Diaspora tourists and the Scottish Homecoming 2009

Since devolution and the establishment of the Scottish Government, the country has increasingly sought to engage with its diaspora, as part of its tourism strategy. In recent years, many countries have welcomed home their diasporas through organised events and in 2009, the Scottish Government organised a Year of Homecoming. This paper describes the experiences of some of the diaspora Scots who returned ‘home’ that year, and explores how returning ‘home’ had an impact on their knowledge of contemporary Scotland and their continuing sense of a Scottish identity.     

Leisure,international retirement migration,and retirement adjustment: insights from the best exotic marigold hotel movies

ABSTRACT

International retirement migration (IRM) is a growing phenomenon linked to increased longevity, early retirement, and improved financial status. Encompassing both travel and leisure experiences, IRM is a topic relevant to both tourism and leisure studies. By analysing the fictional movie series The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and The Second Best Marigold Hotel (2015) from psychological, gerontological, and sociological theoretical perspectives, this paper examines motivation, goal setting, continuity and change, and identity development in IRM experiences within tourism and leisure contexts. This paper (a) identified motivations for IRM as finance, romantic relationships, social relations, self-esteem, self-fulfilment, and social norms; (b) in turn, time perception and attitude influence IRM emigrants’ priority and emotional fulfilment; (c) innovation extricates IRM emigrants from role loss and facilitates role change; and (d) IRM emigrants experience various identity development processes. A conceptual framework for IRM is proposed that purports to explain the IRM experience process and indicates that such an understanding of IRM should incorporate psychological, gerontological, and sociological perspectives.     

Unintended outcomes of the London 2012 Olympic Games: local voices of resistance and the challenge for sport participation leverage in England

This study was undertaken with five families before, during and after the London 2012 Olympics to examine and explore everyday reactions to the Games on families in the East Midlands region of England. The aim of the research was to build localised accounts of the multiple interpretations, potential impacts and reactions to the Olympics in everyday family household settings. The views, perceptions and interpretations of the Games were gathered through qualitative research methods, using video diaries and, pre- and post-event, group interviews. Findings from the study illustrated diverse reactions to the legacy messages, resistance to policy interpretations surrounding this mega event and a strong sense of regional and financial exclusion from the event. Lessons can be learnt for both policy-makers and event managers in the design of future events that encompass the localised perspectives of those communities and individuals who consume the event beyond direct physical participation. In particular, themes from the data included the importance of regional community involvement of national showcase events, limitations of existing media and web-based information sources, and the everyday resistance to policy messages assumed as taken for granted. It is also hoped that the study will provide lessons for the Rio 2016 Olympics from a local delivery perspective.     

Elite sport culture and policy interrelationships: the case of Sprint Canoe in Australia

In recent years, elite sport policy has received considerable research attention. However, to date the emphasis of such studies has been the examination of policies as stand-alone entities and the ways each policy may impact athlete performance rather than how policies influence each other. This study explores the elite sport policy interrelationships of Sprint Canoe in order to explain the dynamic links between policies and how they may affect performance. To explore these links in depth, interviews with coaches, high performance managers and athletes from Sprint Canoe in Australia were conducted. The findings of this study offer a contribution to the existing literature on elite sport policy and go beyond the mere exploration of sport and country-specific policy contexts. They showcase the role of a sport’s culture on shaping policy linkages and interrelationships. The practical implications of recognising where sport policies require attention and how to achieve improvements are discussed.     

During play,the break,and the drive home: the meaning of parental verbal behaviour in youth sport

Problems surrounding parental involvement in youth sport have received much attention in the international academic community. Most of the focus has surrounded the frequency and nature of parental verbal behaviour such as criticism, swearing and abuse. While such behaviour has the potential to exert a negative influence in youth sport, little is known about the socially constructed meaning of parental verbal behaviour. In other words, there is a current lack of understanding surrounding the social significance (or lack thereof) of parental comments, criticisms and abuse in the context of youth sport. Addressing this oversight is important given that parents and youth do not always share a common appreciation of parental involvement in sport. This paper reports on a study which sought to generate a greater understanding of parental involvement in the junior Australian football experience. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with parents and youth participants (n = 86) currently involved in a competitive Australian football season. Data were manually transcribed verbatim and subjected to a thematic analysis. The findings reveal how parents and youth attribute different social meaning to parental verbal behaviour during play, the breaks and the drive home. While youth appear to experience parental verbal behaviour in polarising ways, parents rationalise their own verbal behaviour and in doing so, contribute to a broader social reproduction of sport parenting behaviour.     

