Professor Scott Cohen
Academic and research departments
Department of Tourism and Transport, Centre for Sustainability and Wellbeing in the Visitor Economy.About
Biography
Scott Cohen is Professor of Tourism and Transport and Director of Research in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
Scott's research is primarily focused on societal issues in the contexts of travel, mobility and transport, with particular interests in hypermobility, sustainable mobility, autonomous vehicles and in business and lifestyle travel. He publishes regularly across high impact business, social science and environmental science journals. Scott's research has been featured in prominent media outlets such as The Economist, The Washington Post, NBC News, Fast Company, Newsweek, USA Today, The Financial Times and The Telegraph, and he has made TV appearances on CNN Business Traveller and Channel 4's Flights and Holidays from Hell.
Scott is a Fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism and the International Association for China Tourism Studies. He serves as an Associate Editor for Annals of Tourism Research and as an Editorial Board member for the Journal of Travel Research, Current Issues in Tourism, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, International Journal of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, Tourism Recreation Research, Journal of China Tourism Research and Anatolia.
Areas of specialism
University roles and responsibilities
- Director of Research - School of Hospitality and Tourism Management
My qualifications
Previous roles
Affiliations and memberships
ResearchResearch interests
- Hypermobility
- Sustainable transport
- Autonomous vehicles
- Business travel
- Lifestyle mobilities
- Sociological perspectives on tourism
- Conceptual and qualitative research
Research interests
- Hypermobility
- Sustainable transport
- Autonomous vehicles
- Business travel
- Lifestyle mobilities
- Sociological perspectives on tourism
- Conceptual and qualitative research
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
I am presently looking for new PhD students to begin their studies under my supervision. Please get in touch if you are interested in doctoral study and have research interests related to my own.
Currently I supervise:
Whitney Smith - Gendered media representations in airline employment
Harry Rice - Climate change adaptation in the Scandinavian snow sports industry
Shoukry Rozek - Wellbeing of Arab medical tourists in Western countries
Xudong (Oliver) Qui - Escapism and hyperconnectivity in tourism
Aram Gholamian - Universities as mobilisers in the lifestyles of Iranian women
Teaching
Undergraduate:
- Tourism and Society
Postgraduate:
- Tourism Social Science
- Sustainability in Aviation
Publications
Air transport and tourism are interdependent systems wherein representations of gender are shaped by organisational cultures. Although airlines have progressed their gender balance, cabin crew work remains archetypically feminine. Taking a feminist poststructuralist approach, this paper uses thematic document analysis to examine how gendered discourses are constituted within airline organisational narratives through text, gestures and symbolic signs. Findings reveal that while airlines work to increase gender equality in employment practices, their efforts predominantly focus on the cockpit, neglecting roles beyond the flight deck. The paper recommends airlines broaden their gender equity focus to all roles and provides a basis for reshaping airlines' gender policies and practices.
The Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI) portray luxury lifestyles on social media. The potential roles of travel and transport within these online displays of affluence have not yet been examined. This paper’s purpose is to analyse how transport modes and luxury travel are depicted and interrelated through RKOI images. Co-occurrence analyses were conducted using a data set of Instagram posts with RKOI as a hashtag (2012–2018) to visualize the roles of transport modes and luxury travel in RKOI image construction. The findings demonstrate that both energy-intensive transport modes and luxury travel, whether through air/watercraft or luxury cars, play a vital role in signaling RKOI’s self-image on Instagram, with gendered differences. The article contributes an original conceptual model of how RKOI construct their image using transport modes and luxury travel. Implications for the social normalization of carbon-intensive transport choices, coupled with luxury destinations as a backdrop, are discussed.
Aviation remains a problematic sector of the global economy in times of climate emergency. Grounded in the ideology of reconfiguration, we adopt a system transitions perspective to address high emissions leisure travel. Our focus falls on the marketing communications of airlines as a critical component in the prevailing sociotechnical regime. Thematic analysis of the e-mail marketing communications of selected airlines revealed three prominent tropes: adventure and discovery; privilege; and urgency. These communications bring air travel into the everyday lives of consumers and accelerate the turnover time of tourist consumption. Time is mobilized to create a sense of resource scarcity and urgency to consume, paradoxically in a situation characterized by oversupply. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity for structural reform of the airline industry. Component substitution to address airline marketing is required as an important step toward overcoming consumer moral disengagement and reconfiguring the airline industry.
Individual aspirations of associating with role models are routinely harnessed by marketers, who for instance, use celebrity endorsement in selling brands and products. It appears there has been no research to date, however, on the potential for celebrity activism, or role model advocacy beyond celebrities, such as from politicians, to form effective interventions for encouraging sustainable transport behaviour. This is despite studies suggesting that celebrity endorsement is a potential gateway for transforming public opinion on carbon intensive transport modes. The present paper consequently offers a critical review of the literature on role model advocacy and celebrity activism, and how these concepts have been harnessed to address environmental issues, in order to conceptually assess the potential for extending these intervention techniques to the context of sustainable transport. The scope of the paper includes the potential that high profile politicians/celebrities might play as role models in exercising referent power to influence social norms surrounding sustainable transport, given that the success of social marketing interventions are closely tied to the need for changes in the policy landscape. Key dimensions of role model endorsement in transport are identified and applied to a series of examples of how celebrity and political role models have influenced transport cultures. In addition to offering an original application of a theoretical framework to a new context, in order to help address the increasingly important societal issue of transport’s growing contribution to climate change, the paper discusses the challenges associated with the neoliberal framing of this approach.
Air travel is often justified as ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable’, in the sense that trips have purpose and value. Yet it is evident that people travel for reasons that may include forced and voluntary movement, with motives ranging from visiting friends and family, to leisure, or business. In light of the challenge to decarbonise transport, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this paper discusses the perceived necessity of flight from individual and societal perspectives, while considering moral and economic viewpoints. It suggests that travel motives have different degrees of ‘urgency’, and that the ‘necessity of flight’ cannot be generalised. To empirically test this hypothesis in an exploratory survey, we used mixed methods to examine the perspectives of 29 international students at Lund University, Sweden on the perceived importance of their flights (n = 587) over a six-year period (2012–2017). Results show that the value associated with individual flights depends on flight motive, experience, life stage, or situational factors. Notably, almost half of the leisure flights made lack importance. Implications are discussed in the context of climate policy and the future development of the aviation system.
Tourism is central to late-modern life, and tourism research that threatens this centrality is prone to media attention. Framed by sociotechnical transitions theory, we introduce the concept of ‘shadowcasting’ to show how tourism knowledge disseminated through the media, combined with public comments on its reporting, cast shadows that co-constitute imagined futures. We illustrate shadowcasting through a mixed method approach that demonstrates how media reporting and public comments on a recent paper on autonomous vehicles in tourism emerged and diverged from the original paper. Our findings reveal that issues around sex and terrorism were sensationalised, generating diverse public discourses that challenge linear visions of future transport efficiency. Our concluding discussion indicates other tourism research contexts that are most inclined to shadowcasting. •Reveals how tourism research is bound up in future-making through media reporting.•Introduces and develops the concept of ‘shadowcasting’.•Shows this process through a recent paper on autonomous vehicles in tourism.•Finds that issues around sex and terrorism were sensationalised.•Indicates other tourism research contexts inclined to shadowcasting.
The current trend of increasing demand for air travel runs contrary to climate-related sustainability goals. The absence of behavioural and near-term technological solutions to aviation’s environmental impacts underscores the importance of policy levers as a means of curbing carbon emissions. Where past work has used qualitative methods to sketch public opinion of environmental aviation policies, this work uses data drawn from a survey of 2066 British adults to make a quantitative assessment of the acceptability of a broad range of aviation climate policy options. The findings indicate that there is significant support across demographic groups for a large number of policies, particularly those that place financial or regulatory burdens on industry rather than on individuals directly. Support for aviation policies strengthens with pro-environmental attitudes and is weaker among people who are aeromobile. Though self-interested considerations appeared to dominate policy option preferences, concern for fairness may also shape policy acceptability. Overall, this paper provides to policymakers a quantitative evidence base of what types of policies for addressing aviation climate emissions are most publically palatable.
