Active engagement with nature: outdoor adventure tourism,sustainability and wellbeing

Abstract

This article draws on the conflicting arguments surrounding outdoor adventure tourism activities to determine if such activities might usefully be considered beneficial for humans and nature, and how they might offer avenues for sustainable tourism practice. Research in the field has often examined outdoor adventure activities through a lens that either highlights their negative environmental impacts or has sought to conceptualise motivations and/or experiences. In this article, we argue that through practices that are often seen as destructive, there is the possibility to think differently about human-nature relationships and pro-environmentalism. To explore these issues, we draw on data collected from a series of semi-structured interviews with outdoor adventure tourists. Our analysis highlights how outdoor adventure tourism facilitates reconnections to nature, offering potential wellbeing impacts and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. We conclude that outdoor adventure activities as a form of sustainable tourism have potential implications for our understanding of, and engagement with, sustainability, mental health and wellbeing.     

Competing priorities as constraints in event travel careers

An event travel career is a potentially lifelong pattern of travel to events linked with an individual’s preferred leisure activity. This paper applies the concept of an event travel career to non-elite triathletes. For these active sport tourists, ongoing pursuit of an event travel career is arguably constrained by competing priorities that intervene between everyday life and their pursuit of an event travel career. In-depth interviews were conducted with 21 triathletes identified as pursuing an event travel career. Interpretive analysis revealed seven domains of competing priorities that could work to constrain their event travel career aspirations. These domains included familial relationships, domestic responsibilities, sociability, finances, leisure, wellbeing, and work/education. The seven competing priority domains were interrelated, and cyclical in their constraining effects. Data assisted in clarifying some defining characteristics of the event travel career concept, and challenged notions of leisure participation as entirely positive and fulfilling.     

Synthesizing R&D planning and business strategy: some preliminary findings

The need for firms to compete in the longer run by offering superior products at competitive prices requires better integration of R&D, and technology in general, into business strategy development. A survey based on personal interviews of 40 respondents from “Fortune 500” U. S. industrial firms reveals that their shift in emphasis toward new product/process R&D is providing the impetus for placing R&D in a strategic context. However, R&D has not been fully integrated into the strategic planning process of many organizations. The results of the survey reveal that certain communication channels can be more fully utilized to meld R&D planning into business strategy. Specific suggestions to facilitate information exchange, dissemination of planning data, and integration of various R&D plans into a cohesive technology strategy are given.     

Conservation,Discrimination, and Salvation: Investors’ Social Concerns in the Stock Market

Stocks appear to have investor clienteles based on their business practices and products. The variety in expressive benefits each individual receives from owning controversial stocks causes them to modify their portfolio to accommodate their beliefs. We examine the ownership of firms with social concerns and sin stocks (tobacco, alcohol and gambling). Women tilt their portfolios towards stocks with progressive labor policies for women and minorities. Younger investors avoid companies with poor environmental records but seek companies with progressive labor policies. Democratic voters favor stocks with progressive policies regarding women/minorities and gays/lesbians and are less likely to own sin stocks. Christian objections to homosexuality lead their members to invest less in stocks with progressive labor policies for gays and lesbians. The Christian denominations vary, though, in regard to sin stocks. Catholics are more likely while Mormons are less likely to own a sin stock relative to other investors. Socially responsible investors are clearly not all alike. Social characteristics that are important to one investor may not be important to another socially conscious investor.