Women as social entrepreneurs in the hospitality and tourism industry: Does empowerment play a role?

This paper which is a work in progress presents a qualitative study exploring the nature, motivations and extent to which female entrepreneurs use their H&T businesses as platforms for engagement in various forms of social entrepreneurship (SE) leading to value creation, economic and community development. Although SE is seen as a key contributor to the creation and diversification of entrepreneurial activity, women empowerment and local economic development, there is limited research on the role of female H&T entrepreneurs in emerging non -western destinations. We focus on the following research questions: a) Can female entrepreneurs in H&T be considered as social entrepreneurs? b) How does the structure and organization of society shape the nature of female participation in SE? c) What are the challenges involved in mobilizing female entrepreneurs to effectively engage in SE? d) How does SE maximise value creation and higher levels of satisfaction for all participants? Concepts from women-owned H&T enterprises, SE and women empowerment are drawn upon. We argue that women are embedded in male dominated traditions/customs, community associations and government bureaucracies that may either empowered or dis-empower them. Using the case of Cameroon, we examine how embeddedness enhances the capacity of women to engage in SE in the H&T industry, thereby contributing to local economic development. Empirically we adopt a mixed methods approach using multiple case studies: a survey questionnaire, five focus groups meetings (two women -only, one male-only, and two mix of male and female entrepreneurs) and twenty-five in-depth interviews with selected female entrepreneurs (18), (non)governmental organisations (03) and beneficiaries (04) of social enterprise ventures between May 2014 and February 2015. The findings clarify the role of women in SE in H&T and policy implications for maximising social value creation through the participation of women in SE

Resilience Through Community Landscape Project

The evolutionary process for landscape conservation, planning and management should consider the local (bottom –up) contribution connected to the emerging and rapidly growing models related to social self-organisation and local and community activism in the management of public goods (co-management models). But key issues for landscape resilience are: developing decisional models and integration between self community and planned actions.The case studies considers instead issues for developing a resilient landscape system: management of green areas, ways of enhancing green infrastructure linking rural and urban context, urban agriculture, innovative and inclusive management, urban landscape design, biodiversity and food security, identity valorisation, public and private initiatives linked in coherent strategie

Resilient landscapes for cities of the future

Cities of the 21st century must face several major challenges, which range from overcoming risks due to climate change (closely connected to progressively developing ecological imbalances) to the search for better energy conservation in the urban machine; from improvement in the quality and quantity of open spaces to returning residual areas (neglected areas, urban remnants, etc.) to the city. Thus far, there has been a lack of global solutions to improve the vulnerability of our cities or counteract external stresses that cities face now and will face even more in the coming decades. Faced with these profound changes, the rationalistic urban vision is no longer current. It is based on the mono- functional division of human activities and has led to the definition of plans and projects that are neither very effective in managing urban and territorial phenomena nor very adaptable in terms of external shocks caused by sudden climate, ecological, and economic changes. Today approaches that produce resilient landscapes are imposed on the city and territory through policies, plans, and projects characterized by imprinting flexibility (self-regulating, dynamic instruments in continual evolution), retroactivity (multi -scale, incremental, cumulative instruments), and ecological sustainability (adaptable, qualitative and recyclable, compensatory instruments). Resilient urban landscapes will be indicators of the good health of the territory, the effect of policies, plans, and projects centred on the protection and development of natural cycles, the liveability of cities, sustainable mobility, territorial culture and identity, safety, and the health of people. In this edition of UNISCAPE En-Route, we use the Adriatic City as an important terrain to observe and confront factors of the crisis in the modern city and its landscape. Studying the Adriatic City allows possible exit strategies from the model of the rationalistic city to be proposed in search of new forms of more sustainable urban development aimed at improving the quality of life for people in Europe. The principal longitudinal development of the Adriatic settlement system, essentially due to the concentration of the main economic activities (tourism, industry, specialized agriculture) following the main infrastructures along the coast (all in a north-south direction), has generated a series of conflicts in the last fifty years that emerge today in all their criticality. Important environmental and landscape criticalities can be observed (the process of artificialization constitutes an ecological and aesthetic/perceptual barrier between the sea and inland areas) along with the loss of historic and socioeconomic links that once determined continuity (also functional) between the coast and inland areas. Ever more often the theme of coastal artificialization places huge problems in the safety of dwellings against the catastrophic effects of climate change; industrial decommissioning and the housing bubble represent the main effects of the current economic crisis. Due to the loss of identity in built and natural landscapes in Adriatic territories, intervention policies and experimental projects are being developed that place the objective of responding to precise logic of improving the landscape, anthropic, cultural, and productive identity of each territorial reality through the activation of development processes that do not present negative effects related to the constituent elements of such identities. Starting from the Adriatic case study, this international seminar will confront the policies, plans, and projects of European cities and territories in order to affirm a new development model that produces resilient landscapes via: - overcoming the mere conservation of the landscape, considering its evolutionary processes and the need to connect policies for the conservation of goods and natural and cultural resources with plans and projects for territorial transformation; - social participation in landscape management processes, since resilience is a process that cannot be completely planned and designed, but must be pursued by directing voluntary actions; - the consolidation of new urban and territorial governance, aimed at integrating the different scales of territorial and landscape government; - institutional and social flexibility to adapt policies, projects, and actions to innovative socioeconomic and landscape processes (also by activating synergies between local public and private resources)