Despite its recent emergence as an alternative way of travel, hitchhiking in China remains significantly understudied, with its gender aspects unexplored. Investigating the (re)constitution of gendered Chinese hitchhiking subjects in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the paradox of agency largely unexamined in tourism gender research. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted on the South Sichuan – Tibet Route. The findings demonstrate that gendered subjectivities of the vulnerable female and the invulnerable male in hitchhiking are produced by normative heterosexuality and the principle of reciprocity as interrelated discursive regimes. The paper contributes an understanding of resistance as a contested site that accommodates ongoing political debates and ethical reflections, which requires agency to be continuously posed as a question rather than a solution.
Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalisation, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine differences in language that create differing realities with regards to gender and obligations of care in academic mobility decisions. The findings reveal how academic mobility is discursively formulated as ‘essential’ to successful academic careers, with the need for frequent travel justified despite advances in virtual communication technologies. Heteronormative discourses are shown to disrupt and fragment the opportunities female academics have to engage in academic mobility. However, we also uncover ways in which these discourses are resisted, wherein fathers articulate emotional strain associated with academic mobility. The paper shows how discourse works to constitute the essentialisation of academic mobility, and the uneven gendered practices associated with it, whilst also giving voice to gender inequities in academic mobility from the southern hemisphere.
The current trend of increasing demand for air travel runs contrary to climate-related sustainability goals. The absence of behavioural and near-term technological solutions to aviation’s environmental impacts underscores the importance of policy levers as a means of curbing carbon emissions. Where past work has used qualitative methods to sketch public opinion of environmental aviation policies, this work uses data drawn from a survey of 2066 British adults to make a quantitative assessment of the acceptability of a broad range of aviation climate policy options. The findings indicate that there is significant support across demographic groups for a large number of policies, particularly those that place financial or regulatory burdens on industry rather than on individuals directly. Support for aviation policies strengthens with pro-environmental attitudes and is weaker among people who are aeromobile. Though self-interested considerations appeared to dominate policy option preferences, concern for fairness may also shape policy acceptability. Overall, this paper provides to policymakers a quantitative evidence base of what types of policies for addressing aviation climate emissions are most publically palatable.
The publication of ‘A darker side of hypermobility’ (Cohen & Gössling, 2015), which reviewed the personal and social consequences of frequent travel, led to considerable media coverage and sparking of the public imagination, particularly with regards to the impacts of business travel. It featured in more than 85 news outlets across 17 countries, engendering over 150,000 social media shares and 433 media comments from readers, with the latter a source of insight into how the public reacts online when faced with an overview of the negative sides of frequent business travel. The present paper is theoretically framed by the role of discourse in social change and utilises discursive analysis as a method to evaluate this body of media comments. Our analysis finds two key identities are performed through public responses to the explicit health and social warnings concerned with frequent business travel: the ‘flourishing hypermobile’ and the ‘floundering hypermobile’. The former either deny the health implications of frequent business travel, or present strategies to actively overcome them, while the latter seek solace in the public dissemination of the health warnings: they highlight their passivity in the construction of their identity as hypermobile and its associated health implications. The findings reveal a segment of business travellers who wish to reduce travel, but perceive this as beyond their locus of control. Business travel reductions are thus unlikely to happen through the agency of individual travellers, but rather by changes in the structural factors that influence human resource and corporate travel management policies.
Non-commuting journeys, which include social and recreational journeys, make up a substantial proportion of household travel and these journeys are mostly taken by car. Autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment has the potential to dramatically transform the way people work and travel, as well as reshape leisure travel patterns. Yet, the wider societal implications of AVs beyond commuting, such as travel for leisure and tourism, have received minimal academic attention. This state-of-the-art review follows PRISMA guidelines and addresses this gap through a qualitative synthesis of 48 articles that focuses on the influence of AV use on non-commuting journeys, including those for leisure, tourism, shopping and visiting friends and relatives. Key findings identified in this review include interest in AVs for leisure exceeding that for commuting, sharing being less likely when AVs are used for leisure, non-recognition that some non-commuting journeys will require a lower level of automation and that the spatial impacts of AVs for non-commuting journeys, like commuting journeys, are a
Recent and projected growth in global aeromobility is poised to substantially expand aviation’s contribution to anthropogenic climate change. With limited prospects for technical- or policy-based reductions in sectoral carbon emissions, behavioural shifts in the form of decreased demand for flying become increasingly important. This conceptual article introduces an innovative approach to aviation demand reduction in the form of a co-benefits approach, wherein conventional pro-environmental messaging is augmented by the articulation of the negative personal health impacts of flying. Using a critical review approach based on secondary literature, we examine frequent flying and theories of environmental behaviour change before examining how co-benefits approaches have been used in other domains. We then identify global and local environmental harms from aviation and synthesise these with the existing literature on the personal health impacts of frequent flying, which includes both physiological effects and psycho-social harms. We find that flying less would engender a much wider range of benefits for individual health, than for the environment, and that the health benefits would likely be more salient for frequent flyers than environmental benefits. We conclude that the personal nature of health impacts will add needed salience and urgency to efforts to reduce unsustainable aeromobility.
Despite growing recognition of the material impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use, many economic sectors remain highly dependent on these fuels. Amid growing pressure to-at a minimum-appear to be doing something , businesses increasingly communicate the actions they (seek to) take to reduce their environmental impacts. Oftentimes they aim to build a sense of compatible coexistence of the sector with particular modes of sustainability. For air transport, 'sustainable aviation' has emerged as a container term for a suite of actions proposed by sectoral actors in seeking to align the sector with social and environmental sustainability. This paper critically interrogates 'sustainable aviation' through an analysis of the websites and reports of 14 international and regional airlines. Our analysis reveals the multiple and diverse ways that dominant logics (1) underpin the status quo, (2) depend on 'the science', (3) support techno-organisational changes and (4) prioritise sectoral growth. By recognising the gendered nature of environmentalism, we suggest that 'sustainable aviation' can be viewed as an active enactment of aeromasculinities – a gendered system of thinking, being and doing which forecloses radical action and change required for a climate-safe and just energy future.
Previous research demonstrated Northern Sweden may have a future competitive climatic advantage over the European Alps for ski tourism, yet knowledge of climate change risk perceptions, adaptation, and mitigation strategies undertaken by the Swedish ski industry remains limited. This study combined top-down ski season modelling and bottom-up semi-structured interviews with Swedish ski industry stakeholders to examine changing market dynamics, climate change risk perceptions, and current and future adaptations under the backdrop of Sweden’s potential climatic advantage. Findings indicate that despite a belief of having greater climate change recognition and preparedness than other international ski regions, stakeholders were reticent to link local conditions to anthropogenic climate change. Snowmaking was the most utilised adaptation option, and consistent with other regions was not explicitly seen as a climate change adaptation rather a prudent business decision. A gap between tourists’ demand for increased resort sustainability and the actions of resorts was also evident in several locations. Market dynamics are also considered as capitalising on Sweden’s potential climatic advantage will likely necessitate increased aviation travel and associated emissions, a potential barrier to the country’s ability to become a ‘last resort’ for European skiing due to Sweden’s ambitious, legally binding net-zero policy target of 2045.
