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Individuals and Industries: Large-Scale Professional Gatherings as Ethnographic Fields

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Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs

Abstract

Conferences and trade fairs have during the past decades become a significant global industry in and of itself. Here the authors of this volume claim that such large-scale professional gatherings have become key sites for the making and negotiation of both industries and professions. The anthology is an attempt to make sense of conferences and trade fairs as phenomena in contemporary society. Large-scale professional gatherings are here understood as organized and particular events, bound by place and time, where a large number of professionals within defined industries assemble to network and to exchange information.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Professionals attending trade fairs and conferences are part of the steadily growing business travel industry, which is a sub-sector of the overall tourism industry. There is a lack of industry statistics and standardized terminology making it difficult to provide accurate numbers about the size and value of the industry. Some see the formation of trade associations as a sure sign of a formation of an industry. If so the birth of the industry for large-scale professional gatherings may be set to 1928 when the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IEAA) was founded (Rogers 2013: 5). The Union of International Associations (UIA) has been keeping score of large-scale international professional meetings for 60 years. For 2015 they registered that 12,350 large-scale international professional meetings took place in 248 different countries and they predict a 35 per cent increase over the next five years (UIA 2016). In 2015 the global business travel spending was 1.11 trillion US dollars. And industry leaders expect spending to increase significantly in the years to come (http://statista.com).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anette Nyqvist, Hege Høyer Leivestad & Hans Tunestad

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  1. Anette Nyqvist
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  2. Hege Høyer Leivestad
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Hege Høyer Leivestad

  2. Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anette Nyqvist

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Nyqvist, A., Høyer Leivestad, H., Tunestad, H. (2017). Individuals and Industries: Large-Scale Professional Gatherings as Ethnographic Fields. In: Høyer Leivestad, H., Nyqvist, A. (eds) Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53097-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53097-0_1

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