Tourism Destination Development

Turns and Tactics

Arvid Viken, Brynhild Granås, Arvid Viken, Brynhild Granås

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317009573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Although blurred and heavily contested, the concept of 'tourist destination' still deserves careful attention. Despite its unstable characteristics, 'destination' is a central and meaningful term in play among all parties in the field of tourism, including tourists, tourism operators, and politicians, as well as students and tourism scholars. This anthology draws on different approaches and discourses of tourism destination development, while focusing on how they are shaped and reshaped and how they should be read and rehearsed. The book reveals dominant as well as alternative approaches to the field. The authors demonstrate how tourism destinations are commercial, but socially embedded; how they are both material and territorial, but at the same time socially constructed; how production of touristic brands and images are vital, but contested. Such tensions are unfolded through paradigmatic discussions and a series of case studies from the northern hemisphere. The chapters in the book investigate how destination development is catalysed through theming, how changing environments lead to reorientations, and how destinations are political. Altogether, the book provides experts and students with an up-to-date theoretical and empirical insight into tourist destinations.

Chapter 1

Dimensions of Tourism Destinations

Arvid Viken and Brynhild Granås

To let the term ‘destination’ direct the outline of a book may seem uncontroversial and obviously relevant to the variety of readers of tourism theory. Nevertheless, for social scientists engaged in tourism studies the task has some risks. Firstly, most conceptualizations of the term originate from the scientific field of economics; hence, theoretical elaborations are accompanied – more or less discretely – by economists’ basic understanding of ways of approaching the world. Secondly, while many social scientists have become intensively involved in conceptual elaborations and theorizing around the concept (see for example Ringer 1998; Framke 2002; Saarinen 2004; Saraniemi and Kylänen 2011), destination still cannot be considered a stable and nuanced analytical concept for social scientists who approach tourism. Sociologists, social anthropologists, human geographers and political scientists’ partaking in such discussions have produced a complex web of alternative, parallel and overlapping suggestions for how to define and approach tourism destinations with regard to research (Britton 1991; Weaver 2000; Bærenholdt 2004; Novelli et al. 2006; Scott et al. 2008; Bramwell 2009), including leaving destination out as an analytical concept altogether. Nevertheless, destination is extensively used within a wider discourse on tourism that also includes practitioners – entrepreneurs, tourists, politicians and planners – who from day to day practice destinations discursively at all societal levels, together with researchers.

Hence, and despite its unstable characteristics, destination is a central and meaningful term in play among all parties concerned with tourism. Within the interdisciplinary collaborative research project behind this book, the conceptual fuzziness in question has proved fruitful in that it has encouraged discussions while striving for a deeper understanding. Our experience has been that its characteristics as a blurring term and topic make destination an analytically potent point of departure for collaborative researchers’ ‘travel’ into current touristic processes, as will be done in this book.

Throughout the book, tourism is understood as a multifaceted and complex phenomenon, for which its economic and business-like marks constitute one aspect among others. Reflected in all chapters is an understanding of tourism destinations as material, sociocultural and dynamic entities. Although variably emphasized by different authors, destinations are understood as continuously constructed through the practices and perceptions of everyday- and touristic life as well as through political and economic decision making processes. Overall, destinations are seen as being embedded in the materialities of landscapes, physical infrastructure and technologies, and in the temporalities of past, present and future. Through the following four chapters (Part I), the authors dedicate attention to conceptual and theoretical discussions and suggest different analytical approaches to destinations, embedded in different social scientific theoretical traditions. The chapters that then follow (Part II-IV) explore emerging and established tourism destinations based on a variety of situated studies from the northern parts of Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The analyses provide opportunities for the reader to take the pulse of current turns and tactics in destination development in the Arctic areas of Europe and Canada.

Thereby, the book also illuminates aspects of today’s development of the Arctic as a whole. In social and political terms, the Arctic is often delimited to the areas above the Arctic Circle and includes the northern parts of Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the USA (Alaska). Political and research-related discourses on the area often highlight its oceans and ice-covered landscapes and its resources of petroleum, minerals and fish, while connecting it to global questions concerning environmental protection and indigenous rights. However, the Arctic also has extensive and complex patterns of human presence and interaction which involve societal processes such as industrialization, deindustrialization, and urbanization that otherwise mark the nations that stretch into the Arctic.

In addition to this, the northern territories have become an arena for intensified tourism. Increased attention paid to the Arctic from tourism practitioners is in addition to that from political and industrial actors of many kinds, as well as from natural science research milieus and government administrations. Hence, the development of tourism is both determined by and determines the struggle for access and elbow room that otherwise mark the Arctic area. The logic of tourism intersects with the different interests, knowledge systems and rationalities that together make the Arctic the contested area that it is today.