Despite attempts by airlines and the wider tourism industry to cultivate more diverse working environments, gendered practices and pressures persist. A feminist poststructuralist approach involving interviews with flight attendants from three airlines is used to examine how airlines attempt to construct the ideal aesthetic flight attendant, and how individual workers may resist these gendered practices through their work. The findings demonstrate that airlines consistently shape and discipline flight attendants' gendered grooming performances through rules, peer-surveillance and engendering self-regulation. While flight attendants occasionally employ subtle forms of resistance, they primarily adhere to traditional gender norms. The paper provides a conceptual shift from binary perspectives on surveillance in tourism work to a relational understanding that reveals circulatory force.
Tourism industry and government demand for knowledge of the impacts of climate change on ski tourism is growing. Despite the more than 70-year history and large cultural significance of alpine skiing in Sweden, little is known about the industry's future under a changing climate. This study applies the SkiSim2 model with low to high emission scenarios (RCP2.6 to 8.5) to analyse the implications of climate change for ski operations (season length, snowmaking requirements) at 23 alpine ski areas across Sweden for the early, mid, and late 21 st century. Northern areas of Sweden show much less reduction in average season length compared to central and southern Sweden under the high emission mid-(13% versus 58% and 81%) and late-century scenarios (27% versus 72% and 99%). To limit season losses in these scenarios, snow production increases of over 250% are required in all regions. Such increases will create additional financial and environmental stressors, which may lead to the closure of the most at-risk resorts. With greater impacts projected for much of the European Alps ski market, northern Sweden may represent a 'last resort' for the European ski industry under higher emission scenarios by the mid-late 21st century.
This paper challenges the assumption that international students from the Global South migrate to advanced Western economies primarily for economic gain and social distinction. Through temporally focused interviews with Chinese student switchers in the UK, that is, migrants who moved from China for university and remain working in situ after graduation, we examine how lifestyle factors may come into play in evoking and accommodating (im)mobilities. Our findings reveal how participants' experiences before, during and after international education are narrated as an entanglement of affective and rational concerns. We highlight how their migration decisions are driven by the search for a desired lifestyle that features work-life balance and a perceived release from a work-oriented and socially pressurized life in China. Yet their final emplacement remains an open question due to familial responsibilities in China and Chinese citizenship regulations. The study provides an original conceptual amalgamation of student migration and lifestyle mobility and sheds further light on the importance of life courses in international student migration literature and lifestyle mobility studies.
Non-commuting journeys, which include social and recreational journeys, make up a substantial proportion of household travel and these journeys are largely taken by car. Autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment has the potential to dramatically transform the way people work and travel, as well as reshape leisure travel patterns. Yet, the wider societal implications of AVs beyond commuting, such as travel for leisure and tourism, have received minimal attention within transport literature. This state-of-the-art review follows PRISMA guidelines and begins to address this gap through a synthesis of 63 papers on AV travel focusing on non-commuting journeys, including those for leisure, tourism, shopping and visiting friends and relatives. Given the economic importance of the tourism sector and its inherent focus on non-commuting journeys, this analysis is supplemented with a review of the extent to which national tourism strategies of countries leading AV deployment include reference to AVs. The paper reveals an overwhelming focus on commuting journeys in existing AV studies as less than one-fifth of the reviewed academic sources include non-commuting as part of their wider analysis. The review's further key findings are that the interest of publics in AVs for leisure journeys appears to exceed that for commuting, sharing vehicles will be less likely when AVs are used for leisure and there is a lack of recognition in the literature that some non-commuting journeys will require a lower SAE level of automation. Surprisingly, analysis of the national tourism strategies of countries most prepared to meet the challenges of AVs shows that just three countries make specific reference to AVs within their national tourism strategies. The paper contributes to setting future AV policy agendas by concluding that two gaps must be narrowed: one, the distance between how academic studies predominantly conceive of AV use (commuting) and articulated public interest in AVs for non-commuting journeys; and two, the lack of readiness in certain national tourism strategies to accommodate AVs. As non-commuting journeys will be some of the earliest ways for which AVs will be adopted, the paper sets an agenda with a number of recommendations to aid in this transition.
Air transport and tourism are interdependent systems wherein idealized gender performances are shaped by organizational cultures and particular commercial interests that have implications for gendered representations. Organizations use social media spaces to influence public perceptions, yet in doing so they may (re)construct hegemonic notions pertaining to images of masculinity and femininity. This paper utilizes a feminist poststructuralist approach to deconstruct normative gendered assumptions that exist within the aviation sector's use of Instagram. Netnography is used to uncover the dominant discourses, as well as the complex representations of gender as represented by airlines on Instagram. Findings reveal that despite a minority of images that defy stereotypes, the airlines consistently construct and distribute playful imagery that objectifies female staff and hyper-feminizes the cabin space. In uncovering how airline organizational images may portray employees in gendered ways, this paper contributes to the achievement of SDG 5 i.e. gender equality in tourism. The paper recommends that the industry incorporates more diverse performances across all aviation occupational roles so that images that challenge stereotypes become part of the everyday.
This editorial for the special issue on ‘Desirable Tourism Transport Futures’ explores approaches to transitioning the tourism sector to a sustainable emissions path. It starts by describing an undesirable tourism transport future associated with a business-as-usual scenario, which will inevitably cause the climate mitigation goals outlined in the Paris Climate Accord (2015) to soon become unattainable. We then outline a scenario for a climatically desirable future, the social and economic implications of which are explored. The challenge of mitigating climate change is critical to desirable tourism transportation futures, although to date relatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of sustainable tourism. This is an omission that must be urgently addressed. This special issue addresses desirable tourist transportation futures in relation to deep cut emissions reductions and, therefore, mitigation of climate change-induced environmental impacts. It is important that desirable tourism transport futures are critically considered in terms of both spatial and temporal scale. The scenarios that inform this introductory article provide some insights at the long-term macro-scale. These scenarios are associated with desirable and undesirable elements that will no doubt continue to be the subject of much debate and contestation. While these scenarios will represent both opportunities and threats to the full spectrum of tourism industry stakeholders, they should also inform manifold avenues of future research at a critical moment in the evolution of tourism transportation and the pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030).
When Editor-in-Chief of Anatolia, Metin Kozak, asked me in early 2013 to write a portrait of Erik Cohen, who is the George S. Wise Professor of Sociology (emeritus) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the most recent winner of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) Ulysses Prize for Excellence in the Creation and Dissemination of Knowledge, I was attracted to the idea, but also rather hesitant. I hesitated because I worried over giving a just picture of a foundational scholar who had contributed to building the field of tourism studies for more than 40 years and who showed no signs of slowing down the pace or magnitude of his contributions, despite now being more than 80 years old. My first ever communication with Erik was only in late 2010, and during the two plus years I had corresponded with him, I had quickly come to know his meticulousness in his scholarship and in his attention to the social world.
This paper problematises the concept of searching for self in the context of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings on the search for self from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are considered in light of opposing academic perspectives on self. The study reveals a theoretical tension that exists between lifestyle travellers who may seek a unified sense of self, underpinned by the essentialist position that one‟s „true self‟ exists, and contrasting widely held academic viewpoints that instead conceptualise embodied selves as relational and open to multiple performances.
There has been an inherent bias in studies of ‘mobility regimes’ toward the perspective of the authorities. This article suggests the concept of ‘subversive mobilities’ to offer a novel perspective on the construct of mobilities regimes, by stressing the ways such regimes are penetrated by adversaries through diverse routes and practices, despite the regimes’ various control and defense mechanisms. We investigate how ‘smugglers’ make use of weaknesses in existing mobility regimes to facilitate their subversion, using three case studies of subversive mobilities, smuggling of Rohingya migrants, of Colombian cocaine and of South African rhino horns, to substantiate the potential of our approach. The subversive mobilities of all three case studies reveal some common traits: a multiplicity of routes and means of travel, informal personal networks based on trust and retribution rather than formal organization, and interconnected series of assemblages of differently involved actors. We claim that the continued success of ‘smugglers’ to subvert the existing mobility regimes is their greater flexibility: they tend to be pro-active, initiating new routes and means of movement, and the cooperation of illicit and legitimate role-bearers, while the mobility regimes are mostly reactive, giving the former at least a temporary advantage over the latter. Our approach leads to a more inclusive and dynamic view of mobilities regimes, and enables a better understanding of why the ‘smuggling’ of goods and ‘trafficking’ in people is increasingly successful, despite the efforts of mobilities regimes to block these activities.
