The Use of Resilience Strategies in Crowd Management at a Music Festival : and the safety organization’s role in avoiding crowd conflict

Sammanfattning: Each year people are injured and even die in crowd related accidents, often during planned events. Recent studies have emphasized the need for using a systems approach to study these events. In this study the systems approach of resilience theory is combined with the crowd psychology-models Extended Social Identity Model and the Aggravation and Mitigation Model to examine event safety at a music festival, a domain previously largely unexplored by these perspectives. By using an ethnographic approach as well as interviewing visitors the study set out to answer questions about when and how the safety organization adjusted itself under conditions relating to crowds. Another goal was to study the social identity of the visitors as well as the interaction between the safety organization and the visitors at the festival to explain the presence or absence of crowd conflict. Using thematic analysis several situations were identified where the safety organization adjusted itself, as well as the strategies that the organization used in these different circumstances. It was also concluded that the absence of crowd conflict could best be explained by three factors. First of all, no history of crowd conflict existed between the safety organization and the visitors, secondly, there were no groups present with the goal of creating conflict, and thirdly, the social processes taking place between the safety organization and the visitors were all mitigating in nature. The mitigating nature of the social processes was partly attributable to the strategies identified for adjusting to crowd conditions.