Rhetorical aspects of tour guiding: the Polish case

ABSTRACT

Tour guides are a significant group of stakeholders in the tourism industry. They are responsible for the quality of communication during excursions and ultimately determine the level of satisfaction of tour participants. Therefore, they use a particular language and ways of influencing tourists. This paper investigates whether the particular language of guides contains persuasive means that are crucial for building an effective interpersonal communication. The authors focused on the question of how guides try to create positive relationships with guided groups. They conducted an examination on a group of Wroc?aw city guides during guided walking city tours. In order to complete the research project, qualitative non-participant observation and rhetorical analysis of audio-visual recordings of the guided tours were carried out. This study enabled the key areas of city guides’ communication influence to be specified, and it highlighted deficiencies in their use of some persuasive means. The results may serve as guidelines for improving the communication skills of tourism practitioners.     

Conform or challenge? Adjustment strategies of sanction-torn companies

The literature on sanctions often neglects the role of domestic firms in sender states, although sanctions only have a real economic effect when senders’ firms reduce their activities on the target's market. In contrast, sanctions avoidance and increasing investments in the target country (the observed behaviour of many companies facing the EU sanctions against Russia imposed in 2014) mitigate the impact of these restrictive measures. While sanctions increase the political risk for companies, they also offer economic opportunities—and previous studies could not settle the debate on which factor prevails. By evaluating responses from British, French, German, Italian and Polish enterprises to an online survey distributed in 2017, we analyse at the firm level how sanction-torn companies adjust to new political orders and what drives their strategic decisions. We find evidence that resource dependency induces strategies that challenge sanction policies: in particular, non-fungible assets in the target country incentivise companies to further increase their engagement. These defiance strategies diminish the real economic effect of sanctions and generate a new economic equilibrium, which has negative long-term implications on the choice set of policymakers to further pursue the imposition of sanctions and which even outlasts the lifting of these restrictive measures.     

Island of Peace or Island of War: Tourist Guiding

The role of tour guides in conveying information, offering explanations, and developing narratives has become a contemporary research theme. The guide is introduced as a translator of the culture, who has the crucial task of selecting, glossing, and interpreting sights. The study will examine how the Island of Peace—a border site between former adversaries, Israel and Jordan, is introduced to Israeli tourists by Israeli guides and what messages the guides deliver to their captive audience. Based on participant observation of the guided tours in the site the article will show that the guides’ narratives and messages in many cases do not portray the site as a site of peace (as its name suggests), but mostly as a site with a past of tension and conflict.     

Factors affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of hotel service personnel

The accumulation and sharing of knowledge is an important managerial approach to attracting customers and increasing customer satisfaction. However, knowledge sharing is not an automatic behavior. The primary purpose of this study is to understand the organizational and personal factors motivating employees to share knowledge. Personnel in international tourist hotels in Taipei who provide front-line services for travelers were surveyed. This study shows that internal marketing and organizational culture influence knowledge-sharing attitudes and perceived behavioral control. In addition, perceived behavioral control influences the relations among internal marketing, organizational culture, and knowledge-sharing attitudes. This research suggests that to develop knowledge-sharing attitudes among personnel that benefit customer service, it is important for managers to model supportive attitudes, give actual support in forms such as bonuses and resources, and develop a culture that encourages personnel to attempt innovation.     

Producing ceramic art works through tourism research

It might appear initially that the diverse fields of ceramics and tourism do not have much in common. However, printed pictorial ceramic objects have been widely available since the 1860s as touristic souvenirs. The relationships between art and tourism, however, have been explicitly examined by only a few tourism researchers. This paper critically examines how tourism research can actively and innovatively inform artistic practices. It thus explores the relationships between the production of ceramic art work, souvenirs, photography and tourism. In so doing it challenges the conventional opposition between art and souvenirs through the integration of popular tourism imagery and the distortion of souvenir shapes.     

Level and dynamics of financial depth: consequences for volatility of GDP

The existing literature documents positive but potentially non-linear relationship between financial depth measured as private credit to GDP ratio and volatility of GDP. In this paper, we extend the analysis by considering also the role of financial depth dynamics. We use dynamic spatial panel models to address the issue of cross-sectional dependence of errors obtained from the standard dynamic panel models. We confirm the non-linear impact of the financial depth level but also find that higher growth rates of financial depth are significantly associated with higher volatility of output. The role of the latter factor is considerably more important in terms of explained variance compared to the impact of the private credit level. These results are robust to changes in the sample range, specification of the model, and measurement of the key variables. We also document considerable differences between the estimates obtained from the standard GMM and the spatial models.     

The relationship between a firm's patent quality and its market value — The case of US pharmaceutical industry

This study examined the relationships between corporate market value and four patent quality indicators - relative patent position (RPP), revealed technology advantage (RTA), Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of patents (HHI of patents), and patent citations - in the US pharmaceutical industry. The results showed that RPP and patent citations were positively associated with corporate market value, but HHI of patents was negatively associated with it, while RTA was not significantly related to it. Thus, if pharmaceutical companies want to enhance their market value, they should increase their leading positions in their most important technological fields, cultivate more diversity of technological capabilities, and raise innovative value of their patents. In addition, this study found that market value of pharmaceutical companies with high patent counts was higher than that of pharmaceutical companies with low patent counts, and suggested that pharmaceutical companies with low patent counts should increase RPP in their most technological fields, decrease HHI of patents, or raise patent citations to further enhance their market value. Furthermore, this study developed a classification for the pharmaceutical companies to divide them into four types, and provided some suggestions to them.     

Industry- and company-level factors influencing the development of the forest energy business — insights from a Delphi Study

The global business environment of today requires industries to be increasingly agile in order to create added value. There is a particularly urgent need to innovate and redefine business models in the mature pulp and paper industry, which is continually announcing mill closures and reporting persistent profitability problems. This paper focuses on the emerging forest energy business, which appears to offer many novel opportunities for both the forest and the energy industry. We conducted a qualitative dissensus-based online Delphi study and carried out themed expert interviews in order to identify the main industry- and company-level factors that are most likely to influence the bioenergy sector, its value-creation potential and forest and energy companies' future roles in it. The Delphi technique proved to be a valuable research tool with which we were able to obtain comprehensive information on a subject that lacks historical and financial data, and yet requires input from many quarters. The results suggest that the complementary resources held by forest and energy companies make collaboration in the bioenergy business favorable. Moreover, the procurement and logistics of forest raw material appear to be key success factors in terms of yielding the most synergetic gains. Uncertainty about policy interventions nevertheless causes concern given their relatively rapid effect on the prospects of the bioenergy business.