Travel bragging refers to showing off or boasting about travel experiences. Despite its ubiquity on social media, travel bragging has been relatively under‐researched. This study examines travel bragging from a dual perspective of both braggers and audiences. Based on 30 semi‐structured interviews with participants who frequently posted or bragged about travel experiences and who had been frequently exposed to others' travel bragging on social media, we provide the first systematic conceptualization of travel bragging. We highlight the perception gaps between travel braggers and the audience regarding travel bragging, while uncovering the positive and negative effects of travel bragging and associated theoretical underpinnings.
Intractable conflicts pose a great challenge to both humanity and science. The crucial role played by intergroup emotions in conflict dynamics has long been asserted in the field of conflict resolution. Therefore, regulating emotions in order to change attitudes and behaviour towards promoting peace is vital. One way to transform emotions is to use established emotion regulation strategies to change intergroup emotional experiences, and subsequently political positions. However, the use of direct emotion regulation may pose challenges in its application outside the laboratory, and especially among those who lack the motivation to regulate their emotions. Thus we describe recent research in which Indirect Emotion Regulation is used to overcome those very limitations. Here concrete cognitive appraisals are indirectly altered, leading to attitude change by transforming discrete emotions. Discoveries have both theoretical and practical implications regarding emotion regulation in intractable conflicts, thus promoting attitudes so critical for peace making.
Market segmentation is ubiquitous in marketing. Hierarchical and non-hierarchical methods are the most popular for segmenting tourism markets. These methods are not without much controversy. In this study, we use bagged clustering on the push and pull factors of Western Europe to segment potential young Chinese travelers. Bagged clustering overcomes some of the limitations of hierarchical and non-hierarchical methods. A sample of 403 travelers revealed the existence of four clusters of potential visitors. The clusters were subsequently profiled on socio-demographics and travel characteristics. The findings suggest a nascent young Chinese independent travel segment that cannot be distinguished on push factors but can be differentiated on their perceptions of the current independent travel infrastructure in Western Europe. Managerial implications are offered on marketing and service provision to the young Chinese outbound travel market.
While leisure and tourism researchers have come some way in addressing issues of reflexivity in their own research, this effort towards engaging with positionality has lagged approximately ten years behind when the broader social sciences confronted the ‘reflexive turn’. This research note draws upon two cases from my own research with lifestyle travellers to illustrate how a reflexive approach can help to generate more trustworthy, richer texts in qualitative leisure research.
Social media users are increasingly harming destination brands through their posts. This paper examines how to counter brand co-destruction in social media through the application of storytelling practices. Based on a netnography of TripAdvisor and Facebook, combined with a case study of the Danish destination management organization (DMO) VisitDenmark, the paper investigates the prospective ways in which social media users co-destroy the DMO’s brand. We demonstrate how value creation is a fluid process generated along a ‘brand value continuum’, as complex interplays between co-creation and co-destruction manifest through user generated content. The paper provides recommendations on how DMOs can counter co-destruction by using storytelling to influence perceptions and set agendas for user conversations that stimulate brand co-creation.
Young independent Chinese travellers are increasingly visiting Pai, a small town in northern Thailand, in part influenced by the popularity of the 2009 Thai movie ‘Pai in Love’. Using a performance perspective, combined with theory on affordances, which have not not yet been applied in the growing body of research on Chinese tourists, this paper examines the wide variety of performances in Pai by young independent Chinese travellers, many of which revolve around tourist photography. Drawing upon participant observation and in-depth interviews with Chinese travellers in Pai, the findings reveal that many young Chinese independent traveller performances in Pai revolve around the creation of online self-identities of prosperity and globalisation, love and alternative social identities such as Chinese hipsterism or Xiao Qing Xin. Central to many of these hybrid performances is the digital camera, which affords new, more playful, embodied ways of encountering and interacting with tourist attractions, whilst simultaneously offering a means of recording and refining performances which are then distributed via the ‘statusphere’. The paper’s use of a performance lens provides new insights into Chinese tourism consumption, and highlights the importance of physical, material and social affordances in performing tourism.
Emissions from aviation will continue to increase in the future, in contradiction of global climate policy objectives. Yet, airlines and airline organizations suggest that aviation will become climatically sustainable. This paper investigates this paradox by reviewing fuel-efficiency gains since the 1960s in comparison to aviation growth, and by linking these results to technology discourses, based on a two-tiered approach tracing technology-focused discourses over 20 years (1994-2013). Findings indicate that a wide range of solutions to growing emissions from aviation have been presented by industry, hyped in global media, and subsequently vanished to be replaced by new technology discourses. Redundant discourses often linger in the public domain, where they continue to be associated with industry aspirations of ‘sustainable aviation’ and ‘zero-emission flight’. The paper highlights and discusses a number of technology discourses that constitute ‘technology myths’, and the role these ‘myths’ may be playing in the enduring but flawed promise of sustainable aviation. We conclude that technology myths require policy-makers to interpret and take into account technical uncertainty, which may result in inaction that continues to delay much needed progress in climate policy for aviation.
Despite recognition that Chinese backpackers travel in small, self-organised groups, studies have yet to examine how group dynamics affect the travel experience. Multi-sited ethnography and netnography were deployed to follow Chinese backpackers in Europe to explore their group dynamics. The findings reveal that Chinese backpackers sustain hierarchical group relations by applying cultural attributes of ‘respect for authority’ and ‘keqi’. A conflict-free status is achieved by following the codes of ‘guanxi’ and ‘conformity’. Harmony is practiced to either develop harmonious relationships or resolve potential discord. This study contributes to the literature on harmony by synthesising relevant cultural attributes to understand their applications in group dynamic. It furthermore contributes to the literature on backpacker tourism and self-organised travel group dynamics.
Although consumer behaviour is one of the most researched areas in the field of tourism, few extensive reviews of the body of knowledge in this area exist. This review article examines what we argue are the key concepts, external influences and opportune research contexts in contemporary tourism consumer behaviour research. Using a narrative review, we examine the consumer behaviour literature published in three major tourism journals from 2000 to 2012. Of 519 articles identified and reviewed, 191 are included in this article. We examine the development of and scope for future research on nine key concepts, including decision making, values, motivations, self-concept and personality, expectations, attitudes, perceptions satisfaction, trust and loyalty. We then examine three important external influences on tourism behaviour, technology, Generation Y and the rise in concern over ethical consumption. Lastly, we identify and discuss five research contexts that represent major areas for future scholarship: group and joint decision making, under-researched segments, cross-cultural issues in emerging markets, emotions and consumer misbehaviour. Our examination of key research gaps is concluded by arguing that the hedonic and affective aspects of consumer behaviour research in tourism must be brought to bear on the wider consumer behaviour and marketing literature.
Recent popular press suggests that ‘binge flying’ constitutes a new site of behavioural addiction. We theoretically appraise and empirically support this proposition through interviews with consumers in Norway and the United Kingdom conducted in 2009. Consistent findings from across two national contexts evidence a growing negative discourse towards frequent short-haul tourist air travel and illustrate strategies of guilt suppression and denial used to span a cognitive dissonance between the short-term personal benefits of tourism and the air travel’s associated long-term consequences for climate change. Tensions between tourism consumption and changing social norms towards acceptable flying practice exemplify how this social group is beginning to (re)frame what constitutes ‘excessive’ holiday flying, despite concomitantly continuing their own frequent air travels.
