Commodification of recreational hunting in Sweden : hunting tourism experiences as ‘peculiar goods’

The paper is based on a study of hunting tourism enterprising in Sweden. The study examines how hunting tourism businesses in Sweden navigate in a complex social, economic and moral environment. The aim of the present paper is to identify how tensions between a market- oriented value sphere and a value sphere based on friendship- and community reciprocity are played out in hunting tourism entrepreneurship. In particular, the study focuses on the ambiguous character of the hunting experience product and the different narratives and discourses framing what is considered, by the actors themselves, to be a ‘good’ hunting tourism experience

City innovation as resonance: : the case of outdoor offices and conferences in the open air museum

This paper explores an innovation case within a “smart” Swedish mid-sized city that works extensively with digitalization.Over a long period in time, city populations and city tourism have increased, while more urgentchallenges connected to sustainability have emerged along with health-related problems. In parallel the already established and ongoing digitalization of society was fortified in the pandemic period, something that may have changed the tourism industry. Today, manyprofessional meetings happen both on- and offline.One challenge for public officials who manage urban space, is a societal expectation to maximize and improve tax payers ́ life quality on limited budgets and resources that are commonly owned.This is one of the reasons to why contemporary urban planners and city tourism development organizations need to find new solutions in response to problems related to local and global change. I will focus on norm- changes related to digital nomadism (Makimoto & Manners, 1997) and in connection with a movement for outdoor office work (www. outdoorofficeday.nl,Petersson et al., 2021). The city culture department is testing to offer outdoor offices and meetings in an urban public open air museum, a place that is used for leisure and for pedagogicpurposes.These new offerings can be conceptualized as innovative value propositions (Corvellec & Hultman, 2014) because new values, for instance rich nature experiences or a feeling of doingthe right thing, are made available for tourism consumers. These proposed services can be understood as a re-negotiation of socio-cultural values, where the public institution re-frames space in response to external change.In sociologist Hartmut Rosas (2019) words, this constitutes a form of an ongoing dialogue withthe world, in resonance. Based on eight qualitative interviews with local managers, participant observations, online communication and documents, I explore innovation from this sociologicalperspective.The aim of this research project is to understand tourism innovation discursive practices in public management, as responses to local and global change. Three research questions guide the study; How are outdoor offices and conferences constructed as value propositions for potential visitors? To which problems/risks do these value propositions respond? With what terms are outdoor offices constructed as answers to problems?So far, it was found that some of the strategic actions taken by the project leader was to launchthe outdoor office through a local innovation program, and to frequently work with professionalsocial media platforms.ReferencesCorvellec, & Hultman. (2014). Managing the politics of value propositions. MarketingTheory, 1470593114523445.Makimoto, T., & Manners, D. (1997). Digital nomad: Wiley.Petersson, T., C., Lisberg, J., E., Stenfors, C., Bodin, D., C., Hoff, E., Mårtensson, F., & Toivanen, S. (2021). Outdoor Office Work – AnInteractive Research Project Showingthe Way Out. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.636091 Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance : a sociology of the relationship to the world: Polity Press.https://www.outdoorofficeday.n

Urban Ecosystem Services and Tourism

Urban tourism depends on the place specific qualities of destinations. In many cities, climate change poses a threat to these qualities, through increasing risk of excessive heat, draught and flooding. Cities need to adapt to reduce these risks. One way of doing this is to improve their green infrastructure. Urban forests, parks, rivers and wetlands may help reduce the effects of climate change in cities. At the same time, green infrastructure provide a variety of ecosystem services to the community. In particular, cultural ecosystem services such as recreation, andesthetical values take place in urban green infrastructure; they provide value in the form of improved experiences. These mainly benefit the locals but they may also be important for tourism. Such relations between ecosystem services and tourism have in earlier literature been recognized in rural contexts but very seldom in urban. This paper reports preliminary findings from qualitative case studies in the South of Sweden and Berlin, Germany. They focus on how urban planning projects (primarily aimed at mitigating GHG emissions and adapting to climatechange) can be extended to develop places where experience values for both residents and visitors are created alongside other kinds of ecosystem services. We suggest that the need for climate change adaptation in a city may be used as a means to improve its place specific qualities as a tourist destination. By developing green infrastructure in innovative and environmentally friendly ways, the quality of ecosystem services improves, including those relevant for both visitors and residents. Protecting and building green infrastructure, therebyenhancing a city´s visible qualities and its reputation as a sustainable destination, may also be valuable in marketing the city

Rethinking the risk matrix

So far risk has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL (being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the adverse event). The so called risk matrix follows from such definition. This definition of risk is justified in a long term “managerial” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen’s perspective to the definition of risk