Lifestyling entrepreneurs’ sociological expressionism

This study explores the tourism host-home relationship investigated through documentary analysis of photographs choreographed through mutual negotiation between hosts and researcher (collaborative auto-driving) and participants’ spoken narratives (photo-elicitation interviews); we identify the significance for tourism product construction. Major findings concern the sociological expressionism of the tourism lifestyle entrepreneur who creates a certain personal brand identity or ‘lifestyling’ through their commercial home presentation; ‘private’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘temporal’ classification categories of hosts’ favourite spaces in the home are identified, based upon the individual spatial management strategies employed. Depictions of favourite spaces emphasised emotional and sensorial dimensions rather than material things present, and were described as spaces of contentment and tranquillity essential for energising hosts in the ongoing production of the commercial home.     

Using photography to elicit grazier values and management practices relating to tree survival and recruitment

Integrating conservation and agricultural production is a major challenge globally. The upper Lachlan catchment of Australia is dominated by livestock grazing, and is threatened because most native woodland vegetation has been cleared. A third of all remaining tree cover occurs as scattered trees in grazing pastures. These scattered trees are dying from old age and are not regenerating due to grazing pressure. Previous work has revealed management strategies that are more likely to maintain tree cover, such as low-input rotational grazing. We asked graziers to photograph significant features on their properties, and used the images as prompts in later interviews. This elicited graziers’ landscape values and other drivers of their management practices related to tree cover. The targets that our 25 case landholders chose to photograph, and the ways they discussed them in later interviews, reflected the focus of past education and incentive programs, suggesting that well-designed policies, educational messages and incentives do seem to reach landholders and result in improved practices. For example, many landholders reported management activities related to the protection of large woodland patches or the maintenance of coarse woody debris. The maintenance of scattered tree cover has not been a focus of policy initiatives in the past. Despite this, the narratives elicited by photos of isolated and scattered trees showed graziers valued them and were aware of and concerned about their decline, yet lacked knowledge about how to protect and regenerate them. Graziers urgently need unambiguous advice and practical assistance to help them adapt their practices to maintain scattered trees in the long term.     

Photographs in tourism research: Prejudice,power, performance and participant-generated images

Photography has often been considered tainted as a source of research data, even in tourism, its natural habitat. This situation is undoubtedly a legacy of the prejudice that many social scientists held toward the use of visual data when the academic study of tourism took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Tourism research has therefore persistently favoured textual data over visual data. This paper argues that the power of photography to prove and move can be harnessed to bridge this theoretical and practical cognitive gap. Issues relating to the performance of photography, including those of timing and intent, as well as the speed of information exchange, need however to be considered when designing and implementing research using photographic data. This implies a need to review the 'circle of representation' of tourism destination images, as well as to divide participant-generated image methods into two strands: found photographs and commissioned photographs.     

Photo-elicitation: Using photographs to read retail interiors through consumers' eyes

Researchers studying experiences in retail environments have typically focused their attention towards positivistically examining the influence of individual atmospheric variables upon customer behavior. In this respect photographs are common environmental simulation techniques. This approach concerns not only researchers active in consumer culture, but also interior architects and retail designers, working in a disciplinary tradition that maintains that interiors function as “Gestalt” environments, interacting with their users. In this paper, the authors aim to develop understanding of retail environments as sites of complex sensory experiences and the application of photo-elicitation as an interpretive research methodology concerning experiences in retail environments. The paper discusses the results of two exploratory studies within selected retail environments, and demonstrates the value of photo-elicitation in gaining insight into experiences in retail interiors. Photo-elicitation thus contributes new knowledge of the retail environment, and adds value to positivistic research approaches that have predominated in this field.