2Bparks MAINSTREAM

Knjiga 2Bparks MAINSTREAM je zaključna publikacija mednarodnega projekta Creative Sustainable Management, Territorial Compatible Marketing and Environmental Education to be Parks (2Bparks), ki je trajal od 1. 7. 2010 do 30. 6. 2013. Projekt je z vključevanjem okoljskih vsebin v procese odločanja, razvojem trajnostnega turizma in ozaveščanjem prispeval k trajnostni rabi naravnih virov ter h krepitvi povezav med družbami, gospodarstvi in zavarovanimi območji.V publikaciji so predstavljeni glavni rezultati projekta, s posebnim poudarkom na njegovi nadnacionalni razsežnosti, podana pa so tudi priporočila za trajnostno upravljanje in načrtovanje zavarovanih območij v prihodnje.Projekt 2Bparks je bil sofinanciran iz Evropskega sklada za regionalni razvoj v okviru programa MEDITERAN

Environment and neoliberalism: a critical discourse analysis of three Italian cases

In this paper we will examine the economic integration of environmental discourses using three examples chosen among the three main administrative levels of Italian State: central, regional and municipal. Through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis tools, an interdisciplinary research approach that combines linguistic analysis and social theory, the paper will analyze discursive strategies, interests at stake, use of language and changes of meanings. The selected texts will be interpreted as spaces of representation and social interaction, within an order of discourse dominated by the neoliberal frame

Reading the City. Developing Urban Hermenutics

Städte bezeugen in vielfältiger Weise soziale Gegebenheiten und kulturelle Prak- tiken. Sie schreiben lokale Traditionen fort, erzeugen Neues und dienen zugleich als Projektionsfläche von Wünschen und Hoffnungen. Städte sind Landschaften aus Zeichen. Man kann diese dekodieren, mithin lesen. Der interdisziplinäre Band reflektiert die Lesbarkeit des Städtischen und versammelt Beispiele urbaner Hermeneutik aus der Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaft, der Literatur-, Medien- und Filmwissenschaft und der Architektur- und Städtebautheorie.Cities bear witness to social reality and cultural practices in a variety of ways. They create and re-create local traditions, they generate new things and, moreover, they provide a surface for the projection of hopes and desires. Cities are landscapes made up of signs. As such, they can be decoded and read. This quality of the urban, its readability, provides this interdisciplinary volume with its focus. It brings together contributions to urban hermeneutics from social sciences, cultural studies, literature, film and media studies as well as approaches rooted in theories of architecture and urban planning

Critical issues in social science climate change research

Copyright © 2014 Academy of Social SciencesThis paper examines the challenges and opportunities for social scientists working on climate change research. Much work is required to expose and destabilise taken-for-granted assumptions about: (i) the nature of climate change, its complex ontology and knowledge-making practices; and (ii) how academic knowledge is made at the expense of other ways of knowing, doing and being in the world. I examine the relationship between the natural and social sciences, the epistemological question of what people are, and the multiple spaces, sites and practices across which and about which social science research on climate change is being produced

Bunkerology - a case study in the meanings, motives and methods of urban exploration

This is my Masters of Research (MRes) dissertation, successfully submitted to Sheffield Hallam University in May 2010. It is the origin point for my recent papers on 'bunkerology' and provides greater detail on the nature and process of my empirical study of the practices of ROC Post explorers via their on-line accounts. It also provides a discussion of the study from the point of view of research ethics, research design choices and the epistemology and ontology of the 'subject' of my study. Inevitably, the passage of time and thought throws up issues that could have been dealt with more extensively, differently, or at all. The absence of any consideration of gender was noted by my dissertation's examiners. I am addressing that separately. Other tangents left on the 'cutting room floor' in the dissertation writing process have either seen light separately (my paper 'the Bunker' looking at the interplay of the materiality and metaphor of these structures in organisational culture) or are being worked up into future outputs. Photographs and accounts extracted from 28dayslater.co.uk are used with the permission of 'Turkey' at 28dayslater but all opinions and interpretations about their content are my own. I'm interested in any feedback - and whether from urban explorers, premises owners or academics. Luke Bennett [email protected]