Imitating uniqueness: How big cities organize big events

This article summarises two studies of how a city organized a big event: the Jubilee of the Third Millennium of Christianity (in Rome) and the Cultural Capital of Europe 1998 (in Stockholm). Despite their differences, the supposed uniqueness of both events and the temporary character of the organizations created for their construction, the studies reveal interesting similarities in how the actors framed the two organizing processes. Both the Jubilee and the Cultural Capital of Europe are, in fact, repetitive events. In both cases, the organizing process adopted was one of first delineating an appropriate organizational field, then choosing multiple models to imitate, whereby hybrid organizations were created, the desirable traits of which could then be translated into a local context. Thus the local context encourages variation, whereas global modelling results in events that are more similar to one another.