This chapter addresses event institutionalization and maintenance in a study of the annual Annecy International Animation Film Festival and the International Animation Film Market (MIFA), a major event in the global animation industry. Since its creation in 1956, this event has evolved from a community-oriented gathering of artistically oriented animation film auteurs into a global event featuring aesthetic, technological and business innovations, as well as into a platform for the discovery and recruitment of creative talent. The chapter seeks to highlight the processes that have led to event institutionalization and enabled institutional maintenance. In so doing, it responds to recent calls to study ‘mechanisms that serve to prevent dissipation and eventual deinstitutionalization’ (Dacin and Dacin, 2008: 348).

Events which play a role in the configuration of organizational fields by providing arenas for processes of institutionalization and institutional change have recently been conceptualized as ‘field-configuring events (FCEs)’ (Lampel and Meyer, 2008). While there is growing empirical evidence that such events contribute to the emergence of field-wide institutions and provide institutional entrepreneurs with opportunities to challenge and redefine institutions, little is known about the processes by which such events themselves become institutionalized. A high degree of institutionalization characterizes many of the FCEs presented in the empirical literature, including the Grammy awards (Anand and Watson, 2004), the Booker Prize (Anand and Jones, 2008), the Olympic Games (Glynn, 2008) and the Salon in the nineteenth-century French art field (see Chapter 1 by Delacour and Leca in this volume) – all of which are strongly embedded in systems of norms and regulations, and largely taken for granted by actors within their respective fields.