We Poke the Body and See What Happens: How Do People Manage Expectations in Transformative Parties, Festivals, and Retreats?

This study, published in Eludamos in 2026, examines how organizers of transformative events, including queer festivals, artistic retreats, and grief-focused clubbing nights, manage participant expectations. Drawing on service-studies theory and Ojasalo's typology of fuzzy, precise, implicit, and explicit customer expectations, the authors argue that these playful, somatically and emotionally charged spaces require deliberate expectation priming. The guiding question concerns which organizer-led strategies are deployed before and during events to build and make sense of different expectation types.

The empirical basis is a multiple case study of three events, labeled E1, E2, and E3, drawing on roughly nineteen interviews, ethnographic observation, and supplementary materials. Measurement centers on participants' experiences rather than their pre-event expectations, following Grönroos (1993), and the protocol emphasizes anonymized, group-level reporting with explicit ethical safeguards.

Findings show that organizers relied heavily on word-of-mouth and targeted community messaging rather than broad public marketing, and that visible organizer presence sometimes shaped expectations based on prior editions. Spatial design, rhythm-setting through shared meals and transitional arrival spaces, and aesthetic choices were used both to shape and to subvert expectations. Strategies diverged across cases: E1 used timed workshops and framing sessions to convert fuzzy expectations into explicit ones, E2 relied on attendee-led daily check-ins, and E3 used a soft ending to ease transitions.

The authors conclude that expectation calibration is only partly controllable, since outcomes depend on individual engagement. Implicit expectations were largely set in planning rather than discussed directly, and subverting them sometimes produced positive results, which departs from Ojasalo's claim that revealing expectations always improves quality. Organizers therefore act as navigators of "conditional services," balancing priming and non-priming across marketing, space, facilitation, and positioning relative to other events.