# Worm-lobopodian assemblages from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota: Insight into the "pre-arthropodan ecology"?

Jean Vannier, Emmanuel Laurent Olivier Martin

► To cite this version:

Jean Vannier, Emmanuel Laurent Olivier Martin. Worm-lobopodian assemblages from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang biota: Insight into the "pre-arthropodan ecology"?. Palaeogeography, Palaeo-climatology, Palaeoecology, 2017, 468, pp.373-387. 10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.12.002. hal-02329513

HAL Id: hal-02329513

https://univ-lyon1.hal.science/hal-02329513v1

Submitted on 28 Jun 2025

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Branching out beyond the core:
museums hosting events

**1. Introduction**

In the last decades academics and policy-makers have paid considerable attention to events and festivals, recognising their important role in consumers' experience. Two recent surveys reveal the vastness of the relevant literature, which sees events as either powerful tourist attractions (Getz and Page, 2016) or enhancers of residents' wellbeing (Yolal et al., 2016). As events need venues, the use of pre-existing infrastructure is desirable as it implies lower costs (Frey, 1994). Museums are perfect candidates for many types of events, yet they tend to show great variability as to their engagement in production, co-production and hosting. In fact, museums' traditional role has been that of conservation and communication of their collections through exhibition. Despite this, many of them are increasingly engaging in a number of non-core activities such as organising/hosting events, here not including exhibitions which are part of their core mission, in order to reach new audiences, involve communities and tourists, and thus foster local development (Tufte and Milne, 1999). This may avoid marginalisation within the leisure society (Taheri and Jafari, 2012). In a seminal work Janiskee (1996) identified community festivals, stand-alone house specials and living history portrayals as events organised by historic houses. In the course of time the list of types of museum events has expanded considerably (treasure hunts, mystery dinners, culinary shows, etc.). An even wider range must be considered if we make reference to all kinds of museums, not only historic venues – as citizen science days and researchers' nights in science museums.

We investigate empirically what factors are likely to influence the probability for a museum to host events, in particular considering potential audience, ownership type and organisational model as possible drivers. Unlike others (Axelsen, 2006), we consider both events organised by museums directly, and those organised in museums by companies, institutions and other groups. In fact, rental of venues is often part of museums' outreaching strategy.

The literature finds that visitors' satisfaction is high when involved in museum events (Barbosa and Brito, 2012), and that events attract new audiences (Evans, 2010; Barron and Leask, 2017).
Whenever the potential is there for an increase in visitors, we should then expect more events to be organised/hosted.

Besides this, financial issues may play a role (Whitfield, 2009). When cleverly devised, events pay themselves. Attendees' spending in museums' shops and restaurants, and eventual admission fees, cover costs. By improving visibility, events also trigger sponsorships. These financial aspects work as incentives only if a museum is allowed to retain its revenues, which is not always the case when a museum is publicly owned.

To our knowledge, our research question has never been investigated before. Recently OECD (2018) identified museums as providers of multiple services (OECD, 2018), and proposing new ones may be intended as either effort or commitment to innovation. Therefore, considering events in museums is functional to the analysis of both principal-agent relationships between museums and their stakeholders, and innovation attitudes of museums' management. Our approach may be extended to other attractions that have the potential to branch out beyond the core – e.g., natural and theme parks, theatres and cinemas, sports venues, churches.

## 2. Dataset and method

We exploit the data of the Museum Census by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, covering all Italian museums (regardless of the type of collection), archaeological sites and monuments (ISTAT, 2015). The survey includes questions on whether in 2015 these institutions have organised/hosted events, and provides a rich set of other variables. Our sample includes 3659 observations. We estimate four logit models where the dependent variables equal 1 if a museum: rented spaces for events (*rentpri*); organised/hosted conferences (*confer*); organised/hosted shows and other events (*shows*); would organise events in case of a 10% budget increase (*willinvest*). Given data availability, considering *willinvest* is the only way we have to account for possible financial constraints to museum strategies.

Our proxies for potential demand are log of both population and number of beds in tourist accommodation facilities in a museum's province (*logpop* and *logbeds*, from other ISTAT datasets). A significantly positive estimate of their coefficients would corroborate the thesis that museums consider events as a means to turn potential into real demand.

Following Bertacchini et al. (2018) we also include dummies for ownership type, and degree of management autonomy in case of public museums. Our categorisation reflects the variety of
museums' institutional and organisational models, not only with reference to the Italian case. We consider *pri* (private), *outs* (public but outsourced) and *auto* (public but retaining revenues), taking public museums run as sub-units of culture departments as reference category. These latter rely exclusively on governmental transfers and their revenues accrue to the general governmental budget. Therefore, their incentive to increase revenues is lower, and so is presumably the incentive to organise/host events.

As to the controls, we consider: factors endowment and their combination (number of employees, *noemployees*; log of surface, *logsurface*; employees per square meter, *emplsur*); operational constraints (opening times were the same on all opening days, *fixedtime*; number of days the museum was open, *openingdays*), type of institution (it is a museum or gallery, *museum*, with monuments and archaeological sites being the reference category; it opened after 1979, y80, as younger institutions generally have *ad-hoc* spaces for hosting events) and venue attractiveness (main object of interest are: the building, *objstr*; both exhibited items and the building, *objstrexhib*; with “only the exhibits” being the reference category). We also consider whether being part of a network of either museums or local institutions promoting the area is influential, by including respectively the dummies *network* and *terpart*. These variables account for scale economies (share of marketing and other production costs) and the opportunities offered by a network to be involved in multi-venue events such as big festivals, possibly involving more than one destination (Mariani and Giorgio, 2017). Number of museums in the same municipality (*nmus*) proxies competitive environment. Finally, we include dummies for Italian regions in all our models – estimates are not reported.