Conceptualization and alternate operationalizations of the measurement of sponsorship effectiveness in sport

A model that integrates the communication and product adoption processes is developed and is used to evaluate the effectiveness of alternate measures of sponsorship. The further through the communication process an evaluation takes place, the stronger is the evidence of a sponsorship’s contribution to increasing sales. The most frequently used sponsorship measure is media equivalency values. These frequently inflate the real value of media coverage. Further, this approach is fundamentally conceptually flawed because it measures only the extent of media output and offers no insight as to whether people absorbed the message. Studies measuring changes in consumers’ awareness usually rely on people’s recall of a sponsor’s name being associated with an event, but recall is notoriously faulty. Image enhancement is a state closer to assessing impact on sales and is best measured by ‘strength of link’, reflecting the extent to which a brand has borrowed an event’s image. Intent‐to‐purchase studies are the stage immediately preceding sales and can be done by surveying audiences and identifying their brand and product desires and their purchase habits. The most desirable measure from a sponsor’s perspective is impact on sales, which may be expressed as: (i) increases in traffic at retail points of sale; (ii) number of new sales leads created; or (iii) actual increase in sales associated with a sponsorship.     

Towards a model of cross-sectoral policy development in leisure: the case of sport and tourism

Whilst leisure studies has now become an established field of academic analysis, there is still little literature on the dynamics of the leisure policy process, particularly in the area of cross-sectoral liaison. This paper attempts to synthesize previous research relating to general policy dynamics in developing a model of cross-sectoral policy development. In developing this model, particular attention is given to two major ESRC funded projects of the 1980s – work on Inter-Governmental Relations and Government Industry Relations – which produced two recognizably different models of the policy process. A combined model is proposed which is used to examine and compare the structures of the sport and the tourism policy communities and to analyse how these structures might effective the emergence of a sport-tourism policy network. In conclusion, the extent to which the model this paper develops might be applicable to other areas of leisure policy is discussed.     

Leisure,income inequality and the Veblen effect: cross-national analysis of leisure time and sport and cultural activity

This paper was prompted by the publication in Britain in 2009 of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which attracted considerable comment, both positive and negative and both substantive and methodological. The book claimed to show that, on a range of health and social measures of well-being, rich countries with more equal income distributions tended to perform better than those with less equal income distributions. Leisure time and behaviour were not among the indicators of well-being included and, while some researchers have sought to fill this gap, the range of leisure indicators used to date has been limited. This paper examines the relationship between income inequality and leisure time on a world-wide basis, and ten measures of cultural participation and two of sport and physical recreation participation in European countries. Efforts are made to address some of the methodological criticisms which have been made of The Spirit Level. It is found that more equal countries have more leisure time and higher levels of participation in cultural and sporting activities, and that there are also significant relationships with absolute Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head and with religious-related values. The extent to which variations in leisure time and participation are related to income inequality is linked to Thorstein Veblen’s theory of pecuniary emulation, referred to as the ‘Veblen effect’.     

Identity,Politics, and the Beach: Environmental Activism in Surfers Against Sewage

Abstract

Academic accounts of leisure activities like surfing tend to emphasise their individualistic, hedonistic and commercialised qualities, seeing this as characteristic of leisure consumption in late capitalism; that culture is increasingly dominated by the market and attention is diverted from collective and political issues. Yet empirical research in such lifestyle sport cultures reveals a more complex and contradictory picture of leisure consumption. This paper examines the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), founded by surfers in Cornwall, England. It draws on subcultural media discourses about SAS and interviews with SAS members and personnel. Whilst acknowledging the limitations in the political significance and impact of SAS’s activism, the paper argues that through their sport consumption, participants from a range of minority water sports cultures have formed a politicised trans‐local collectivity based around a concern with their own localised environment, one which has become articulated into broader trans‐national political issues. It is argued further that SAS is part of a broader wave of new social movements and direct action protest groups that gathered momentum in Britain in the mid to late 1990s. In such groups the politics of identity take centre stage. The paper therefore challenges us to rethink the meaning of political activism, and the capacity of leisure and sport to contribute to the politics of identity.     

