Jane Widtfeldt Meged

Tourists Co-producing Guided Tours

The guided tour is a stigmatized tourist practice. In contrast to studies portraying sightseeing tours as an over-determined stage where tourists passively follow prescripted routes and scripts, this article also uncovers creativity, detours and productive practices. We examine how tourists can be said to perform both in and out of tune with guides script and the interaction order of guiding more broadly. What is distinctive and innovative about the perspective is that we regard guides and tourists as mutual depending co-producers of the guided tour. First, the article begins with a short discussion of some of Goffmans central concepts. Second, we move on to a more general discussion of how front-stage tourism services are performances where both tourist staff and guests play their part. Third, we examine ethnographically how participants on guided tours in Copenhagen co-produce this particular service by employing various tactics that we label and discuss.

Guides crafting meaning in a flexible working life

ABSTRACT Certified guides are exemplary, well-educated, self-employed, casual labourers in a liberal and competitive job market. Applying grounded theory, this exploratory study builds on in-depth qualitative interviews with Danish, Italian and French certified guides. Informed by the theory of job crafting and adding a critical perspective, we understand the guides’ agency, and how they craft scope, tasks and relations in order to sustain a positive self-image and a meaningful working life. Comparing certified guides’ job-crafting practices, we learn that guides are alike across the three countries, and they perceive themselves as natural-born who engage in self-actualization. They thrive on connecting with tourists, whom they empower or enlighten, as they craft idealistic or social objectives. At the same time, the guides work in individual workspaces, and they adapt to a competitive labour market, by assuming extra tasks and working for free or below tariffs, while they engage in fierce competition particularly with newcomers in order to make themselves employable. However, the study also indicates that organizational structures such as guide associations, which act as brokers to the market, may take the brunt of the individual competition in regard to the employers.

Working Within the Collaborative Tourist Economy: The Complex Crafting of Work and Meaning

This chapter explores from a critical perspective how workers in the collaborative tourism economy craft meaning and identity in work and discusses transformations on the established labour market induced by the collaborative economy. It does so through the perspectives of guides working with Copenhagen Free Walking Tours, a platform offering guided tours and hosts offering short-term rentals on the platform Airbnb. Both guides and hosts practice job crafting. However, guides and hosts navigate the collaborative economy in different ways. Both markets require hosting qualities drawing on personal competencies when delivering hosting–on-demand. Guides can be characterised as social lifestyle entrepreneurs as they experience guiding as a lifestyle with high social and cultural returns. To the contrary, the Airbnb hosts interviewed can be perceived as micro-entrepreneurs practising pseudo-sharing, and manoeuvring in micro-competitive platform capitalism.

Disruptive Network Innovation in Free Guided Tours

ABSTRACT This article provides an analysis on how disruptive innovation is spurred by the dynamics of digital and analogue networks in the sharing economy. The analysis builds on a free guided-tour company in Copenhagen. Data is collected in a bottom-up reiterative process, drawing on theories on disruptive innovation and network theory. Between 2013 and 2016, one of the free tour companies in Copenhagen was followed by means of participant observations, interviews with tour guides and interpretation of online documents. Results show that free guided tours based on tips alone and orchestrated within the frame of the sharing economy are not merely a product innovation. More importantly, they entail disruptive market innovations that circumvent traditional industry structures and ultimately produce disruptive organizational innovations where trust in network is the crux. Free guided-tour companies operate as communitarian organizations in extractive business models, and they are game changers in the field of guided tours, and ultimately in the field of tourism.

Camønoen: A pilgrim trail conceived along a communitarian business model

ABSTRACT To overcome socioeconomic decline, Danish coastal communities attempt to harness the potentials of the collaborative economy with novel forms of communitarian initiatives in tourism. This paper assesses the emergent business model of the Camøno walking trail, which was conceived as an alternative, bottom-up initiative to leverage tourism in Southern Denmark. To understand its rapid uptake and success, we draw on theorizations of value creation in alternative and sharing economies as a reframing process, with due attention to the transformation of non-market resources into commodities (public land, volunteer labour, sense of place). Based on a two-year-long ethnographic fieldwork chronicling the consolidation of the Camøno, we analyze these reframing processes and identify three domains of collaborative governance; the governance of affect, the governance of ownership and the governance of exchange. The paper concludes with a discussion of the institutionalization of ad-hoc, alternative business models with due attention to policy recommendations in a European rural context.

Networks as premises for innovations in guided tours

ABSTRACT This article provides an analysis on how disruptive innovation is spurred by the dynamics of digital and analogue networks in the sharing economy. The analysis builds on a free guided-tour company in Copenhagen. Data is collected in a bottom-up reiterative process, drawing on theories on disruptive innovation and network theory. Between 2013 and 2016, one of the free tour companies in Copenhagen was followed by means of participant observations, interviews with tour guides and interpretation of online documents. Results show that free guided tours based on tips alone and orchestrated within the frame of the sharing economy are not merely a product innovation. More importantly, they entail disruptive market innovations that circumvent traditional industry structures and ultimately produce disruptive organizational innovations where trust in network is the crux. Free guided-tour companies operate as communitarian organizations in extractive business models, and they are game changers in the field of guided tours, and ultimately in the field of tourism.

Tour guiding research – insights, issues and implications

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