The period leading to and immediately after the release of the IPCC’s fifth series of climate change assessments saw substantial efforts by climate change denial interests to portray anthropogenic climate change (ACC) as either unproven theory or a negligible contribution to natural climate variability, including the relationship between tourism and climate change. This paper responds to those claims by stressing that the extent of scientific consensus suggests that human-induced warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Secondly, it responds in the context of tourism research and ACC, highlighting tourism’s significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as climate change’s potential impacts on tourism at different scales. The paper exposes the tactics used in ACC denial papers to question climate change science by referring to non-peer reviewed literature, outlier studies and misinterpretation of research, as well as potential links to think-tanks and interest groups. The paper concludes that climate change science does need to improve its communication strategies but that the world-view of some individuals and interests likely precludes acceptance. The connection between ACC and sustainability illustrates the need for debate on adaptation and mitigation strategies, but that debate needs to be grounded in scientific principles not unsupported skepticism.
This overview paper examines three areas crucial to understanding why, despite clear scientific evidence for the growing environmental impacts of tourism transport, there is large-scale inertia in structural transitions and a lack of political will to enact meaningful sustainable mobility policies. These include the importance of addressing socio-technical factors, barriers posed by ‘technology myths’ and the need to overcome ‘transport taboos’ in policymaking. The paper seeks pathways to sustainable mobility by bridging the science – policy gap between academic research and researchers, and policymakers and practitioners. It introduces key papers presented at the Freiburg 2014 workshop, covering the case for researcher engagement using advocacy and participatory approaches, the role of universities in creating their own social mobility policies, the power of social mechanisms encouraging long-haul travel, issues in consumer responsibility development, industry self regulation and the operation of realpolitik decision making and implementation inside formal and informal destination based mobility partnerships. Overall, the paper argues that governments and the tourism and transport industries must take a more cautious approach to the technological optimism that fosters policy inertia, and that policymakers must take a more open approach to implementing sustainable transport policies. A research agenda for desirable transport futures is suggested.
The ‘flyers’ dilemma’ describes the tension that now exists between the personal benefits of tourism and the climate concerns associated with high levels of personal aeromobility. This article presents the first international comparative analysis of attitudes towards climate change and discretionary air travel, providing insights into areas of convergence and divergence across three European societies - Norway, the United Kingdom and Germany. Employing a critical interpretive approach and drawing upon 48 indepth semi-structured interviews, we document evidence of widespread neglect of the ‘flyers’ dilemma’. Our comparative analysis confirms that although current discretionary air travel practices are deeply embedded and resistent to change, attitudes towards the climate crisis and barriers to behaviour change offer points of important contrast between different societies. Efforts to reformulate excessive discretionary air travel in response to accelerating global climate change must accommodate the unique issues and contrasting perspectives that exist in sections of these socieites. Keywords: Climate change, discretionary air travel, ‘flyers’ dilemma’, attitudes, behavior change.
Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer an emic account of the practices, ideologies and social identity that characterise lifestyle travel as a distinctive subtype within backpacking. Departing from the drifter construct, which (re)constitutes this identity as socially deviant, the concept of lifestyle allows for a contemporary appraisal of these individuals’ patterns of meaningful consumption and wider insights into how ongoing mobility can lead to different ways of understanding identities and relating to place.
Anthropogenic climate change poses considerable challenges to all societies and economies. One significant contributor to human-induced climate change is tourism transportation, particularly aviation. This paper addresses the relationship between climate change concerns, the energy-intensive nature of tourist consumption, and unrestrained tourist air travel behaviour in the context of Australia. Following Barr, Shaw, Coles and Prillwitz (2010), it seeks to understand public climate concern within the context of routine everyday (‘home’) lives and occasional tourist (‘away’) decision-making, with a specific focus on air travel. It draws upon 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in Australia between March and June 2011. The findings highlight the contradictory nature of environmental concerns and consumption decisions in everyday and tourist contexts. This is evident in widespread domestic consumer practices that are motivated, all or in large part, by climate concerns, set against almost complete disregard and neglect of responsibility to modify existing air travel practices. Our results highlight the magnitude of the challenge involved in shifting deeply entrenched air travel behaviours despite the growing urgency of radical emission reductions. It also highlights the need to consider consumer responses to climate change not in isolation, but in relation to industry drivers and strong government policy interventions.
Since the formulation of the mobilities paradigm, research has shown that movement is increasingly at the heart of our social identities. This paper argues that mobility, and indeed, hypermobility, constitutes to a growing extent who we are, while societal perspectives on mobility increasingly dictate how we need to move in time and space in order to accrue network capital. In this critical review, deeply embedded mechanisms of the social glamorization of mobility are uncovered, and juxtaposed with what we call a ‘darker side’ of hypermobility, including the physiological, psychological, emotional and social costs of mobility for individuals and societies. The paper concludes that while aspects of glamorization in regard to mobility are omnipresent in our lives, there exists an ominous silence with regard to its darker side.
Accelerating global climate change poses considerable challenges to all societies and economies. The European Union now targets a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. Indeed, the Labour-led Norwegian government is committed to carbon neutrality across all sectors of the economy by 2030. Aviation has been identified as a rapidly growing contributor to CO2 emissions. This article reports on a research project that explored Norwegian attitudes towards climate change, particularly as they relate to extreme long-haul air travel to Aotearoa/New Zealand. It reveals that the ‘dream trip’ to New Zealand for Norwegians is still largely intact. It also finds evidence of ‘air travel with a carbon conscience’ arising from growing concern for high frequency discretionary air travel. Evidence of denial of the climate impact of air travel that recent studies have revealed was largely absent. Interviewees expressed a greater concern for short-haul air travel emissions than for the climate impact of long-haul travel. However, intentions to adapt long-haul travel behaviours were expressed, highlighting the need to monitor consumer attitudes towards the impact of air travel on climate change. We conclude that Norway is a vanguard European tourism market in terms of climate sensitivity.
The purview of climate change concern has implicated air travel, as evidenced in a growing body of academic literature concerned with aviation CO2 emissions. This article assesses the relevance of climate change to long haul air travel decisions to New Zealand for United Kingdom consumers. Based on 15 semi-structured open-ended interviews conducted in Bournemouth, UK during June 2009, it was found that participants were unlikely to forgo potential travel decisions to New Zealand because of concern over air travel emissions. Underpinning the interviewees’ understandings and responses to air travel’s climate impact was a spectrum of awareness and attitudes to air travel and climate change. This spectrum ranged from individuals who were unaware of air travel’s climate impact to those who were beginning to consume air travel with a 2 ‘carbon conscience’. Within this spectrum were some who were aware of the impact but not willing to change their travel behaviours at all. Rather than implicating long haul air travel, the empirical evidence instead exemplifies changing perceptions towards frequent short haul air travel and voices calls for both government and media in the UK to deliver more concrete messages on air travel’s climate impact.
This review article starts with an examination of the shifting nature of tourism discourse from the 1960s up to the present, and then focuses on seven topics that we consider to be on the forefront of current developments in the sociological study of tourism: emotions, sensory experiences, materialities, gender, ethics, authentication and the philosophical groundings of tourism theories. We find that in recent years the sociology of tourism was marked by three general trends: the growing application of specific novel theories from other fields to tourism, the examination of new facets of touristic phenomena, and an intensified inquiry into the status of tourism as an intellectual or cultural project. We conclude that while the application of a range of novel theoretical perspectives and facets largely reflects the postmodern move away from binary thinking and concepts, the sociology of tourism still makes little contribution back to the discipline of sociology, and will need to address important emergent topics such as deglobalization and current nationalistic movements toward isolationism, to do so.
