Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson

Tourism translations: Actor-Network Theory and tourism research.

This article discusses Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and its utility for tourism studies. It argues that ANT can be an effective methodological approach for studying tourism development due to two reasons. First, its ability to deal with relational materiality of the social world, immanent in the concept of translation which highlights the net-workpractices of different actors; and second, its willingness to grasp multiple relational orderings, thus drawing diverse forms of tourism spatiality into analysis. The article begins by briefly sketching out the discourse on tourism and tourism development in relation to ANT. It then discusses the origins and characteristics of ANT. Special attention is paid to the concept of translation and how the approach provides an alternative focus for tourism research. The last part of the article briefly illustrates ANT as a methodological orientation through discussion of a tourism development project in Iceland.

Tourism in times of crisis: exploring the discourse of tourism development in Iceland

This paper explores the growth of tourism in Iceland and sets current policy discourses in the context of the global credit crunch of 2008. Tourism in Iceland has grown from being practically non-existent in the mid-twentieth century to being one of the three key sectors of the economy. With this growth, Iceland, as many other island states, started paying more attention to the potentialities of tourism as a development option. However, interest in tourism in public debates and policy seems to become prominent in times of economic crisis while it wanes during years of economic growth. In this light, the paper will relate discourses of tourism to the present condition of economic recession and potential crisis, especially when it comes to government policies. This paper investigates the relationship between tourism and crisis as it features in public discourse in Iceland, and aims at clarifying the implications this particular discourse on tourism has on tourism development in Iceland.

Ordering, materiality, and multiplicity: Enacting Actor–Network Theory in tourism

In this article, we demonstrate how Actor–Network Theory has been translated into tourism research. The article presents and discusses three concepts integral to the Actor–Network Theory approach: ordering, materiality, and multiplicity. We first briefly introduce Actor–Network Theory and draw attention to current Actor–Network Theory studies in tourism with a focus on how the approach is sensitive toward heterogeneous orderings. The following section discusses how more recent Actor–Network Theory approaches emphasize multiplicity and thus multiple versions of every ordering attempt. This leads us toward ontological politics, which have bearings on how we approach and understand research methods and how we perform tourism research. In conclusion, we argue that Actor–Network Theory enables a radical new way of describing tourism by critically investigating its ontological conditions.

Icelandic tourism: past directions - future challenges.

Abstract Although island tourism in general has long been considered within the tourism literature, attention has been focused primarily on warm-water islands; conversely, limited attention has been paid to cold-water islands as destinations for tourists. This paper assesses the development of tourism in one such destination, Iceland, and discusses its history and the challenges confronting it. Tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in the Icelandic economy. Tourism arrivals have multiplied in recent years, doubling, for instance, in the ten-year period between 1997 (201,000) and 2007 (459,000). This growth in arrivals has prompted rapid expansion in the tourism sector, invoking questions with regards to both the opportunities tourism presents and the challenges that will need to be addressed in the near future. In order to underpin a critical appraisal of future challenges, this paper reviews the history of modern tourism in Iceland with a focus on policy and entrepreneurship in tourism. It describes the characteristics of tourism in Iceland and its development, and critically illustrates some of the main challenges the tourism industry in Iceland is facing. In so doing, the paper seeks to add to the understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing cold-water island destinations that are experiencing significant growth in tourism.

“To Get Things Done”: A Relational Approach to Entrepreneurship

In recent years, entrepreneurship and innovation have gained much attention in discussions on economic development in diverse fields. Research on entrepreneurship and innovation in tourism is a relatively novel field of inquiry. This paper deals with the entrepreneurial process through a relational approach in the form of actor–network theory (ANT). It builds on a broad view of entrepreneurship, framing it as the capacity to perceive opportunities for change and the capacity to get things done. It is argued that ANT may serve as a useful device to open up the entrepreneurial process and provide insights into the diverse ways through which particular innovation projects are accomplished. Styles of ordering relational practices are identified as key elements in this regard. These denote methods of associating necessary elements to establish and stabilize particular orders. This paper discusses four styles of relational ordering identified in the translation process of a particular tourism development project in Iceland: the style of economic development, the style of fellowship, the style of “sparks” and, finally, the style of “finding ones sea legs”. It is illustrated how these styles are intertwined and how they are at times difficult to separate in the study of entrepreneurial practices. It is argued that entrepreneurship is always based on diverse styles of relational ordering and, thus for understanding the workings of entrepreneurship, it is important to follow the ways in which they are enacted and continually (re)produced in entrepreneurial practices.

