Live Entertainment in a Fairytale Art-Peripheral Tourist Setting

This article introduces a multidisciplinary study in which the different fields of musicology, social sciences and children’s ‘fairytale’ literature blend together. The interest in this topic came from a lack of attention in past studies on the art-peripheral performers’ and audiences’ experiences with the more popular form of entertainment in art-peripheral tourist settings. Another fundamental purpose for this research is to explore the important role of the art-peripheral ‘fairytale’ settings in transforming the different groups of hosts’ and guests’ everyday rational characters and performances, as they transgress from their cultural norms, and move through the liminal spaces of the sea. Consequently, new identities in Hurghada’s hotels’ fairytale scenes are being formed, and which are the outcome of localized and western, cultural, political, economic, and social constructions. The empirical method in this study puts emphasis on the texts of classical fairytale stories, which are used as an architextual model developed in the course of earlier research undertaken by the author. It is also well worth mentioning, that Hurghada’s art-peripheral hotel settings generate cultural tourism from the simple consumption of entertainment and popular music

Evaluating the performance of university course units using data envelopment analysis

The technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring the relative efficiency has been widely used in the higher education sector. However, measuring the performance of a set of course units or modules that are part of a university curriculum has received little attention. In this article, DEA was used in a visual way to measure the performance of 12 course units that are part of a Photogrammetry curriculum taught at Aalto University. The results pinpointed the weakest performing units, i.e. units where the provided teaching efforts might not be adequately reflected in the students’ marks in the unit. Based on the results, a single unit was considered to offer poor performance with respect to its teaching resources and was selected as a candidate for revision of its contents. Financial resources were not used as such; instead, the performance of students in previous pre-requisite units was used as the inputs. For clarity, a single output covering the overall student performance in the examined unit was used. The technique should be widely applicable assuming the grade point averages of the students who took the course unit are available along with the marks obtained in the evaluated units and their pre-requisites

Measuring efficiency and productivity in professional football teams: Evidence from the English Premier League

Professional football clubs are unusual businesses, their performance judged on and off the field of play. This study is concerned with measuring the efficiency of clubs in the English Premier League. Information from clubs’ financial statements is used as a measure of corporate performance. To measure changes in efficiency and productivity the Malmquist non-parametric technique has been used. This is derived from the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) linear programming approach, with Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) being used to ensure the cohesion of the input-output variables. The study concludes that while clubs operate close to efficient levels for the assessed models, there is limited technological advance in their performance in terms of the displacement of the technological frontier

Live Music in the Tourist Industry : A Comparative Study Between the Finnish Hotel Cruise Lines and Sharm EL Sheikh's Resorts Entertainment

The primary aim of this study is to focus on the tourists, singer-musicians' and hotel managers' experiences with live music in Finnish hotel cruise lines and Sharm EL Sheikh's seaside resorts. The tourist, singer-musician and hotel manager relations - although an integral part of the tourist experience - have received little attention in past tourism and music studies. Thus, the purpose of this research will be to show that by observing these different informants performance rituals, interactions, and attitudes towards local entertainment in the tourist industry, we could offer insightful guidelines to better understand the cultural significance of live music in the tourist experience, often produced by a complex nexus of socio-political factors. The research will furthermore, try to encompass new grounds by focusing on the sociocultural and aesthetic meanings of live (popular, folk and world) music performances, from a tourist rather than popular music perspective. Themes, such as liminality, the flow, and imagined communities will thus be crucial in assessing the socio-culturally different or similar performer-audience meanings and experiences with live music in the two "worlds apart" en-tertainment settings. The multi-sited ethnographic framework in this research, will compare the host-guest experiences for the two world apart sites, and study the future impacts of world systems on changes in local music production and on attitudes towards live music performances. While Cohen (2002) asks, what can popular music tell us about cities the purpose of this paper is to ask what does the hotel industry tell us about popular music