### 3. Results

Figure 1 reports descriptive statistics. Figures 2 and 3 present model estimates, highlighting p-values and confidence intervals respectively. Contrarily to what expected, we find evidence of no effect (*shows*) or weak evidence of negative effect (*rentpri*, *conf*) of the number of hotel beds on a museum's probability to organise/host events. This may be peculiar of Italy, home of the Grand Tour, where most tourists tend to visit museums because of their collections, rather than because of their events. Potential local audience is not significant either; this is puzzling since, if not tourists, then a large potential local audience should be a driver. However, this finding has to be interpreted together with the results on *willinvest* (whether a museum would host events if it had a 10% budget increase), which suggest that in highly populated provinces there are museums that would organise events if they experienced a better financial
situation. These are public museums having both lower number of employees, and possibly dedicated spaces (y80 has a positive and significant coefficient in Figure 2, bottom right). This suggests that in 2015 many Italian public museums could not organise events to engage local audience because they experienced liquidity constraints, in spite of the fact that they wished to do so and had both infrastructures and potential demand.

The salience of ownership type and organisational structure varies according to the type of event. All types of museums have similar probabilities to host a conference, the type of event that is less likely to generate revenues. Public museums run as sub-units of culture departments (reference category) are associated with lower probability to organise/host shows than more autonomous public museums. Private museums are associated to lower probability to host shows but higher probability to rent spaces for private events (and, *ceteris paribus*, rental is more common if the venue is attractive). All in all, our evidence suggests that event organising/hosting is affected by museums' ownership and organisational model: museums retaining their revenues are more likely to host events.

Internal constraints play an important role in determining the probability to host an event: in particular, being a big, fully operating museum makes a difference. Being part of a local network promoting the area is associated to greater probability to host all types of events, and the impact is sizable. This hints at the idea that organising/hosting events is often associated to a wider proactive strategy and projection into the local context, but also, and again, that budget is relevant when it comes to decide whether to host events or not. Connectedness makes co-producing more likely, implying cost reduction and enhanced visibility.

**4. Conclusions**

We investigated the drivers of event organising/hosting as a specific museum strategy to involve both tourists and locals. We found that museum characteristics such as factors' endowment, full operation and connectedness are important, whereas there is weak evidence of a negative effect of the area's tourism vocation. We believe that this may be peculiar of the Italian context, though evidence using data from other countries would be necessary to corroborate this intuition. Local potential audience is not found to be a significant driver, either. However, the presence of public museums located in highly populated areas may explain this result. They are the most likely to claim they would organise events if they had a 10% budget increase, which hints at their liquidity constraints. This calls for new financial arrangements
between governments and many public museums. Museums' ownership and organisational model matter when one considers events, suggesting that financial incentives are important in determining the effort level and the innovation attitude of a museum's management. Public museums retaining their revenues are more likely to host shows, while private museums are associated with greater probability to rent their spaces for events. This research note calls for more research work focused on the determinants of cultural and leisure institutions' branching out beyond the core to include events and festivals in their service provision.
References.

Axelsen, M. (2006). Using special events to motivate visitors to attend art galleries, Museum Management and Curatorship, 21, 205-221

Barbosa B. and Quelhas Brito P. (2012). Do open day events develop art museum audiences?, Museum Management and Curatorship, 27:1, 17-33

Barron, P. and Leask, A. (2017). Visitor engagement at museums: Generation Y and ‘Lates’ events at the National Museum of Scotland, Museum Management and Curatorship, 32:5, 473-490

Bertacchini, E., Dalle Nogare, C. and Scuderi, R. (2018). Ownership, organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums, Journal of Cultural Economics, 42:4, 619-643

Evans, G. (2010). New events in historic venues: a case of London. Rivista di Scienze del Turismo-Ambiente Cultura Diritto Economia, 1(2), 149-166.

Frey, B.S. (1994). The economics of music festivals, Journal of Cultural Economics, 18:1, 29-39

Getz, D. and Page, S. J. (2016). Progress and prospects for event tourism research, Tourism Management, 52, 593-631

Istat (2015). Indagine sui musei ed istituzioni similari, https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/167566

Janiskee, R. L. (1996). Historic Houses and special events, Annals of Tourism Research, 23-2, 398-414

Mariani, M. M and Girogio L. (2017). The “Pink Night” festival revisited: Mega-events and the role of destination partnerships in staging event tourism, Annals of Tourism Research, 62, 89-109

OECD (2018). Culture and Local development: Maximising the impact, OECD Publishing, Paris

Taheri, B. and Jafari, A. (2012). Museums as Playful Venues in the Leisure Society, in R. Sharpley and P. Stone eds., The Contemporary Tourist Experience: Concepts and Consequences, Routledge, NY

Tufte, S. and Milne, S. (1999). Museums: a supply-side perspective, Annals of Tourism Research, 26:3, 613-631

Whitfield, J. E. (2009). Why and how UK visitor attractions diversify their product to offer conference and event facilities, Journal of Convention & Event Tourism, 10:1, 72-88

Yolal, M., Gursoy D., Uysal M., Kim H., Karacaoğlu S. (2016). Impacts of festivals and events on residents well-being, Annals of Tourism Research, 61, 1-18
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1:** Descriptive statistics.</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2:** Estimates from logit models, marginal effects and p-values (*p*<0.1; **p*<0.05; ***p*<0.01).</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3:** Estimates from logit models, marginal effects and 95% confidence intervals.</figcaption></figure>
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