increasingly spectacular business conferences. Anthropological studies of these exchanges represent a promising avenue for future research that takes more seriously the fun, festive, emotional, and theatrical dimensions of business life.
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Acknowledgements
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