Extraordinary body-self narratives: sport and physical activity in the lives of transgender people

Physical activity and sports can be regarded as particularly challenging social practices for transgender people, regarding the centrality of the body, gendered structures like changing rooms and competitions, and normative gender ideologies. In the emerging body of literature on transgender people and sport, the main focus has been on mainstream, competitive sports as non-inclusive. In this article, I present body-self narratives in physical activity and sports (PA/S) during different stages of their gender transition, based on interviews with 12 transgender people in the Netherlands. The results confirm that mainstream sports and physical activity spaces like swimming pools are often experienced as relatively unsafe by transgender people, both pre- and post-transition and especially during the ‘liminal’ transition phase. However, apart from places of shame for or control of the ‘wrong’ body-object and places of felt/enacted stigma, the body-self narratives also indicated that PA/S had been important enabling and empowering activities at different times in the lives of transgender people. For example, regarding gender (dis)identification or as coping strategy in de pre-transition phase and for ultimately gaining body-subject awareness, gender recognition and pride of the ‘right’ body-self.     

Tourism and nostalgia for the pastoral on the island of Fyn,Denmark

Constructions of home are powerful from both heritage and tourism perspectives, as ‘home’ suggests a certain type of heritage precedence while also providing a competitive tourism advantage over rival locations. Sport tourism sites also disseminate notions of home as part of their narrative, both to create and solidify particular heritage claims as well as to enhance the tourism potential of a location. Home narratives are used, in particular, during stadium tours, where tourists go ‘behind the scenes’ at a famous sports venue. Tour narratives at Twickenham Stadium were examined in this study. At Twickenham, it was found that the stadium was represented as ‘home’ during tours in three different ways: as the literal home of the English National Rugby team; as the spiritual home of the sport of rugby; and as the home of particular notions of English identity. These representations were created as a means of claiming cultural propriety, particularly with regard to the sport and its heritage, as well as in recognition of the venue's role as an international tourism destination. However, the employment of home narratives, which espouse notions of stability and continuity, also mask wider heritage and tourism anxieties, in particular competition from rival sites.     

Negotiating work and family: lifestyle migration,potential selves and the role of second homes as potential spaces

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in the USA with migrants who use an act of relocation as a means of deliberately constructing identity as well as seeking greater ‘balance’ and ‘control’ in their lives. Specifically, it examines how ‘second’ homes can serve as a transitional or ‘potential space’ in the lives of these migrants not only between different geographic places but also what are taken to be distinct identities and ideals associated with these places and the lives lived in them. Such behaviour is not simply about coping and adapting to a new environment; rather, it is about using qualities of destination places to reconcile different visions of self and family purposefully set apart by relocation and a particular notion of ‘the good’ that underlies a ‘lifestyle commitment’ attached to the new place. The author highlights how research into the changing dynamics of work and family can help us understand, generally, effects of an emergent, economic order on working families and, specifically, how associated social and cultural changes shape this migration behaviour. Through analysis of lifestyle migration, this article contributes to discussion of the ways in which cultural values of work and family interrelate in migrancy as well as of challenges and opportunities facing migrants who purposefully attend to leisure activities and places associated with leisure as proper domains for essential identity work and to lifestyle as the means of realising what we may call the ‘potential self’.     

The Impact of Internal Branding on Employee Engagement and Outcome Variables in the Hotel Industry

The concept of internal branding is well accepted in the service industry. This study examines how internal branding helps service organizations achieve desirable outcomes such as job satisfaction and employee loyalty. The model is developed based on social exchange theory and considers the relationship among internal branding, employee engagement, job satisfaction, and employee loyalty. The model is tested on service employees of hotels in South Korea using a survey method. The study finds internal branding is critical for employees to be engaged with the job and the organization and employee engagement fully mediates the relationship between internal branding and job satisfaction. Several implications are discussed.     

Cider and the Marketing of the Tourism Experience in Somerset,England

Summary

The paper provides a background to the history, development and importance of the cider industry to the county. A case study approach is then adopted, in order to demonstrate the richness of cider experiences available to the tourist travelling both through, and within, Somerset. Three case studies of individual firms are provided. The paper notes that a firm's reasons for engaging in tourism bear great similarities to those utilized by wineries. The paper also highlights the importance of collective marketing strategies at both the firm and business level.     

Politics at play: locating human rights,refugees and grassroots humanitarianism in the Calais Jungle

Abstract

This article examines the political footprint of a new wave of grassroots humanitarian organisations in the informal refugee camp, popularly dubbed ‘The Jungle’, in Calais, northern France. Set against the formal humanitarian void created by the French state barring of international aid agencies, and the abject conditions of camp life, we trace the shifting socio-spatial remit and progressive politicisation of these ‘apolitical’ organisations as they encounter a crisis of human rights in the Jungle, prior to its violent demolition by state decree in October 2016. In foregrounding the organisational perspectives of Play4Calais and the Refugee Youth Service, and their unorthodox deployment of play, sport, cinema and art, we reveal a grassroots humanitarian praxis which offers an alternative to the large-scale ‘professionalised’ registers of aid delivery. By virtue of their relative informality, spatial proximity and volunteer activism, these grassroots organisations not only stand in tension with the violent border sovereignties of neoliberal states, but open up the inchoate possibility for political struggle and refugee-centred claims-making over the right to inhabit the ‘exceptional’ space of the camp.     