The increasing number of people leading more mobile lives, with spatially dispersed families, raises questions over how they maintain their family life and friendships, and how this is shaped and shapes different forms of migration, and different patterns of Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR). This paper develops an explanatory framework for conceptualizing and analyzing VFR mobilities, seeking to draw together threads from migration, mobilities and tourism studies. In unpacking the notion of VFR, this paper understands VFR mobilities as being constituted of diverse practices, and discusses five of the most important of these: social relationships, the provision of care, affirmations of identities and roots, maintenance of territorial rights, and leisure tourism. While these five types of practices are considered sequentially in this paper, they are in practice often blurred and overlapping. The interweaving of these practices changes over time, as does the meaning and content of individual practices, reflecting changes in the duration of migration, life cycle stage, individual goals and values, and the broader sets of relationships with and social obligations to different kin and friends.
A large part of the global population is now connected in online social networks in social media where they share experiences and stories and consequently influence each other’s perceptions and buying behaviour. This poses a distinct challenge for destination management organisations, who must cope with a new reality where destination brands are increasingly the product of people’s shared tourism experiences and storytelling in social networks, rather than marketing strategies. This article suggests a novel interpretation on how these online social networks function with regard to generating engagement and stimulating circulation of brand stories by offering a conceptual framework based on the sociological concepts of storytelling, performance, performativity, and mobility. These concepts are characterised as ‘technologies of power’, for their role in shaping the social mechanisms in social media. VisitDenmark, the DMO of Denmark, is used as a case to put the framework into practice. The case demonstrates how DMOs can use the framework to strengthen their ssocial media branding, and five practical recommendations for how to do so are provided.
This paper assesses the extent to which dog owners located in Brisbane, Australia wish to holiday with their pets and if there is a gap between this desire and reality. The paper also examines the extent to which this demand is being catered for by the tourism accommodation sector. The need for this study reflects the increasingly significant role dogs are playing in the lives of humans and the scale of the dog owning population. The results suggest whilst there is a strong desire amongst dog owners to take holidays with their pets the actualisation of this desire is comparatively low. A significant obstacle to the realisation of this desire appears to be a dearth of pet friendly accommodation. This has implications for the ability of the tourism industry to benefit from the potentially lucrative market that is the dog-owning population.
Encouraging positive public behaviour change has been touted as a pathway for mitigating the climate impacts of air travel. There is, however, growing evidence that two gaps, one between attitudes and behaviour, and the other between practices of “home” and “away”, pose significant barriers to changing discretionary air travel behaviour. This article uses both modern sociological theory on tourism as liminoid space, and postmodern theory that views identities as contextual, to provide a deeper understanding of why these gaps occur in the context of tourism spaces. Based on 50 in-depth consumer interviews in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom, our findings confirm that tourism spaces are often subject to lower levels of environmental concern than daily domestic contexts. The majority of participants reduced, suppressed or abandoned their climate concern when in tourism spaces, and rationalised their resulting behavioural contradictions. Only a minority held there was no difference between the environmental sustainability of their practices in domestic situations versus those on holiday. These findings suggest that scope for voluntary positive behaviour change in the air travel context is limited and will not come without stronger intervention, which is a key finding for policy makers seeking reductions in air travel’s climate impacts. Keywords – Flying, climate change, attitude-behaviour gap, home and away, identity, behaviour change
This study examines the propensity for long-haul independent travel amongst young Chinese travelers and evaluates the corresponding management implications. The paper reports findings of a survey of 403 potential travelers to Western Europe. Three clusters of visitors were identified and profiled on the basis of their socio-demographics, motives and service expectations for Western Europe. Unlike previous studies emphasizing the homogeneous behavior of the Chinese outbound market (e.g. packaged tours and group travel), our findings suggest a nascent Chinese independent youth travel segment that does not conform to Western conceptualizations of the ‘typical’ attitudes and behaviors of such visitors. This may portend the end of backpackers as a discrete group as the outbound Chinese market diversifies and engages Western Europe’s backpacker infrastructure in multiple ways. Recommendations are offered for managing expectations, marketing independent travel amenities and facilities, and service provision to these visitors.
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt all industries tied to transport, including tourism. This conceptual paper breaks new ground by providing an indepth imaginings approach to the potential future far-reaching implications of CAVs for urban tourism. Set against key debates in urban studies and urban tourism, we discuss the enchantments and apprehensions surrounding CAVs and how they may impact cities in terms of tourism transport mode use, spatial changes, tourism employment and the night-time visitor economy, leading to new socio-economic opportunities and a range of threats and inequities. We provide a concluding agenda that sets the foundation for a new research sub-field on CAVs and tourism, of relevance to urban planners, policymakers and the tourism industry.
This paper introduces and explores the psychological and social factors that both contribute to and inhibit behaviour change vis-à-vis sustainable (tourist) mobility. It is based on papers presented at the Freiburg 2012 workshop. Specifically, it reviews climate change attitudes and perceptions, the psychological benefits of tourism mobilities, addictive elements of mobility and social norming effects, the attitude-behaviour gap (i.e., cognitive dissonance between understandings of, and responses to, climate change), the psychology of modal shifts, the psychology of travel speed/time, and psychological explanations for the perceived importance of long distance travel. It notes that anthropogenic climate change is an inescapable reality, and that tourism’s share of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions appears set to rise substantially. There is little prospect of technical solutions adequately addressing this problem. The paper concludes that, while a comprehensive understanding of tourist psychology is necessary to inform policy makers, it alone will be insufficient to achieve emission reductions, and bring tourism to a climatically sustainable pathway, if treated in isolation. Radical change in the structures of provision is also necessary. That change may take the form of infrastructure planning, including financial and economic infrastructure (e.g. taxation regimes and emission trading schemes) for sustainable mobility.
There is widespread consensus that current climate policy for passenger transportation is insufficient to achieve significant emission reductions in line with global climate stabilization goals. This article consequently has a starting point in the notion of ‘path dependency’ (Schwanen, Banister and Anable 2011) and an observed ‘implementation gap’ (Banister and Hickman 2012), suggesting that significant mitigation policies for transport do not emerge in the European Union because of various interlinked ‘transport taboos’, i.e. barriers to the design, acceptance and implementation of such transport policies that remain unaddressed as they constitute political risk. The paper argues that without addressing transport taboos, such as highly unequal individual contributions to transport volumes and emissions, social inequality of planned market-based measures, the role of lobbyism, and the various social and psychological functions of mobility, it will remain difficult to achieve significant emission reductions in passenger transport. Yet, transport taboos remain largely ignored among EU policy makers because their discussion would violate ‘order’, i.e. harm specific interests within neoliberal governance structures and the societal foundations and structures of transport systems built on these.
This article examines how the mobilities paradigm intersects with physically moving as an on-going lifestyle choice. We conceptualise a lens of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ that challenges discrete notions of, and allows for a wider grasp of the increasing fluidity between travel, leisure and migration. We demonstrate how contemporary lifestyle-led mobility patterns contribute to and illustrate a breakdown in conventional binary divides between work and leisure, and a destabilisation of concepts of ‘home’ and ‘away’. We unpack issues of identity construction, belonging and place attachment associated with sustained corporeal mobility, and conclude by suggesting avenues for the further study of lifestyle mobilities. Keywords: lifestyle, corporeal, mobility, identity, belonging
Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist tourism studies, in a comparative analysis of tourism in and from these regions and those in the ‘West’. Our analysis opens up the systematic study of tourism in emerging world regions in terms of the mobilities paradigm, and concludes: one, travel had a multiplicity of origins in societies in the emerging regions, but most did not possess an equivalent emic term to ‘tourism.’ Two, tourism at domestic and intra-regional levels tends to be entangled with other discretionary mobilities, whereas the long-haul level is more differentiated. Three, the development of domestic discretionary travel in emerging regions can be represented by four overlapping ‘mobility constellations’. Four, there are significant historical differences between the regions in their long-haul mobility constellations, although their kinetic hierarchies are all still steep. Five, forms of movement and associated practices of discretionary travellers from the emerging regions and Western countries became increasingly similar under the impact of socio-technological, economic and cultural globalisation. Six, differences between the emerging regions, particularly Asia, and the West are most salient on the emic level of representations of international travel: the specific cultural motive forces for tourism do not centre on authenticity-seeking, but are instead bound up with prestige and markers of modernity.
