Conventions,Festivals, and Tourism

Abstract

The link between conventions and tourism has often been assumed, and to some extent has been researched, and yet little research has been undertaken to study the relationships between organizations staging an event. The aim of this paper is to highlight the links between convention, festival, and tourism organizations using a case study in Lismore, Australia. The Lismore Chamber of Commerce has used an agricultural convention in conjunction with a community festival to share resources and attract wider audiences. This paper demonstrates the outcomes of this relationship in terms of innovation, cooperation, and regional development. Where previous attempts to coordinate the herb industry had failed, the case shows how coordinated events can serve an important purpose. The case also demonstrates the use of a network analysis methodology as a potential tool for researchers and managers in identifying and understanding industry relationships. The results demonstrate the success of this event and highlight the importance of developing and maintaining network relations.     

Sport,heritage, and tourism

The relationship between sport, heritage, and tourism is strong, and the breadth and depth of research that explores this relationship is significant. This collection adds to the heritage sport tourism literature by considering several new perspectives. In particular, authors have examined sport heritage as a vehicle for understanding and memorializing conflict, as a tool for both celebrating achievement and marginalizing people, as a field of dissonance that often does not conform to tourism promotion and marketing, as a topic that generates, commends, commodifies, and (sometimes) discards “living” heritage, and as a means for discovering, or imagining, genealogical roots. Ultimately, sport heritage illuminates many of the issues, challenges, and debates in heritage and heritage tourism more broadly, while also demonstrating that, through its constant making remaking, sport heritage rarely fossilizes.     

Tourism,smart specialisation,growth, and resilience

This work analyses the implications of tourism dynamics and smart specialisation strategies on growth and socioeconomic resilience of European regions where tourism is a regional priority. By using a panel data model for 2006–2017, phases of growth, recession, and recovery are scrutinised. A convergence process is identified, with higher growth rates for less-developed regions; however, the most developed regions are more resilient. Tourism demand is positively correlated with growth and resilience but a high share of tourism within regional employment has negative impacts on both. Specialisation patterns combining tourism with agriculture have positive effects in both cases. Diversification strategies including unrelated sectors contribute to increased resilience in these regions, and a prioritisation of construction reduces regional resilience.     

Vacation decisions,activities, and satisfactions

Vacations are a major consumer expense category. People devote considerable attention to deciding whether to take one or not (generic decision), to making joint decisions as husband, wife, and children, and to acquiring information from different sources and media. Information functions to sensitize, persuade, heighten appreciation, and legitimize choices. Several vacation types can be distinguished. Life-style, as a broader concept, may server as a good basis of explanation for vacation behavior. Equity and attribution are important concepts in understanding vacationer (dis)satisfaction and complaint behavior.     

Human Resource Management,Job Satisfaction,Morale, Optimism,and Turnover

ABSTRACT

This article examines the usage of nine human resource management (HRM) practices among 46 hotels in San Diego. Results showed that the hotels in the sample use training and development to bring employees up to an acceptable level of performance, and then rely on allowing employee a voice to keep them engaged. Usage of HRM varied by hotel types (e.g., resorts vs. economy), and the practices had a statistically significant relationship with job satisfaction, morale, and optimism about the future of the hotel. These attitudes, in turn, were significantly related to turnover intentions. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Culture,Self-Construal,and Leisure Motivations

The purpose of this study is to examine Canadian and Mainland Chinese students' leisure by investigating the role self-construal plays as an intervening variable between culture and motivation. Separate hierarchical multiple regressions are performed on each motivation with culture entered first followed by a block composed of four types of self-construal: vertical collectivism (i.e., dutiful), horizontal collectivism (i.e., cooperative), horizontal individualism (i.e., unique), and vertical individualism (i.e., achievement oriented). Results suggest that: (a) higher levels of horizontal collectivism are associated with higher levels of introjected reward (i.e., pride), identified (i.e., personally important), integrated (self-identity), and intrinsic (i.e., interesting and enjoyable) motivations; and (b) higher levels of horizontal individualism are associated with higher levels of introjected reward, identified, and integrated motivations.     

Festival quality,self-connection,and bragging

Festivals provide opportunities for experiential consumption, attracting both first-time and repeat visitors. However, current understanding of the perceptual and behavioural differences between these groups remains incomplete. This study investigates how experiential purchase quality influences experience self-connection and braggart word-of-mouth, for both first-time and repeat visitors, using a mixed-method approach. The qualitative (n = 32) and quantitative (n = 909) results together reveal that the combinations of experiential purchase quality dimensions stimulating experience self-connection and braggart word-of-mouth in repeat visitors differ significantly from those for first-time visitors, emphasising the need for festival managers to pay close attention to how different visitor groups perceive and prioritise experiential purchase quality dimensions. The findings thus extend current understanding of how braggart word-of-mouth emerges in an experiential consumption context.     

Hospitality,Tourism, and Lifestyle Concepts

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of the significance of the lifestyle concept for the management of service quality and customer satisfaction in the hospitality and tourism industry. It discusses aspects of its continuing evolution and outlines the contents of articles relevant to this volume, providing a brief summary of the articles collected. It concludes by identifying a number of opportunities for further research into hospitality and tourism lifestyle concepts.     

