Erika Andersson Cederholm

The Value of Intimacy - Negotiating Commercial Friendship in Lifestyle Entrepreneurship

Abstract With the aim of reconsidering lifestyle values in relation to economic rationality in small tourism and hospitality businesses, we focus on the “commercial home” as a site where boundaries between personal and commercial values are constantly performed in practice. Through an interactionist analysis of the narrative of a B&B and gallery owner, we illustrate the emergence of intimacy as a commercial value in the hospitality industry. By using Georg Simmel’s notion of distance, we analyse the formation of value as a dynamic social process in a context where a traditional market ethos is both rejected and reformulated. In this value creation analysis we show how tension between intimacy and distance in the interaction between hosts and guests is managed through negotiated boundary work. This is illustrated through three themes: situated friendship, the in‐between space of the private and the public and the local host as traveller. We argue that an analysis of situated interactions between producers and consumers highlights tension and interplay between personal and commercial relations, rather than a dichotomic either/or relationship. This personal/commercial nexus points at an emerging hospitality ethos that opens up new possibilities to analyse the co‐creation of value and innovation in the service economy.

Lifestyle Enterprising: The "ambiguity work" of Swedish female horse-farmers

This article introduces the concept of ambiguity work as a specific form of work–life balancing performed when making a livelihood based on leisure interests and a personal lifestyle. The study focuses on female self-employed horse-farmers in Sweden involved in service work with and through horses. Through an analysis of narratives and practices of this service work, based on ethnographic interviews and observations, boundary negotiations of various social spheres are discernible: work and life, and the commercial and the personal. The analysis shows that the horse-farmers perform a delicate and ongoing balancing act between family interests, individual leisure and paid work. Drawing on the notion of sociological ambivalence, it is suggested that this balancing act does not strive for demarcations, but rather to stay betwixt and between social spheres. It is argued that lifestyle enterprising is enacted and confirmed through ongoing boundary negotiations, or ambiguity work, that sustain a tension between keeping and blurring social boundaries. It is further argued that ambiguity work in this type of lifestyle enterprising both reinforces and questions ideals and norms concerning small business management and professional versus nonprofessional relationships.

The Role of Nature in Swedish Ecotourism

Our purpose in this paper is to discuss Swedish nature in a specific context, namely that of ecotourism. The wider framework is the concept of cultural economy in relation to nature. Nature is culturally constructed – given meaning – by the actual doings of e.g. ecotourism operators, and this meaning is transformed into cash flows through tourist practices. It is this cultural construction of nature by ecotouristic practices we will focus upon here. The paper is structured through a set of changes having occurred in Swedish ecotouristic practices during the last few years. We will tentatively define these changes as shifts in focus from nature as thing to nature as experience, from nature as place to nature as universalised locality, and finally changes in the different actorships manifested by ecotourist operators and ecotourists. The material we use is the organisation Nature’s Best, a certifier of quality for Swedish ecotourism businesses. We view this organisation as a mediator/constructor of nature, partly in the way it represents the businesses they certify and partly in the way it represents nature. We also use a number of the actual ecotourism businesses Nature’s Best certify as a source of the cultural construction of nature. We will loosely sketch a development from “traditional” ecotouristic practices and rhetoric to what we perceive as the new cultural economy of nature, but the greater part of the text will be dealing with the new practices displayed by Nature’s Best and to some extent similar ecotourist operators. (Less)

Experiences of Ecology: (Dis)ordering Nature as a Visitor Attraction

By taking the strategic development of a nature visitor centre in southern Sweden as a case study, this article examines practices of nature construction and how these practices are enacted and performed at various sites connected to the centre. The analytical focus is boundary work, i.e. how boundaries separating nature/culture, rural/urban, local/global, history/present/future, humans/non-humans and indoor/outdoor are (dis)ordered to form a visitor attraction. Boundary work is examined in five instances of nature construction: interviews with strategic and operative staff connected to the nature centre, an application for state funding of the centre, the ceremonial opening of the centre, market communication material and the centres permanent exhibition. The analysis shows how the nature centre manifests a nature cosmology upheld by alternate purifying and hybridizing practices, where the result is a visitor attraction offering ecology as experience.

With a little help from my friends : relational work in leisure-related enterprising

The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business – in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interest in horses and participate in the everyday work on the farm – provide the foundation for an economic environment where personal favour exchanges and a gift economy are intertwined with a market economy. Drawing on Viviana Zelizers notion of ‘relational work’, applied in a context where the gift economy is based on individual leisure interests and leisure-based friendship, the present analysis focuses on how relationships, transactions and forms of repayments are constantly negotiated along a continuum between work-oriented friendship and friendly work relations. The empirical illustrations demonstrate the limitations of the notion of boundary work often employed in studies of relational work – which emphasizes boundary definition. In contrast, it seems that relational work may also involve practices that maintain indistinct boundaries between different types of relationships, thus sustaining tension between a formal and informal economy.

Tourism & Identity - Accumulated tourist experience and travel career narratives in tourists' identity construction

ground-breaking starting point for the interdisciplinary field of “mediated tourism”, although it opens up more questions and issues than it can address. While the authors succeed in pinpointing tourism-specific perspectives in media studies, the thesis of hypermedialisering is not studied directly. However, it is the reviewer’s strong belief that more contributions will soon follow in the wake of Jensen and Waade’s work to remedy this flaw.

Mobility and Place: Enacting Northern European Peripheries

Books reviewed in this issue. Mobility and Place: Enacting Northern European Peripheries. Bærenholdt, Jørgen Ole and Granås, Brynhild (eds). Researching Leisure, Sport and Tourism: The Essential Guide. Long, Jonathan. Key Concepts and Techniques in GIS. Albrecht, Jochen. Key Texts in Human Geography. Hubbard, Phil, Kitchin, Rob and Valentine, Gill (eds). Energy Poverty in Eastern Europe. Hidden Geographies of Deprivation. Buzar, Stefan.