Attitudes to a Non-viable Community-owned Heritage Tourist Attraction

This paper reports on a study of community attitudes to a publicly owned heritage tourism attraction in a regional Australian centre. The attraction, an authentic reproduction of a 19th-century riverboat, was built as an Australian bicentennial project in 1988, with the aim of her becoming the region's primary tourism attraction. However, over the years it has proved to be a non-viable attraction, requiring an ongoing council subsidy of up to $A200,000 per year to keep it operational. The council is under strong pressure to divest itself of the vessel, which will mean its closure and likely removal from the community. The study found strong support for council retention and continued subsidisation of its operations. However, the study also raises questions about the efficacy of community involvement in the decision-making process. In this instance, emotional attachment to the attraction, rather than a rational assessment of its future, drives community attitudes.     

Food Tourism as a Viable Market Segment: It's All How You Cook the Numbers!

This study examines whether food is a special interest or mainstream tourism product. Much of the research on special interest tourism examines the activity in isolation of the broader suite of products available in the destination mix. Such a myopic approach may produce impressive looking numbers, but may not define viable market segments. Instead, based on their research findings, the authors argue that a more holistic approach is required to examine food tourism within the context of other products in the destination to determine its value. Overall, this study suggests that consuming food may be a ubiquitous activity for most visitors to sophisticated urban destinations and may not be representative of a specialist segment.     

The Collective Effect of National Culture and Tourist Culture on Tourist Behavior

Cross-cultural understanding in tourism is a well-researched area, but in spite of great amount of time and money spent on cross-cultural training programs, this study suggests miscommunication continues to exist, caused by differences between expected and actual host or guest behavior. A gap, therefore, appears to exist between theory and practice. This article argues that much of this gap can be attributed to international tourists behaving in a manner that diverges from their expected cultural norms when they travel. They join a temporary “tourist culture” that sanctions, and indeed, encourages alternate behavior. Tourist behavior, therefore, represents a combination of national and “tourist” cultures. This proposition is tested by comparing the expected and actual behavior of Korean tourists visiting Australia. The study found that both tourists and frontline hotel staff noted that tourists behaved in a less restrained manner than expected. These findings have significant implications for cross-cultural training.     

The Effect of Cultural Distance on Tourism: A Study of International Visitors to Hong Kong

This study focuses on the impact of cultural distance on the behavior of international pleasure tourists who visited Hong Kong. It analyzes data drawn from the Hong Kong Tourism Board's Visitor Profile Report, and tests whether cultural distance has a similar impact on behavior as noted in previous studies examining physical distance. The study concludes that cultural distance exerts a modest impact on such attributes as demand, travel party composition, trip profile, behaviors, expenditure and satisfaction.     

Travel as a Life Priority?

This paper adopts a different approach to understand non- or infrequent travel. Most research is grounded in constraints theory, and assumes that once constraints are removed, people will travel. Yet, in spite of efforts by the industry to remove obstacles to participation, travel propensity rarely exceeds three-quarters of the population of developed economies. This paper tests the idea that tourism may simply not be a high enough priority for some people to engender travel, while for others it may be seen as being more important. The study evaluated where travel ranks within a set of 13 other activities. People who rated travel as being important or very important to them, consistently rated it as being a higher priority than most of the activities studied. Those who rated travel as being unimportant or of little importance placed it as a lower priority activity. The findings challenge the traditional constraints theory.     

Lean and mean in the civil service: the case of processing in HMRC

The public sector has been importing private sector methods and practices aimed at generating efficiencies and cost savings. However, the consequences of these changes on the working lives of civil servants are under-researched. This article uses detailed fieldwork to investigate the impact of Lean on labour processes in HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). We argue that Lean has a detrimental effect on employees, their working lives, and the service that is provided to the public. The consequences of Lean on public sector work are highly problematic, which is of serious concern given its progressive impact on other civil service departments in the UK.     

Gender differences in accounting education: an undergraduate exploration

There is increasing evidence that females are outperforming males in secondary education across a range of subjects. The data in higher education, however, is not so clear-cut. Several studies have been undertaken examining the impact of gender on undergraduate accounting performance, ranging from early year performance to that of later years, with conflicting results. Some of the literature suggests that gender differences are dependent on the type of assessment utilized, reporting that females tend to perform better than males in coursework assessments with the position being reversed for examinations. This paper examines gender differences across several performance measures both prior to and post entry into an Accounting and Finance degree. Data was collected from the population of honours graduates of 1998, 1999 and 2000 (n?=?132) on a thick sandwich Accounting and Finance degree at the Robert Gordon University in Scotland. All the data was extracted from student files to develop a multitude of independent performance related variables, categorized into: point of university entry data, early university performance data and final honours year performance data (examined on an individual module basis and also a global coursework and examination performance basis). Statistical differences were examined using a two independent sample technique, whereby the population was categorized by gender into male and female, with either a t-test or Mann–Whitney test being utilized dependent on the distribution of the independent variable. Only two gender differences were found: females outperformed their male counterparts in the first year accounting module and also in the auditing module, which was undertaken via distance learning during the third year of the programme. No gender differences were found in any of the final year modules, and this was also evident in the coursework and examination performance analysis. Single sex focus groups were set up to explore why gender differences were apparent in the auditing module.     

Off-sites that work

Of all the meetings top executives go to in a year, none is more important than the strategy off-site, where the most essential conversations for the future of the business occur. Yet it is the rare management team that can say its strategy off-site truly changed the way the business is run. At best, participants do some vague direction setting and work on team-building skills; at worst, they write off the retreat as a waste of time and resources. It needn't be like that. From their two decades of experience designing and facilitating strategy off-sites in companies large and small around the world, the authors have distilled a set of best practices that businesses can use to make the most of this annual opportunity. Essentially, the problem with most strategy off-sites is that they're insufficiently structured. People think that if you schedule a meeting, invite top leaders (and perhaps an outside expert), and block off units of time to discuss big subjects, the rest will take care of itself. In reality, formlessness leads to aimlessness. Oddly enough, only rigorously designed meetings give rise to truly candid strategy discussions. That rigor starts before the meeting, when the scope of the matters discussed must be limited, the participant list drawn up accordingly, the relevant materials (and only those) sent out and absorbed, and a detailed agenda established. During the meeting, the pace and quality of the conversation can be managed through attention to politics and by using carefully tailored frameworks, decision points, and group exercises. After the meeting, an action plan ensures clear accountability and follow-through. If you and your executive team spend four days a year rafting down rivers together, you'll eventually get good at rafting down rivers. Spend four days a year having well -designed strategy conversations together, and you will transform your annual off-site from a meaningless junket into a genuine turning point for your business.