John Hird

Destination leadership and the issue of power

Purpose – Studies of destination management and leadership may over-emphasize unity and collaboration, thus producing romanticized accounts for such processes. This paper discusses destination leadership from a less romanticized perspective – pointing to the various ways in which it intertwines with power. Design/methodology/approach – The authors focus on the relationship between destination leadership and power networks offering a fresh look at the reality of collaborative processes in destinations. By exposing the latent or manifest networks of complex power relations in destinations, the authors disentangle the analysis of destination management and leadership from romanticized perspectives. A non-conventional vignettes approach is applied. Findings – The concept of power offers more realistic descriptions and “thick” conceptualizations of destination leadership. Moreover, the predominance of more inclusive and bottom-up approaches to destination development necessitates advances in understandings of ...

Teaching tourism change agents

This article discusses knowledge, competencies and skills Master’s students should obtain during their academic studies and particularly, the differences between teaching about a topic and teaching to do. This is exemplified by experiential learning theory and the case of a change management course that is part of a Tourism Master’s program, where a major challenge is not only to teach students about change and change agents, but to teach them how change feels and how to become change agents. The change management course contains an experiment inspired by experiential teaching literature and methods. The experiment seeks to make students not only hear/learn about change agency and management, but to make them feel change, hereby enabling them to develop the skills and competencies necessary for them to take on the role as change agents and thus enable them to play key roles in implementing change in tourism in the future.