The complete thematic network of this study is shown in Figure 6.6. Clearly, all the organising themes are heavily engaged in the global theme value co-creation. Other than basic themes contributing to organising themes, as explained earlier in this chapter, one of the notable highlights of this analysis is the multi-layered network structured behaviour of various themes. Simply put, many themes behave as basic themes to more than just one organising theme. This is a considerable thematic outcome of this analysis in terms of knowledge around thematic networks. Traditionally, thematic networks are expected to behave in a very linear manner, where derivatives are derived from an organising theme, and basic themes completely relate to one organising theme only.
In the case of this study, the dataset used was networked in itself. As thematic networks are applied to a linear string of text, the dataset for this study is linear, but because of the multilayer referencing to various contexts (through usernames and hashtags), the data are a networked string of text too. This implies a first understanding of service systems: actors have no control over who consumes the value; they can only emit certain value into the system, and other actors may consume any amount of value from others, forming value- in-exchange.
If the thematic network analysis of this study had been linear, it would mean that actors have control over who consumes value. This is discussed further, in Chapter 8, in reflections on S-D logic.
Four basic themes emerged as a common contributor to all three organising themes— value for music distribution platforms, value for host city, marketing campaign and value for sponsors. This indicates how important these themes are to the music festival service system. Possibly, in expanding this research, these basic themes could form the basis of studying a greater number of actors. It was known that there are many actors in the service system, but for this study, only the most important actors in the context were investigated. However, these emerged themes clearly show that other actors are important; for example, value for music distribution platforms arose as a strong logical theme that points to the importance of music distribution/media companies in driving festivals.
Below is an example of how a music distribution platform engages artists, festivals and customers.
In the first tweet, Triple J tweets about Splendour in the Grass music festival line-up, eventually extracting 62 retweets and 119 likes, which indicates some degree of engagement of customers as well. In the second tweet, Triple J clearly engages and mentions the band HAIM, and also mentions that they discovered these artists at SITG (festival). Clearly, Triple J is playing a very active role in weaving conversations and relationships in the music festival service system of SITG.
This implies that music distribution companies, sponsoring brands, the host city (or even council) and beneficiaries of marketing campaigns are important actors to be included in future studies, to form a better understanding and fresh perspectives on service systems. In a way similar to snowball sampling, this study started by studying three important actors, and during the process, found other four important actors: studying these additional actors will reveal further actors in the service system.
Another set of basic themes that contributes to all three organising themes is that on the relationships between value-in-exchange (V1, V2 and V3). V1 is positive related to V3, V3 is positively related to V2, and V2 is positively related to V1: these are the basic themes identified as related to all three organising themes. This implies that in a service system, there will always be multiple relations between value-in-exchange, derived from
value co-created by various actors. Although at this stage, there are only three such themes, once more actors are included in the scope of the study, these themes may exponentially increase because of the networked form of relations.
6.5 Conclusion
This chapter presented the thematic network analysis of the themes that emerged in Chapter 5. All such themes served as basic themes under three organising themes: value co-created by festivals, value co-created by artists and value co-created by customers. Ideally, in thematic network analysis, a basic theme falls under a specific organising theme. However, many basic themes in this analysis were found to belong to more than one organising theme. This is because of the networked structure of the data and the themes that emerged from it. The biggest outcome of this analysis is that service-to- service interactions/exchanges in a service system are never linear and independent in nature and are always affected by other actors and exchanges. For example, a relationship between a festival and an artist will always be affected by the festival’s or artist’s brand image in the mind of the customer.
Many basic themes could have belonged to other organising themes if the scope of this study was not limited to the three actors (festivals, artists and customers). For example, the value created by sponsors could have been another organising theme. This means, as the scope of the study increases, the number of organising themes will increase and major actor types will form an organising theme themselves. However, the networked behaviour of basic themes belonging to multiple organising themes will still co-exist.
The non-linear and dependent form of exchanges is further addressed in Chapter 8, where a new FP for S-D logic is proposed; a call to study further actor types is discussed in Chapter 9.