Linking transformational leadership and employee creativity in the hospitality industry: The influences of creative role identity,creative self-efficacy,and job complexity

Integrating transformational leadership, creativity and social cognitive theories, we explore the relationships among transformational leadership, creative role identity, creative self-efficacy, job complexity and creativity. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with bootstrapping estimation was conducted using data from 395 supervisor–employee dyads from international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The results show that supervisors' transformational leadership positively influenced employee creative self-efficacy and creativity. Moreover, creative role identity was found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creative self-efficacy, while both creative role identity and creative self-efficacy were found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity. Specifically, job complexity was found to moderate the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creative role identity, the relationship between employee creative role identity and creative self-efficacy, and the relationship between employee creative self-efficacy and creativity. We discuss the implications of these results for research and practice in hospitality context.     

Visitors' perceptions of the use of cable cars and lifts in Wulingyuan World Heritage Site,China

This paper examines perceptions and attitudes towards the use of cable cars with specific reference to Wulingyuan World Heritage Site in China. A total of 45 respondents were interviewed using open-ended questioning and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis suggests six motives for the use of the lift: (1) tight schedules generated by travel agents and tour operators, (2) lack of physical strength to walk to the summit, (3) group membership influences, (4) the saving of time, (5) lack of information about alternative approaches and (6) novelty of the lift. However, when questioned about sources of satisfaction, respondents tended to refer to other aspects of their visit. This raises questions of managerial significance, as in the past the construction of such lifts and cableways has been based on a premise of enhancing visitors' satisfaction with their visit, and this perceived advantage has been seen as outweighing possible adverse environmental impacts     

Exploring the Motivations,Experiences and Meanings of Camping in National Parks

Camping in natural areas such as national parks is an important social activity and provides a way of reconnecting with nature to achieve personal, social, and health benefits. Experience and meanings are not well understood regarding camping in natural areas, and recent research is limited. The aim of this qualitative study was to examine the motivations, experiences, and higher-order meanings of camping in two national parks in Western Australia, with a particular focus on the last of these. Important associated motivations included the “push” factor of addressing feelings of disconnection from nature, others, and self; and the “pull” factor of experiencing nature. Re-creation, reconnection and reaffirmation were key higher-order meanings. A deeper understanding of the camping experience highlights the importance of the people-natural environment relationship and shows how camping can benefit individuals and society.     

A case study investigating the impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on participation in two non-traditional English sports,Judo and Fencing

The hosting of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOPG) brought with it detailed legacy plans aiming to ‘Inspire a Generation’. The idea that hosting a sports mega-event will encourage the host population to engage in more physical activity is commonly used by governments to justify the large investments they make. The aim of this research paper was to investigate the impact that hosting the 2012 Games had on grass-root sports participation within the host nation. This paper focuses on two non-traditional English sports, Fencing and Judo and investigated the changes in mass sports participation. The membership rate analysis of our sample highlighted an overall increase in participation between 2007 and 2013, in both Judo and Fencing. The data gathered from the interviews with the head office staff at the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and local club coaches suggested that the grass-root participation programmes were the most effective way of increasing participation, rather than the reliance, solely on the inspiration effect from hosting the LOPG itself. The study highlighted the importance of strengthening communication between local voluntary clubs and the NGB, to ensure sports could promote themselves and capitalise on this global sporting phenomenon, which provided unprecedented media coverage and opportunities for these non-traditional sports. This case study provides initial results relating to the effect that a major international multi-sport event can have in the development of non-traditional sports in the host population, in terms of membership variations, participation programmes and organisational dynamics.     

Tourism,Marketing and Sustainable Development in the English National Parks: The Role of National Park Authorities

This paper examines the work of the English National Park Authorities (NPAs) in relation to aspects of the development of sustainable tourism. The NPAs have implicitly sought to achieve sustainable tourism development since the parks were first designated, striving to balance the needs of visitors and the environment within the context of living, working landscapes. Studies have revealed, however, that some NPAs are not fully championing sustainable tourism development. The paper examines the NPA's use of marketing and marketing perspectives in encouraging sustainable tourism, exploring attitudes, roles and activities. A diverse, piecemeal and sometimes underinformed approach is revealed. The paper concludes with ways forward for English NPAs and for other protected area management organisations.