Co-host collaboration and event leverage under various event ownership models

The master thesis exploratory study on co-hosted events laid a foundation stone to the current PhD research on polycentric events. The study's theoretical framework was value co-creation (Woratschek et al., 2014). The research design involved the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 4 event owners and 4 event organizers of co-hosted events and the document analysis. It concluded that co-hosting is a practice that can be formed under different circumstances (typologies) such as planned, arranged and forced. The awareness of these typologies is key when talking about challenges and opportunities of such event context. The results of this exploratory study unveiled that the event leverage among co-hosts was mostly caused by the event ownership model practiced by the event owners. The PhD-level study will therefore involve careful consideration of the event ownership models of various event owners and their influence on the event delivery as well as the co-hosts' capacity to leverage individual and joint benefits under such models. The first stage in this research was conducting the peripheral study on classification of events to monocentric and polycentric, where later has an additional sub-classification. The purpose of this study is to provide a panoramic view on all possible polycentric event scenarios across major existing dichotomies in the event classification by Chappelet and Parent (2015), such as for-profit/non-profit, mono-sport/multi-sport and one-off/recurring events. and stimulate the polycentric event discussion beyond the commonly researched one-off non-profit and monosport events. The second stage, that is currently ongoing, is the literature review. The examples of the literature considered are sport globalization (Gruneau & Horne, 2016), sport event classifications, management, ownership (Kelly et al., 2019), seizure (Müller, 2015), leverage (Chalip, 2006; Kelly et al., 2019) and polycentric events (Byun et al., 2019; Stura et al., 2017). The next stage will be identifying the theoretical framework. The initial choice is within the organizational theory, stakeholder theory, network governance, IORs and event leverage. The PhD Student Seminar is an opportunity to be in the right environment at this stage of thesis writing and to be consulted on formulating the right research question and choosing appropriate theoretical framework.