A festival's community and organizational identity

In this paper we focus on the organizational identity of a cultural festival, and on how different categories of organizational members, constituting a festival’s community from different positions and with different aims, engage and challenge the organizational identity of the festival itself. Specifically, we ask how organizational members of a festival’s engage with the central attributes of a festival, changing its organizational identity. We use Actor Network Theory to focus on the communitarian aspect involved in festivals, which is deemed relevant in the literature about festivals, but at the same time is overlooked when it comes to the analysis of the impact of organizational members on organizational identity. Specifically, we focus on Festivaletteratura, which is the most important and oldest Italian literary festival. To answer our research question, we rely on several data sources: the experience of one of the authors as a volunteer for several of Festivaletteratura for 14 years; the cultural programmes of Festivaletteratura and other relevant Italian cultural festivals; the historical archive of Festivaletteratura; and focus groups organized by the Administrative Office of Festivaletteratura and aimed at inquiring the take of expert volunteers on how the festival should evolve.