Barriers to outsourcing household services to small business

It is popularly assumed that the main barrier that prevents household services from being outsourced to the small business sector is household disposable income. This paper evaluates critically whether this is the case. Reporting survey results from 418 households in the UK city of Sheffield, the finding is that cost is the main barrier in just 38% of instances. Nearly two‐thirds of household services are undertaken in other ways either out of choice or due to the poor availability, quality and reliability of provision by small businesses. How these barriers to outsourcing household services might be tackled is then addressed.     

Commodification of Volunteer Tourism: a Comparative Study of Volunteer Tourists in Vietnam and in Thailand

Volunteer tourism (VT) has often been depicted as a means of avoiding the commodification of tourism (and even ecotourism) by ensuring that local communities benefit from VT, both environmentally and economically, and that there is authentic engagement by the tourists with indigent people and their cultures. However, critics have questioned this claim, arguing that VT has become little different from tourism and ecotourism, entailing commodification by providing profit for VT organizations rather than for local communities and consuming rather than respecting local environments and cultures. This study tests these claims and counterclaims by a comparative analysis of two VT experiences, one in Vietnam and the other in Thailand. The findings of the study are that although each cohort of volunteer tourists (VTs) exhibited elements of both decommodification and commodification, on a continuum of decommodification and commodification, the Vietnam VTs were closer to the decommodification node, whereas the Thailand VTs were closer to the commodification node. In part, this was because the Vietnam VT project was pitched more towards conservation research, whereas the Thailand VT project was pitched more towards vacation conservation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Work–family conflict and the commodification of women's employment in three Chinese airlines

In the East, where gender is mediated by different family structures, societal institutions and economic development, the work–family conflict (WFC) metaphor remains appropriate. This paper investigates Chinese women's experiences of WFC in the fastest growing commercial airline sector in the world. It finds that, in contrast to the West, work-to-family, rather than family-to-work, conflict dominates. Liberalization, competition and commercialization have also had a significant gendered impact on jobs. The latter resulting in the commodification of women's aesthetic and emotional labour, job segregation, employment insecurity, poor career opportunities and increased WFC. We explore reasons why HR policies and practices in airlines fail to address women's workplace concerns and find that occupational status and lack of organizational power, together with the prevalence of traditional gendered norms and attitudes, play important roles     

Regaining control through reclamation: how consumption subcultures preserve meaning and group identity after commodification

We examine the process of subcultural commodification where group meanings of a Japanese youth consumer subculture (i.e. Harajuku) are created, fragmented, and then commodified by the mainstream culture. We consider the role of authenticity in subcultures and specifically what it means to reclaim meanings and group identity after commodification. Using a multi-method ethnographic approach, we explore how a subculture reacts when faced with co-optation. In light of the Harajuku group's attempt to preserve a meaningful form of their community, we illuminate the consumption processes through which their group identity is re-negotiated and sustained. This analysis promotes understanding of how a non-Western subculture reacts after mainstream commodification, and the strategies they employ to regain control of their community by reclaiming authenticity, maintaining collective belonging, and uniting with a common cause.     

Back to the past: a sub-segment of Generation Y's perceptions of authenticity

To date, authenticity conceptualizations have taken into account the views of both suppliers and tourists. However, most studies, at the a priori stage, have not taken a market segment perspective but considered tourists to be a homogeneous population. This study challenges that by focusing on a distinct market segment based on age and life experience: Generation Y, drawing out an a priori-based sub-segment of Generation Y's perspectives of authenticity. It investigates if authenticity ideologies influence decisions to become a heritage tourist. Additionally, it determines other factors that predict differences between a heritage tourist and a non-heritage tourist. The study unveils interesting findings. With the exception of the objectivist and negotiation stance, other authenticity ideologies fail to inspire this generation to be heritage tourists. Intervention factors such as party size (and with it a social experience) and ethnicity prove to be better predictors of heritage preference. The results offer important implications for the heritage industry. For instance, “time travel” demand based on purely objective or negotiated versions can help promote conservation efforts and the sustainable development of heritage. This can lead to enhanced opportunities for partnership between the tourism industry and cultural/heritage site managers, and help revive discontinued or forgotten traditions.     

Marin Držić: A Case for Croatian Literary Tourism

In spite of the positive experience with literary tourism worldwide, Croatian tourist destinations do not recognise the value of literary heritage as a potential key tourist attraction. This is not an indication that Croatia has nothing to offer; on the contrary, Croatia boasts of strong literary figures throughout history, in the fields of prose, poetry, and drama. Croatian tourist destination managers, it seems, perceive tourists primarily as consumers of sun, sand, and sea, and are not aware of key trends in contemporary tourism. Simply, they are far too complacent with the present ideology of Croatian tourism. This article explores the possibility of turning Croatian literary heritage into a cultural tourism product. Using the example of Marin Dr?i?, a Dubrovnik-born Renaissance playwright, it shows how a literary figure can be commodified, and how new destination image(s) can be constructed and communicated.     

Privatization,commodification and transformation in Japanese housing: ephemeral house – eternal home

The space and place of the Japanese home holds an iconic status in both foreign and indigenous understandings of Japanese life. The architectural forms and bounded spaces of Japanese houses have historically been embedded in social practices that integrate individuals with hierarchical orders of space and social relations moving outwards from the house to community. Housing units and residential neighbourhoods have, however, undergone considerable transformation in the last century. Homes have been increasingly privatized, commodified and marketized, while the features of housing and neighbourhoods have been intensively modernized and urbanized. This paper considers transformations in the form of Japanese housing and the extent to which contemporary housing production and consumption mediates historically embedded notions of domestic relations and space.     

Holiday in Mexico: critical reflections on tourism and tourist encounters

This article examines the role of tourism as a motive and mechanism for change in contemporary cities, considering how the theming of space with tourists in mind necessarily involves other kinds of spatial and social transformation, and asking what role actual and hypothetical tourists play in local contests over space and representation. Looking closely at Belfast's Gaeltacht Quarter provides an insight into how global fashions in place marketing, tourism and minority language promotion intersect with the particularities of areas to which they are applied. This paper argues that the superficially value-neutral, internationally recognisable language of economic development can be used both as a means of transcending, and a means of strategically negotiating, intense struggles over space, identity and status.     

The Power of Tourism: A Metamorphosis of Community Culture

The commodification of culture for tourism can result in fundamentally changing a community's structure. Focusing on one rural Atlantic Canadian community, this article examines the transformation of longstanding stable forms of human and social capital that have bonded a local community over two centuries, and in so doing helped to ensure sustainability. Transformations induced by tourism development may dramatically transform such cultures. To avoid corrosive transformation of local culture, careful management plans that protect community values must become the focal point of the plan. This paper discusses the commodification of the culture process as it has unfolded and transformed local culture in a case study rural community. Results of the study show that while local culture may be a community's most valuable asset, the commodification of local culture for tourism may, in reality, impede a community's efforts to achieve sustainability. Cultural-based tourism development invokes transformation, whereas the traditional community culture dies away while attempting to simultaneously create a new culture based on the icons of the traditional one. This may be described, metaphorically, as a death–rebirth-like process. This research suggests that conventional notions of cultural tourism as a means of community sustainability without regard for traditional practices and values may not be appropriate.