60 VOLUNTEERING AND EVENTS – Contributions by Leonie Lockstone-Binney
60 VOLUNTEERING AND EVENTS – Contributions by Leonie Lockstone-Binney
In applying for an internal leadership role recently at my university, I had cause to reflect on my academic portfolio and various achievements. This is something I do not do as regularly as I should because I am often too busy to see the wood for the trees, as the idiom goes. It is quite empowering do so and see a collective body of work including close to 90 peer reviewed articles and multiple grants to support these from competitive sources including the Australian Research Council and the International Olympic Committee.
I claim two core contributions in this piece. Firstly, since completing my PhD on volunteering in museums and cultural tourism settings in the early 2000s, I have continued to research on volunteering in relation to tourism and more recently event settings. My research has primarily contributed to understanding of tourism and event volunteering in terms of: a) mapping progress in the field and examining the theoretical perspectives that inform the study of tourism and event volunteering b) examining the event volunteering experience at major and mega events c) setting a research agenda to inform the direction of future volunteer research focused on mega sporting events (d) providing insights into how flexible work initiatives can be used as a management tool to recruit and retain volunteers; and finally, e) examining the volunteering legacies for host cities of the Olympic Games. These research streams have culminated in the commissioning of multiple field-defining edited books I have jointly led including People and Work in Events and Conventions (Baum et al., 2009), Event Volunteering: International Perspectives on the Event Volunteering Experience (Smith et al., 2015) for the Routledge Advances in Event Research Series and the forthcoming compendium volume Routledge Handbook of Volunteering in Events, Sport and Tourism (Holmes et al., 2021). A study by Lis and Tomanek (2021) within this Handbook conducted a bibliometric analysis of research on tourism, sports and event volunteering and from that source, I am highlighted as one of top 10 researchers in the field. Finally, of note related to the first research stream above, a paper I lead authored examining the theoretical perspectives informing leisure volunteering (Lockstone-Binney et al., 2010), was judged by the Managing Editors of international journal Leisure Studies as the 2010 entry in its list of the ‘30 most significant papers published in the journal over the last 30 years’. This is a considerable accolade given the substantial number of papers published in this top-tier journal over this extended time period.
More broadly speaking, aligned to my teaching specialisation of events, my impact relative to the development of the field of event studies has been clear and formative. From a teaching and scholarship perspective, I had a leading role in developing and refining Victoria University’s Event