A Situated Study

The studies presented in this book investigate specific destination development processes within the Arctic, and not the Arctic as a destination in itself. One of the questions that can be posed is whether the development that is observed is typical for destinations outside the Arctic. This question touches upon a discussion of what is typical, and if a typical case exists. On the one hand there is a tendency towards seeing what happens in the urban power centres as typical, and in other places as deviant (Gregson et al. 2003; Viken 2012). On the other hand, a very typical travel pattern and motive, is to go to ‘other’ places. Otherness, newness and exotics are among the tourist buzz-words (Wang 2000). The Arctic has been a place of ‘otherness’ almost as long as modern tourism has existed. And sometimes a tourism destination in remote areas constitutes a midpoint on the tourism map. This has, for instance, happened to North Cape, the northernmost point of Norway, which was for several periods, most recently in the late 1980s, at the forefront of tourism development in Norway. Here, the first modern, huge and contrived tourist attraction in the country was created. North Cape soon became a model for tourism development elsewhere. It is an attraction and destination on the periphery, but for some years it has been a centre of Norwegian tourism development. However, the question of whether destinations in the Arctic are typical still needs to be addressed.

As the specific destinations explored throughout the book are located in the Arctic area, a remark must be made about a challenge that the authors of this book, along with all researchers who study the north from a northern perspective, have to deal with. The challenge concerns that of exceeding the geographical particulars while communicating research findings from the north to a southern, ‘central’ and international audience. This challenge is related to a hegemonic touristic discourse about the north, based on narratives of the north produced mainly from the south. Seen from the north, these are narratives that sometimes – based on research approaches that tend to confirm an outsider’s preconceptions – underpin homogeneous narratives and myths about the north as for example wild, uncivilized or primitive. With such hegemonic narratives in play, tourism researchers from the north are put under pressure to convince a wider audience about the value of their contributions for concept development and theoretical elaborations within the international field of tourism studies. Looking back at ways of understanding case studies, Lijpart (1977) identifies ‘the deviant case study’ as one where the case, here being the particular destination, is selected to show an alternative pattern or launch an alternative model. By focusing on Arctic destinations, many will argue that the cases in this book are by definition deviant (Viken 2012). Such an understanding does not correspond with the argument of this book. Our argument is that Arctic destinations also may be typical.

As indicated above, the empirically based chapters of the book explore specific destinations. They do so while accounting for each destination, both in general and specific terms. Even though the theoretical positions taken in regard to philosophy of social science are not stringently coordinated, a shared methodology can be identified in the way all contributions are positioned at a point of intersection between ideographic and nomothetic modes of working. Firstly, all empirical analyses use specific concepts and theories with the aim of contributing to conceptual and theoretical development within the field of tourism studies. Secondly, they provide insight into specific development processes which researchers and students who are engaged in tourism studies elsewhere can learn from in their own empirical and theoretical work. At several points, this common feature in modes of working resembles a situated knowledge approach (Haraway 1996; Hansen and Simonsen 2004; Bærenholdt and Aure 2007). It implies that the ambition to provide knowledge about the particular is not founded on an ideographical way of reasoning. Instead, it is based upon an understanding that emphasizes the partiality of any perspective available to social scientists in their engagement with a complex and changeable world. Similarly, the situated knowledge approach contains no ambitions to establish nomothetic theory, but seeks to establish partial connections which can be identified from the perspective through which the researcher meets the world (Haraway 1996, 264–265).

Most Arctic destinations are not mainstream. None of them are the first destination in most tourists’ travel careers. Arctic experiences are based on the area’s particular nature, cold climate and experiences of polar nights and midnight sun. The growth seen in Arctic tourism, and particularly in Arctic winter tourism, reflects a global trend of people discovering the aesthetics and values of the cold north. This trend must be understood in relation to the current global interest in the political issue of climate change, the attention this political agenda pays to the Arctic, and the popular symbols that it displays of ice bears, icebergs and the like (Hansson and Norberg 2009). Throughout its history, the core product of Arctic tourism has been that of offering natural scenery for the tourist to gaze at, more or less sheltered on-board ships, coaches, and cars. Today, nature is the major resource in the development of Arctic tourism, but now also as an arena and a resource for sports and activity related tourism, including more focused forms of sightseeing. This trend is part of a general trend towards more specialized forms of leisure (Bryan 1977; Kuentzel and Heberlein 2006) and growing consumer demands for new experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1999; Franklin 2003; Bærenholdt and Sundbo 2007). Thus, the Arctic fits well into a general trend.

