'It's not about accounting, it's about friendship' - sensemaking and burdens in unpaid worklife at Roskilde Festival

This thesis examines why volunteer ’workers’ spend hundreds of hours every year creating the Roskilde Festival (RF) – Northern Europe’s largest music and arts festival.Having been invited into Roskilde Leadership Lab season 2018/2019 – an internal course for managers at RF – we started investigating the field through observational studies. Between January and April, we also conducted interviews with 16 very committed managers from all of RF’s six divisions. We found that these volunteers receive an identity-building role in a very special anddiverse organization in exchange for their involvement. Being part of RF constitutes a certain meaning in their lives. We then use Ib Ravn and Karl Weick to find out what meaning is all about. The meaning is primarily bound to ‘being part of something bigger’; the RF-community. Our informants even say, ‘my RF-family’ and call the people they manage ‘my volunteers’ because they feel a great responsibility towards them. This community, as well as RF’s humanitarian purpose, presents the volunteer managers with lots of cues that help them make sense of their involvement. Because they feel so strongly about RF, they often end up handling a massive workload that they did not initially sign up for. This adds to their sensemaking progress, but at times it also dilutes it. Our informants say that, in particular, economic control and bureaucratic leadership far from the actual task at hand feel like a constraint. At times it even feels like internal networks in RF end up excluding both experienced volunteers and new generations – and in that the diversity of the community suffers.Essentially, we conclude that the strategic management of RF needs to make room for more face-to-face encounters with the volunteer workers, listen to their experiences and be open to their criticism. Also, the internal communication needs to be clearer and more reliable. If this fail the ‘magic’ that comes to life in creating RF is in danger of vanishing along with the collective sensemaking that keeps the volunteers coming back.