Creative connections? Tourists, entrepreneurs and destination dynamics

ABSTRACT Creativity is one of the more recent ideas of a range of concepts put forward to capture how culture affects the dynamics of economic processes. In the case of tourism, creativity brings together three interrelated aspects of destination dynamics. Firstly, the intensification of the experience economy and commoditisation of the social; secondly, the individual’s capacity and responsibility to innovate and respond to societal changes; and thirdly, the socio-spatial embeddedness of economic activities. We argue that it is crucial to deal with these issues as interrelated rather than separate entities, in order to better grasp destination dynamics. To accomplish this we approach creativity as a relational process. This paper explores tourism encounters and their creative capacities, focusing on the connections between tourists and tourism life-style entrepreneurs and what such relations may imply for tourism destination dynamics in rural areas. Its unifying thread is a story of a life-style entrepreneur in the Strandir region, Northwest Iceland. It is argued that while many of the activities of life-style entrepreneurs may be regarded as creative, this is not necessarily a key to commercial success.

Earthly substances and narrative encounters: poetics of making a tourism destination

This article deals with the becoming of place in relation to tourism. The agency of non-human actors, such as earthly substances or matters underlying any given destination, has rarely been addressed empirically. Our argument is based on the view that a place is an entanglement of ever-moving substances. Hence, our objective is to trace how materialities of cultural landscape contribute to the continuous production of places through tourist encounters. By approaching destination development from the angle of relational materialism, the article aims at providing insights into the formation of tourism places, describing it as ‘poetics of making’. The article provides an account of the creation of the Strandir region, a sparsely populated coastal area in the north-west of Iceland, as a tourist destination. We will focus on the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, established in 2000, which has played a central role in framing the area as a tourism destination. The Museum brings together, and re-awakens, the period of witchcraft in the 17th century during which Strandir was one of the most notorious regions in Iceland for witch-hunts and burning. We will illustrate how magic, understood as a blank figure narrating human encounters with earthly substances, affects the ordering of Strandir both as a place and as a tourism destination. The power of the blank figure of magic rests in its ability to overturn stable orders or mobilise new or latent connections. Importantly, it also rests on personal narratives with the support of imagination, emotions and play. The Museum has been instrumental in creating and enhancing the image of the region as a place of magic, emphasising how culture and nature, as conventionally defined, mesh through human and non-human practices in the continuous forming of Strandir.

Co-creating tourism research: Towards Collaborative ways of knowing

Co-creation has become a buzzword in many social science disciplines, in business and in tourism studies. Given the prominence of co-creation, surprisingly little discussion has evolved around its implications for research practices and knowledge production as well as what challenges there are for fulfilling the promise of co-creation in tourism research. This book aims to contribute to this discussion by addressing how tourism research comes together as a collaborative achievement and by exploring different ways of collaborative knowledge production in tourism research. It is structured to offer, on one hand, an introduction to the ontological basis for collaborative research and, on the other hand, a set of empirical examples of how collaborative knowledge creation can inform tourism design, management, policy and education. The theoretical accounts and empirical cases of this book display how research collaborations can offer modest, local yet often impactful insights, traces and effects. It therefore will be of value for students, researchers and academics in tourism studies as well as the wider social sciences.

Improvising Economy: Everyday Encounters and Tourism Consumption

As a part of the rising collaborative economy tourism entrepreneurs are faced with increasing demand of providing opportunities of authentic experiences. Tourist experience has always rested on co-creation and everyday encounters and we argue that the collaborative economy can be seen to include multiple rationalities, manifested in improvised tourism encounters. We contend that by following some of the often mundane encounters between visiting guests and the attraction they visit, it is possible to shed light on how interfering rationalities and multiple levels of collaboration affect the growth of tourism economies. The chapter focuses on improvised encounters between a particular entrepreneur, Siggi, who is the director of the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft and his guests. It is argued that the value of collaboration and sharing in present day tourism economies is about more than economic transaction and needs to be critically examined as such.

Moving Places: Multiple Temporalities of a Peripheral Tourism Destination

Abstract In this paper we take departure from an ontological understanding of the new mobilities paradigm for exploring the emergence of a peripheral tourism destination. The Strandir region is a sparsely populated and remote area in North-Western Iceland, where tourism has become an increasingly important factor in enhancing regional image and local economies. Still, like all places, Strandir has always been entangled in different kinds of mobilities that enact diverse temporalities and spaces. This paper traces the movement of Strandir in relation to centre and periphery with a focus on how the road connecting the region to the rest of the country affects its present position. By journeying on the main road running through the region we explore how it both serves to cement Strandir as a place on the periphery and plays part in the continuing creation of the place by affording connections to other routes and pathways, most recently tourism mobilities. In order to illustrate further the continuous movement of Strandir, we make a stop at Djúpavík, where a disused herring factory has become a central tourist attraction. Its accomplishment as a relational ordering is traced as well as how it crumbled when some of its parts did not act according to a plan. However, the factory is not a passive space; it is full of life, and just as the road it has creative capacities that keep Strandir moving and tangled in multiple temporalities.