Onto-Epistemological and Theoretical Engagements Through Praxis and Beyond: Comfort,Crises, Shifts,and Re-Groupings

In 2014, Berbary and Boles challenged our field to think critically about onto-epistemological and macro theoretical underpinnings of leisure research. In particular, the call was made to understand how researchers position themselves, their participants, and their research processes within particular frames or paradigms that attend differently to notions such as truth, power, subjectivity, rationality, language, and representation. Recognizing our own desires to promote and engage such praxis, we try to not just write about our practices of theorizing, but rather to illuminate the potential shared embodied turmoil that might ensue when one takes the time and space to read theory, read thoroughly, and engage deliberately. Therefore, using Kuhn's scaffolding of scientific revolutions, in this article we share our own experiences navigating our adventures through onto-epistemological and theoretical frameworks in order to acknowledge the difficulties of engaging with multiple paradigms of praxis.     

Race,gender, and leisure benefits

This study investigated the relationship between race, gender, and 7 leisure benefits that are based on a Benefits Approach to Leisure (BAL) framework. A random sample of 47 blocks from a southern metropolitan census tract composed of racially integrated middle‐class neighborhoods yielded 99 African American and 107 European American households who rated statements representing 7 leisure benefits on a Likert‐type scale. Using 2‐tailed t tests, with an F (folded) statistic to test for equality of the 2 variances, significant differences (p < .05) between middle‐class African Americans and middle‐class European Americans were found on 4 of 7 leisure benefit scales (57%): relaxation, diversion, self‐expression, and social interaction. When gender was considered, African American and European American middle‐class men differed significantly (p < .05) on relaxation and self‐expression scales, whereas middle‐class women differed significantly (p < .05) on social interaction and self‐esteem scales. The 7 leisure benefit areas were ranked according to perceived importance; a strong association (R = .86, p < .05) was shown between the racial groups. Gender showed considerable effect on the ranking of preferred leisure benefits among middle‐class African Americans but was of limited value when comparing middle‐class European American rankings.     

Experience,brand prestige,perceived value (functional,hedonic, social,and financial), and loyalty among GROCERANT customers

The food service industry has already observed that a merely good quality of products/services cannot make a business successful and has emphasized the importance of delivering unique and memorable experiences. Grocerants meet customer demand by filling the roles of grocery stores and restaurants, while offering novel and special experiences to customers. This study explores the unique experiences staged in grocerants by applying the experience economy and associates such experiences to brand prestige, customer perceived value, and loyalty. Data was collected at grocerants in Korea, using a mall-intercept survey. Our results identify the positive effects of entertainment and escapist experiences on brand prestige which significantly triggers functional, hedonic, social, and financial values. The three values (functional, hedonic, and financial) also affect loyalty. Overall, the proposed theoretical framework sufficiently accounts for customer loyalty. This study was the first attempt to investigate grocerant patrons’ behaviors and thus includes a high degree of originality.     

Ethnicity,Acculturation, Self-Construal,and Motivations for Outdoor Recreation

Research on the leisure of racial and ethnic groups has recently been criticized for a variety of different reasons. In response to some of these concerns, this article examines the motivations of outdoor recreationists who identify themselves as being Chinese ( n = 53); it compares their motivations with those of Euro-North Americans ( n = 180) at the same outdoor setting; and it does so using the construct of self-construal as an intervening variable between ethnicity, acculturation, and motivations for outdoor recreation. According to Markus and Kitayama (1991), individuals with independent self-construals value being unique, expressing themselves, and promoting their own goals, whereas individuals with interdependent self-construals value belonging, fitting in, and promoting others' goals. Furthermore, although people in or from Western Europe and North America are more likely to have independent self-construals, people in or from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Southern Europe are more likely to hold interdependent self-construals. On the basis of the above, a series of regressions were conducted. Results suggest that (a) ethnicity does affect both types of self-construal; (b) ethnicity does affect four outdoor recreation motivations directly, although this relationship is usually, but not always, mediated by self-construal; (c) ethnicity does affect four other recreation motivations indirectly, either through the interdependent self-construal or through both types of self-construal; and (d) with Chinese respondents, acculturation did affect one recreation motivation directly and, through the independent self-construal, two other motivations indirectly.     

Trans traveling and embodied practices: Panopticism,agency, dress,and gendered surveillance

We examined trans individual's enactments of gender authenticity negotiations with a unique perspective considering the intersections of dress and travel. We drew upon the concepts of power, agency of the body, and dress and ambivalence to examine relationships between embodied practices, traveling, and society by conducting 15 semi-structured interviews with trans individuals. Through our work we argue that dress and appearance-related practices while traveling play an integral part of negotiating gender identities in ways that feel authentic to the self for trans individuals. Part of these authenticity negotiations sometimes involve moments of lacking authenticity through self-surveillance in order to manage liveable and safer lives in unknown or even familiar spaces.     

American Green: Class,Crisis, and the Deployment of Nature in Central Park,Yosemite, and Yellowstone

Abstract

With the introduction of the microcomputer, sophisticated statistical computing can now be done at a person's desk. However, since the microcomputing environment is a subset of the mainframe environment, there exist limitations to statistical microcomputing, such as precision and processing efficiency. However, the microcomputer does offer advantages for statistical computing if the statistical software for microcomputers exhibits certain characteristics. These software characteristics and the advantages and disadvantages of statistical microcomputing are discussed.