Johan Hultman

Female nutritional state affects the rate of male incubation feeding in the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca

SummaryMale pied flycatches Ficedula hypoleuca regularly feed their mates during incubation. By experimentally supplying some females with extra food we studied how the females nutritional state affected her incubation schedule and the rate at which her mate fed her. Females that received extra food spent more time on the nest and shorter periods away from it, compared with control females. This suggests that nest attentiveness is governed by the amount of energy available to the female. When females reccived extra food, males decreased their rate of incubation feeding. They also did so in response to increasing ambient temperatures, whereas incubation schedules were unaffected. We, therefore, conclude that our results support the “female nutrition hypothesis”, i.e., that the food provided by the male constitutes a significant nutritional contribution to the incubating female.

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.

Ecotourism in Scandinavia: lessons in theory and practice.

In recent years, public, scientific and governmental interest in ecotourism in Scandinavia has grown substantially. This book is the first to comprehensively describe, analyse and evaluate aspects of Scandinavian ecotourism. It will appeal to researchers and students of tourism in general and ecotourism in particular.

From “less landfilling” to “wasting less”: Societal narratives, socio‐materiality, and organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that organizational change depends on societal narratives – narratives about the character, history, or envisioned future of societies.Design/methodology/approach – A case study of a Swedish municipal waste management company serves as an illustration.Findings – Swedish waste governance is powered by two main narratives: “less landfilling” and “wasting less”. Less landfilling has been the dominant narrative for several decades, but wasting less is gaining momentum, and a new narrative order is establishing itself. This new narrative order significantly redefines the socio‐material status of waste and imposes major changes on waste management organizations.Research limitations/implications – Based on the case of waste governance in Sweden, the authors conclude that organizations should be aware that societal narrative affects the legitimacy and nature of their operations; therefore, they must integrate a watch for narrative change in their strategic reflection...

The European Waste Hierarchy: from the sociomateriality of waste to a politics of consumption

Municipal solid waste is a central concern for environmental policy, and the sociomateriality of waste—the ways in which waste is socially defined and dealt with—is an important issue for sustainability. We show how applying the European Unions waste policy through the European Waste Hierarchy (EWH) affects the sociomateriality of waste. The EWH ranks the desirability of different waste-management approaches according to their environmental impact. We investigate how the EWH has been acknowledged and interpreted in five different organizational contexts with relevance for Swedish waste management: EU environmental policy, the Swedish EPA, two municipal waste-management companies, and the trade organization Swedish Waste Management which represents the interests of municipal bodies involved with waste. In addition to preventing the production of waste, the EWH aims to disassemble, circulate, and reintroduce as much material as possible into production processes. We show how these aims shape paradoxical relationships between economy and society on the one hand, and environment and nature on the other, and open the way for a discussion of a politics of consumption through material management.

Managing the politics of value propositions

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion, revived by the service-dominant logic thesis, on value propositions in service organizations. Against a backdrop of understanding value as a pluralistic social construct that takes place across different institutionalized practices of valuation or regimes of value, we argue that value propositions transcend the immediate localness of both value in exchange and value in use. Correspondingly, we claim that service practitioners may draw advantages from engaging with a politics of value that addresses multiple regimes of value, whether commensurable or not. A case study of waste management services in Sweden serves as an illustration of such a politics that combines practical, economic, political, and environmental aspects of value propositions.

Can there only be one? Towards a post-paradigmatic service marketing approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to unlock positions regarding the goods/services dichotomy in service marketing and to offer an argument that treats goods and services on an ontologically equal basis.Design/methodology/approach – A close reading of influential texts that argue in favor of a service‐dominant logic (SDL) and new paradigms in service marketing.Findings – Both the SDL proposal and calls for new service paradigms can be understood as ad hoc solutions that serve to reproduce and even strengthen the asymmetry between goods and services. A post‐paradigmatic analysis opens up new possibilities for service marketing research and practice.Research limitations/implications – By showing how goods and services can be positioned equally, hitherto invisible sites of value creation become potential subjects for analyses in service marketing.Practical implications – Service marketing practices are situated so as to explain the value creating interactions between service providers and customers in a ...

The business model of solid waste management in Sweden – a case study of two municipally-owned companies

This paper describes the business model of municipally-owned MSW (municipal solid waste) companies in Sweden. A comparative study of two of these companies shows that they combine three types of activities: public service activities that collect solid waste from households, commercial establishments, and industry; processing activities that transform this waste; and marketing activities that enable products and recycled material to re-enter the economy. The historical success of the two companies rests on their ability to create value by combining these three distinct yet mutually dependent types of activities. However, an ongoing legal controversy may develop into a threat to this business model and to the entire organization of Swedish waste management.

Sticky Landscapes and Smooth Experiences: The Biopower of Tourism Mobilities in the Öresund Region

As landscapes become ordered according to certain sets of economic, political, ecological or social practices and discourses, other possible orderings become limited in their potential. This article illustrates this with an example taken from the field of tourism and place marketing. The empirical focus is golf experiences in Scania, Sweden, bookable by individual consumers over the Internet. The ordering of what is termed the ‘golfscape’ is unfolded with the help of an assemblage of arguments taken from writings on mobility, biopower and subjectification, post‐foundational views of the materiality of the social and recent conceptualisations of the socio‐cultural and spatial impact of tourism. The booking sequence, i.e. the interaction between consumer and booking software, is analyzed as a series of negotiations, techniques and technologies of control and enactments of power. It is concluded that mobility studies can benefit from a Foucauldian power perspective when explaining practices of mobility and spatial fixation.

Through the Protocol: Culture, Magic and GIS in the Creation of Regional Attractiveness

Abstract This paper shows how culture is used and transformed as it becomes mobilized as a strategic resource in a regional development project within a neoliberal economic discourse. The focus is on how four smaller municipalities in the transnational Swedish/Danish Öresund region initiate a process of cultural mappings in order to incorporate local culture and cultural heritage in the regional tourist economy. By using the concept of magic, the paper discusses how the practice of cultural mapping can be envisaged as an enactment of power. The analysis of the mapping practice is based on an actor-network ontology to show how interactions between humans and a software protocol transform both the mapped subjects and the regional landscape in a material sense. It is concluded that cultural mapping is a problematic practice, politically as well as morally, as it is driven by the commoditization of culture and constitutes a technologically mediated, normative shaping of a region framed by a rhetoric of objectivity and the common good.