Volunteer tourism : altruism, empathy or self enhancement?

Volunteer tourism being an ambiguous concept could be seen equally as an expression of social conscience and civil duty but also as cynical exploitation of human qualities like altruism and empathy. Still it is recognised that volunteer participants may also gain from their involvement but that should not raise questions about the purity of their motives. It is much less clear where, on a continuum from altruism to self enhancement, volunteer tourism falls, and it is likely that this varies greatly from individual to individual. To some it clearly a holiday, to others a commitment with real costs, and to others something in between, an enjoyable experience with anticipated benefits in terms of career advancement at some point in the future. This paper looks at both altruism and empathy in a theoretical context in an attempt to deconstruct their role in the development and expansion of volunteer tourism opportunitie

The volunteer tourist as 'hero'

Volunteer tourism is a rapidly growing form of tourism which has a weak conceptual basis and which is generally defined rather simply in terms of participants' actions while on holiday, ignoring elements such as reasons for participation, behaviour, and influencing forces. This article argues that an appropriate conceptual base for volunteer tourists is Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' and draws analogies between participants in volunteer tourism and the 'Hero' in Campbell's writings. The article discusses data on volunteer tourists, which reveals their self-expressed reasons for participating, and their specific situations. The data were collected by field research based on covert participation at an orphanage in Mexico. Volunteers interviewed revealed the traits explaining their participation in volunteer tourism that were similar to the characteristics and driving forces found in the participants on Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' and in medieval and classical myths. While participation in volunteer tourism may not match contemporary understanding of heroes and heroic behaviour, there is considerable similarity in reasons given by respondents for participating in the activity, and a conceptual model is developed to illustrate thi

Quenched Light Hadron Spectrum and Decay Constants using Improved Wilson Fermion Actions

We compare results obtained using the Sheikholeslami-Wohlert (SW) fermion action with tree-level and tadpole-improved coefficients for $5.7\le\beta\le 6.2$.Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE96(spectrum), 3 LaTeX pages plus 5 ps figures, espcrc2.sty (included

Biomarkers of Aging: From Primitive Organisms to Man

What biological changes take place as we age? Efforts by scientists to uncover the biomarkers of aging, that is, the normal phenomena of growing old, and to separate these inevitable physiologic changes from diseases and other factors.Warns that alleged "anti-aging" medicines like growth hormone injections are unprovable given current scientific knowledge

The Government's Impact on the Labor Market Status of Black Americans: A Critical Review

This paper surveys recent evidence on the impact of government programs on the measured labor market status of black Americans. In this paper, we argue that previous studies neglect the impact of recent government policy on the supply side of the labor market, and that the supply side effects of recent policy play an important role in explaining the recent measured increase in the ratio of the wages and incomes of blacks to the wages and incomes of whites.

Levels and long-term trends in earnings inequality: Overcoming Current Population Survey censoring problems using the GB2 distribution

Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full-time, full-year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind, calculating Gini coefficients from the estimated parameters, and comparing them with past findings

Sustainability or stagnation? Limits on development in tourist destinations

Two concepts have featured heavily in academic writing on tourist destinations over the past three decades, one relating to the tourism area life cycle (TALC) and the other relating to sustainable development (SD). It is argued here that these concepts have many features in common, and that the idea of stability in the development process of a destination is dependent on that destination living within its limits, i.e. not exceeding its tourist carrying capacity. In the TALC this desired state equates to the stage of “stagnation” and for sustainable development, it represents a state of sustainability. The paper reviews the issue of implementation in the context of these concepts using two examples to illustrate how a more sustainable form of tourism might be achieved when effective control over the development and operation of tourism is implemented effectively