This article explores the personal identity work of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are interpreted in light of theories on identity formation in late modernity that position identity as problematic. It is suggested that extended leisure travel can provide exposure to varied cultural praxes that may contribute to a sense of social saturation. Whilst a minority of the respondents embraced a saturation of personal identity in the subjective formation of a cosmopolitan cultural identity, several of the respondents were paradoxically left with more identity questions than answers as the result of their travels.
Late modernity in developed nations is characterized by changing social and psychological conditions, including individualization, processes of competition and loneliness. Remaining socially connected is becoming increasingly important. In this situation, travel provides meaning through physical encounters, inclusion in traveller Gemeinschaft based on shared norms, beliefs and interests, and social status in societies increasingly defined by mobilities. As relationships are forged and found in mobility, travel is no longer an option, rather a necessity for sociality, identity construction, affirmation or alteration. Social contexts and the underlying motivations for tourism have changed fundamentally in late modernity: non-tourism has become a threat to self-conceptions. By integrating social and psychological perspectives, this paper expands and deepens existing travel and mobilities discussions to advance the understanding of tourism as a mechanism of social connectedness, and points to implications for future tourism research.
Freedom is a widely discussed and highly elusive concept, and has long been represented in exoticised, masculinised and individualised discourses. Freedom is often exemplified through the image of a solitary male explorer leaving the female space of home and familiarity and going to remote places of the world. Through in-situ interviews with families caravanning in Denmark, the primary aim of this study is to challenge existing dominant discourses surrounding the subject of freedom within leisure and tourism studies. Secondly, we shed further light on an under-researched medium of mobility, that of domestic caravanning. This serves to not only disrupt representations of freedom as occurring through exoticised, masculinised and individualised practices, but to give attention to the domestic, banal contexts where the everyday and tourism intersect, which are often overlooked. This novel repositioning opens up new avenues in tourism studies for critical research into the geographies of freedom in mundane, everyday contexts.
Whereas much previous culture-related business research has focused on cross-cultural differences among various groups, this special issue departs from this trajectory through a focus on transculturalism. It examines various aspects of transcultural issues in business research, that is, business-related concepts that transcend the boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other cultural dimensions. In this overview article, the authors reflect on the conceptual development of transculturalism, its application in business research and practices, and the papers in this special issue. Future directions in transcultural business research are provided.
Tourism has been critiqued as an environmentally destructive industry on account of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with tourist mobility. From a policy perspective, current and projected growth in aviation is fundamentally incompatible with radical emissions reduction and decarbonisation of the global energy system. Efforts to address the aviation-climate change ‘policy clash’ must be informed by an understanding of public sentiments towards climate change, air travel and carbon mitigation. This article examines how consumers across four western nations are responding to the environmental excesses of contemporary air travel consumption. It focuses on individual receptiveness to voluntarily measures aimed at changing flying behaviours, industry responses and degrees of government regulation. Its theoretical context harnesses lessons from public health to inform a discussion of bottom up (social marketing, nudge) and top down (government regulation) approaches to the urgent challenge of radical air travel emissions reduction. The findings of its comparative empirical analysis are presented, based upon 68 in-depth interviews conducted in Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. We highlight contrasts in how consumers are beginning to internalise and process the environmental excesses of contemporary air travel consumption. Whereas voluntary measures, such as carbon off-setting, are viewed with widespread scepticism, divergence was found across the four study contexts in willingness to accept regulatory measures. Norwegians were far more willing to accommodate strong government intervention through taxation, whereas participants from the other three nations favoured softer strategies that are not perceived as restricting individual freedoms to travel. We conclude that voluntary approaches will be insufficient alone, and that behavioural change in public flying behaviour requires diverse policy measures. These must be informed by insights into the public’s willingness to palate stronger mitigation interventions, which varies within and between societies.
This overview article for the special issue on ‘Desirable Transport Futures’ sets out with a brief introduction of the current development of the global transport system, suggesting that it remains unclear whether transport systems are heading towards desirable change. This desirability is defined as a reduction in the system’s negative externalities, including accidents, congestion, pollutants and/or noise, while retaining its functionality. There is evidence that transport externalities continue to grow with an increasingly mobile and growing global population. Against this background, the article discusses what may constitute more desirable transport futures, as well as the barriers that have to be overcome to move towards such futures. The article concludes that transport governance will be essential to far-reaching change, and that greater focus has to be placed on individual and societal socio-psychological perspectives shaping mobility consumption. Nine papers contained in this special issue provide in-depth analyses of transport systems, as well as insight into how these may be changed in more systemic ways. A concluding research agenda is offered that outlines a number of innovative approaches researchers may pursue as part of further efforts to engender desirable transport futures.
This article introduces the concept of the ‘publication regime’ into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently disseminated to other parts of the world. Using empirical examples drawn primarily from the field of tourism studies, we examine the problems engendered by the introduction of the regime’s appointment and promotion procedures of early career academic staff in universities in the emerging world regions. We specify the auxiliary mechanisms intended to ameliorate these problems, and draw attention to the neocolonial implications of the disciplining process which these mechanisms are introducing into the academic life of the universities in the emerging regions. We argue that, as the Western publication regime is becoming increasingly globalized, local intellectual voices tend to be silenced by the regime’s growing hegemony, and, call for the integration of non-Western perspectives into the framework of the publication regime.
This article addresses critiques of Eurocentrism in tourism studies, which have called for a “paradigm shift” in response to the rapid rise of tourism from emerging world regions. We clarify the concept of a paradigm shift, and examine arguments for a shift in tourism studies on epistemological, theoretical and empirical levels. We argue for a shift on the theoretical level: the incorporation of tourism studies in the mobilities paradigm. We argue that this paradigm offers a fresh perspective on tourism as enmeshed with other kinds of discretionary mobilities, is free of Eurocentric assumptions, and destabilizes some of the leading concepts on which now problematic binary modernist thinking in tourism studies is based. However, the positivistic, ‘etic’ character of early studies of the mobilities paradigm hinders its culturally nuanced deployment in emerging world regions, a limitation we seek to remedy by adapting Tim Cresswell’s (2010) conceptualization of mobility as comprised of movement, representation and practice. We conclude by a summary of the principal findings of our application of the mobilities paradigm to the comparative study of tourism from the emerging regions.
The contemporary justification for zoos is based on their ability to act as sites of wildlife conservation. Alongside this is the reality that zoos have historically been defined as sites for the entertainment of the general public and continue to be dependent on the revenue raised through visitor receipts. Consequently, zoos are, today, identified as sites of conservation, research, education, and entertainment. In recognition of this, the aim of our research was to assess the image that zoos are currently portraying to the general public, to see how the different roles are advertised and how they sit alongside one another. The data were gathered via a content and semiotic analysis of the websites of 54 zoos spread throughout the world. The results indicate that the image zoos present to the public whilst incorporating a strong conservation message lacks depth. In addition, the image zoos present via their websites has a strong emphasis on entertainment. Based on the results of this paper, it is suggested that zoos need to present their conservation credentials in more detail and ensure the entertainment message does not adversely affect transmission of the conservation or education one whilst at the same time continuing to attract sufficient visitors to ensure the economic viability of zoos. In addition, it is recognized that changing public perceptions of zoos requires these institutions to act together rather than independently when determining the overarching theme of the “zoo.”
