How should tourism education values be transformed after 2020?

Abstract

Values and axiology are necessary components for successful and meaningful tourism education and research. They especially need to be revisited in considering the future of higher education in a COVID-19 world. If transformation means to bring about a substantial change in a positive direction, then the COVID-19 pandemic might be a blessing in disguise for tourism higher education, as a substantial change has been due for quite some time. The transformative powers that education offers are seen in the individual through the internal and external transformations of learners. Higher education holds the promise of transforming society, but it is widely criticized for being too enmeshed in neoliberal values, which weakens it ability to productively equip students with capacities to transform the society they are entering. Education, both generally and more specifically tied to tourism higher education, requires a stronger awareness of lived values and aspirational values to transform how education is carried out. These include, for example, an emphasis on wellbeing indicators over revenue and tourist arrival numbers. All humans act and plan for their futures according to their lived values, but such values are hardly ever overtly acknowledged in research or in daily parlance. The COVID-19 pandemic is stirring up a new search for these lived values in a context where past formulas are failing on a global scale.     

“Reckless,cavalier, dismissive,petty and vengeful”?: The impact of municipal constituency change on candidate diversity

The demographic composition of electoral districts has an important influence on the identities of candidates because they affect the political opportunity structures of ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. The 2018 municipal election in Toronto, Canada provides a unique opportunity to examine how changes to electoral districts impacted the participation of visible minority candidates. At the end of the initial nomination period, the right-wing populist provincial government of Doug Ford reduced the number of city council wards from 47 to 25, which also affected the boundaries of school board districts. Candidates and aspirants then had the opportunity to re-register in the new constituencies. This change constitutes a natural experiment that allows us to isolate the impact of district structure on the relationship between demographics and candidate ethnicity. Using logistic and Poisson regression modeling, we compare the proportion and number of Visible Minority and White candidates before and after consolidation. Contra expectations, we did not find any effect on minority candidates, but show some evidence that consolidation reduced opportunities for Whites. We trace this unexpected finding to the geographic patterns of ethnic settlement.     

To see or to be seen… is that the question? An evaluation of palaeolithic sites’ visual presence and their role in social organization

Visibility is one of the most common features considered when analyzing site location; visual control of a territory is usually considered to be a desirable characteristic for a prehistoric settlement. However, the role that visibility could have played in the perception of sites, as a significant element of palaeolithic landscapes, has been rarely evaluated. Sites can act not only as settlements but as places for population aggregations, social interactions and symbolic activities; in this context, the relevance presence of a site within the landscape could have been an influencing factor in site location preferences. This paper focuses on the visual presence of a set of sites from Late palaeolithic Cantabria (Northern Iberian Peninsula), and evaluates how the way they were perceived could have been related to their role in the social organization of foraging communities.     

Embracing the future: path transformation and system reconfiguration for self-driving cars in West Sweden

ABSTRACT

The past years have witnessed a surge of academic interest into how new industrial paths are developed in regions. Transformation processes of existing regional industries have received less attention. This article focuses on radical innovation-based renewal processes of established paths and investigates how regional innovation systems are tackling challenges related to path transformation. Drawing on insights from the regional and technological innovation systems literatures, we develop an analytical framework that elucidates the relation between path transformation and system reconfiguration. The framework suggests that regional innovation system elements are created or adapted to (i) target the build-up of system functions regionally; (ii) link up to system functions in other locations, and (iii) transplant system functions from elsewhere. The analytical framework is applied to a case study of the transformation of the automotive industry in West Sweden towards self-driving cars. The empirical analysis provides support for the importance of the three types of system reconfiguration and emphasises the relevance of different types of assets. Furthermore, it highlights how actors tend to utilise previous networks and positions in global innovation systems rather than turning to the development of system functions regionally as the ‘default option’ of system reconfiguration.