Tactics and Turns within the Arctic

The tourist industry is specialized in two ways. First, specialization implies Fordist patterns of development (Ioannides and Debbage 1997) related to that of enhancing productivity through mass tourism. Such quantitatively focused tourism production can be identified in the Arctic, e.g. through an expanding cruise industry within the whole area and through Finnish Christmas tourism in Lapland. Second, and more important within the Arctic, specialization processes also include the development of ‘special interest tourism’ (Hall and Weiler 1990), and themed travel (Rojek 1993), in destinations normally served by small enterprises, as explored in Part II. The tension between Fordist and alternative patterns of tourism production constitute a backdrop for the formulation of the next section of the book (Part III), where particular focus is placed on current reorientations of well-established destinations. Theming, specialization, standardization and non-standardization of destinations are related to normative questions of what values and visions that tourism development should materialise. The complexity of the phenomenon of tourism implies that tourism development initiatives are interwoven into a manifold of societal processes, such as land use politics, strategic initiatives for the enhancement of employment and economic growth, environmental protection regimes, identity politics and place development processes. Hence, tourism is situated in the midst of processes imbued with politics and power (Cheong and Miller 2000). The political aspect of destination development is the third area of focus of this book (Part IV).

Themed Destinations

Production and consumption are dynamic and interwoven areas. Changes in consumption follow changes in production, and vice versa. However, the logic of competition encourages product development and therefore the production side often gives the greatest impetus to processes of change. In tourism such product development can comprise everything from transport to attractions and activities on-site, and sometimes also the creation or re-creation of destinations. Among the huge variety of ways in which novel tourism products are pursued is the strategy of theming.

Within the field of tourism studies, the concept of theming is interpreted in a variety of ways which are always concerned with the relatedness of product components. Theming can relate to the narrative tuning of sites of consumption, i.e. the tuning of the variety of parts that comprise a site where consumption takes place. Here, restaurants constitute an archetypical example (Breathworth and Bryan 1999). The degree and consistency of the narrative framing of a site of consumption may vary. For example, and in regard to restaurants, sometimes the menu is the main supporter of a framing narrative while at other times the totality of the product is themed through the use of architecture, interior design, pictures, texts, artefacts and signs within the restaurant premises.

In similar ways, more extensive consumption environments like urban areas and shopping malls can be (re-) shaped as themed environments (Gottdiener 1997). So can tourism attractions and destinations. According to Chang (2000, 36), ‘theming’ within tourism occurs in at least three ways, i.e. as ‘marketing themes’ expressed through slogans, catchphrases and marketing material, such as ‘theme park and attractions’, and as ‘place development themes’. According to this definition, a theme chosen for a place will infuse not only strategic thinking and planning, but also product development (Chang 2003), i.e. the development of place as a product, or as a resort development (Flagestad and Hope 2001). One example of themed place development is found in the town of Alta, Norway, where tourists can ‘hunt’ the Northern Lights, stay at the Northern Lights hotel and visit the Northern Lights Cathedral (from 2013) in a town called ‘The City of Northern Lights’. As the observant reader will notice, theming partly overlaps the concept of branding. Within this book, theming is used in categorizing destinations constructed around a core product, such as a sporting activity or a history. Theming indicates that it is not the overall marketing aspects that are in focus throughout the analysis, but how a particular theme can nurture product development and the formation of new destinations.

Branding can be part of a theming process, and theming is closely related to branding. And as with branding there is a risk that the theming will be influenced by trends from other places across the world, with the dynamic of product dedifferentiation in play (Lash 1990; Lash and Urry 1994). Products homogenization across fields and localities is one of the ways globalization is manifested today (Terkenli 2002).

Beach or ski-based destinations and pilgrimages are examples of theme travel, as is the Arctic. But such a huge area also gives room for many types of theming. The Arctic destinations are more or less naturally or culturally themed. Examples of nature-based destination theming are those made around the particular light experiences of the midnight sun or the northern light. In cultural terms, Arctic destinations are often themed in accordance with the culture of indigenous peoples living in the area, like the Inuit or the Sami. Beardsworth and Bryman’s (1999) listing of theming classes includes such ethnic marking, in addition to reliquary theming, which is theming related to local rituals or local history. This can also be found within the Arctic, for example in relation to the history of the Arctic expeditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Within the late-modern paradigm of experience tourism, theming strategies are closely related to ‘special interest tourism’ (Hall and Weiler 1992). People travelling to practice or nourish their hobbies in a new or foreign locality reflect the phenomenon of increased specialization within the leisure field (Kentzel and Heberlein 2006). Becoming more competent, committed, skilled, and specialized in regard to leisure activities hence becomes part of the tourist’s agenda. Responses to this trend can be seen at an enterprise level, with companies that relate in fine-tuned and specialized ways to target groups, as well as at a destination level, with specialized activities constituting the core product and main...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Dimensions of Tourism Destinations
• Part I Conceptualizing Destinations
• Part II Catalysing Themed Destinations
• Part III Reorienting Destinations
• Part IV Destinations as Politics
• Index