This article reviews the changing nature of contemporary tourism and sociological approaches to its study. We examine the broad social trends and specific historical events that recently affected tourism and discuss how the focus of sociological inquiry in tourism studies shifted from earlier discourses of authenticity and the tourist gaze to three novel theoretical approaches, the mobilities “paradigm”, the performativity approach and actor-network theory (ANT), which each reflect a broader meta-theoretical re-orientation in contemporary philosophy and sociology. We appraise these conceptual developments and discuss their limitations. We then identify several current research issues as important areas for problem-oriented work at the intersections of tourism and contemporary society: social justice, environmental sustainability, natural disasters, terrorism, heritage, embodiment and affect, and mediatization.
Seeking to shift the discussion of the concept of authenticity in tourism scholarship from the dominant concern with tourist experiences to the more sociological problem of the processes of authentication of tourist attractions, we conceptualize two analytically distinct, but practically often intersecting, modes of authentication of attractions, “cool” and “hot”. Through a range of examples, we demonstrate the implications of the two modes for the dynamics of the constitution of tourist attractions, examine their interaction, and illustrate how "cool" and "hot" authentication can be conducive to different types of personal experiences of authenticity. We furthermore explore the crucial question of who is authorized to authenticate tourist attractions, and thereby uncover issues of power and contestation in the politics of authentication.
Transport is a significant and growing contributor to climate change. To stay within ‘safe’ global warming guardrails requires substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. This represents a global political consensus, but there is evidence that current legislation in the transport sector is not significant enough to achieve medium- and longer-term reduction goals. In focusing on the European Union, this paper investigates the perspectives of twelve policy officers in three Directorates-General (MOVE, CLIMA, ENV) of the European Commission with regard to their understanding of mitigation goals and timelines, responsibilities for policy development and implementation, and perceived efficiencies of these policies to achieve climate objectives in the transport sector. Results indicate diverging and common views on climate policy goals and political responsibilities, as well as barriers to policy-making, including lack of political leadership on climate change mitigation, resistance from member states, the favoring of economic growth over cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, pressure from industry and lobby groups, preferential treatment of aero- and automobility over more sustainable transport modes, policy implementation delays, insufficient forecasting and monitoring tools, and an overreliance on technologies to contribute to emission reductions. In offering a view inside the ‘black box’ of transport policy-making, the paper reveals fundamental institutional (structural) and individual (agency-based) barriers that will have to be overcome if significant emission cuts in the transport sector are to be achieved
Background Organisations frequently rely on international business travel when operating in internationalized business environments. Yet, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on their international business travellers (IBTs) being physically and psychologically well enough to productively perform across different working environments. The salience of this issue has led to increased interest in explaining IBTs’ work-related outcomes and their antecedents. Data and methods This paper tests key assumptions of the job-demands resources theory (JD-R) in the context of international business travel. Based on a sample of 134 IBTs from different national backgrounds, the study analyses the role of prominent job demands and resources for IBTs’ exhaustion and engagement. The study also looks at the presumed moderating role of recovery experiences. Results Support for the JD-R theory when applied to the context of international business travel remains mixed. Results suggest workload as an important predictor of exhaustion. Organisational support predicts engagement. Other typical resources including autonomy and supervisory support do not show a significant relation to work-related outcomes. Apart from recovery relaxation, which significantly weakened the impact of job demands on exhaustion, none of the moderating effects (via coping, buffering or other recovery experiences) are confirmed. Conclusions The findings reflect the unique complexities of international business travel. For professionals working with or as IBTs, this study only suggests workload and support as reliable levers to influence work-related outcomes. For a better understanding of further job demands, resources and moderators within the IBT context, additional JD-R related research and theoretical development is proposed.
Tourism research on visiting friends and relatives remains normative and family-centric. The literature has yet to question the normative underpinnings of relationships and remains oriented around physical proximity. This paper therefore aims to understand the shifting qualities and intimacies of migrant personal relationships developed across diverse means for maintaining relationships. It draws from a multi-sited ethnography that includes interviews from migrants and friends and family living at a distance. Framed through theory on personal relationships and affect, we introduce the concept ‘aspirational intimacy’. This shows how important relationships become oriented around aspirations of normalcy and belonging that construct shared capacities to feel connected, while imagining alternative possibilities for relationships and life-course trajectories.
There is a burgeoning body of academic literature (e.g. Becken, 2007; Gössling et al, 2006; Hares et al, 2010) that examines if and how consumer concern about climate change manifests itself in tourist behavioural practices. These works build on a wealth of previous studies that consider how consumer concern over issues of sustainable development may also affect tourist behaviour. Indeed, whilst tourism’s climate impacts have lately been a hot topic, there is no doubt that issues of climate change are within the remit of, and need to be considered alongside, wider discourses of sustainable development (Weaver, 2011). Recent research focussed explicitly on the climate impacts of tourism and associated tourism transport reflects the realisation in the academy that the tourism industry, characterised by energy-intensive consumption, is a significant contributor to accelerating global climate change. Despite the claim, however, that tourism is increasingly blended into the fabric of everyday life (Edensor, 2007), the mass of tourism still largely occurs as a bounded experience outside the rhythms of the day-to-day, which is both extraordinary and often involving conspicuous consumption. With tourism often experienced as an event set apart from the day-to-day, it is unsurprising that few studies, with the notable exception of Barr et al (2010), have sought to understand tourist environmental concern in relation to a wider scope of everyday lives and daily decision-making. The present chapter seeks to further understandings of how tourism consumption, and its consequent carbon emissions, are made sense of and justified by consumers in relation to everyday life decisions. Based on 30 open-ended, semi-structured interviews carried out in the United Kingdom and Norway in 2009, the chapter illustrates consistencies and 2 inconsistencies in the climate sensitivities of UK and Norwegian consumers in relation to both everyday domestic (home) and tourism (away) practices. Modern theory on tourism as liminoid space (Turner, 1982) and postmodern theory that suggests personal identity (and consequently behaviour) is inconsistent and performed differently across varying contexts (Bell, 2008; Edensor, 2001) are used as complementary explanatory devices for understanding some of the participants’ seemingly contradictory consumption decisions. The research consequently reveals significant paradoxes in consumer climate sensitivities between the everyday and holidays. These findings hold important implications for the viability of climate change mitigation strategies and sustainable development goals that rely, at least in part, on nudging individual lifestyles towards less carbon-intensive consumption choices.
While sustainability issues in the tourism industry have been the subject of substantial research, such issues have not been well discussed in the field of events which is increasingly supporting tourism plans. The environmental sustainability of events in particular has not been thoroughly addressed, and sustainable tourism accreditation schemes have generally omitted events from their scope. Green Globe, an environmental accreditation scheme for tourism, suggests 25 different types of schemes to benchmark different sectors of the industry but fails to directly address events. This chapter evaluates the adaptability of Green Globe's environmental accreditation scheme to the event sector. Eight different indicators can be applied to special events. Six are suitable for events in their current state while two others require some adjustment.
This book follows the recent delivery of a three-day workshop in Freiburg, Germany that disseminated and discussed cutting edge research addressing psychological and behavioural insights into sustainable tourism mobility. In order to mitigate tourism’s contribution to climate change, there is the need for innovations at political, technical and individual levels. Though opportunities exist to significantly improve the energy efficiency of tourism and tourism transport, it is clear that current volume projections outpace the reductions. Therefore strong structural and behavioural change will be required as well. Yet, despite this growing contribution to climate change, tourist and traveller behaviour is currently not acknowledged as an important element within the development of climate policy. Influencing individual behaviour and informing effective governance will require a sound understanding of the psychology and social factors that surround contemporary tourism and travel mobilities. This book aims to explore the psychological and social factors that may contribute to and inhibit sustainable behaviour change in the context of tourist and traveller behaviour. We seek to form a stronger knowledge base and research agenda for the effective governance of tourism’s contribution to climate change.