Mikael Jonasson

Performing Co-produced Guided Tours

Tour guides have traditionally played a key role in linking tour operators, incoming agencies and tourists. However, very little attention has been given to the competences that involve performative aspects of guiding. Such performative competences involve the complex maneuvring in native and foreign cultures, intercultural mediating, functioning as pathfinders and mentors, and negotiating in unfamiliar destinations to their guests in a culturally sensitive manner, and coordinating group movements in space. The article examines the complexity involved in guided tours, and consequently the need for a deeper understanding of the performative aspects of guided tours. The article concludes that the performative aspects of guiding tourists involve interpretations, mediations and translations through verbal and bodily communication. It also involves the ability to engage by producing intense moments through narratives and creative affordances. One final conclusion from this work is that it is a challenge to actually use the variety of scientific perspectives offered within tourism education programs in order to produce hybrid study outcomes, but, it could also be seen as the pragmatic approach that tour guides adopt in practice.

Guided Tours and Tourism

Guided tours can be found at more or less all places where tourism exists. Many people’s first thought of guided tours is that of a herd of people, following a woman with a yellow umbrella; this is not always a positively afflicted image of this phenomenon. Guided tours have been both stereotyped and ridiculed in everyday talk, being considered as a highly choreographed action. However, it is also an activity which most people have taken part in, thereby experiencing new places (Widtfeldt Meged, 2010). In tourism research, guided tours have hitherto not received the attention we believe they deserve. We will show that research on guiding exists, among others the classics of Boorstin (1977), Holloway (1981) and Cohen (1985), but that the academic field is far from well-studied. In this special issue, therefore, we aim to discuss guided tours as a highly essential phenomenon in the field of tourism. Guided tours are multi-facetted, situatedly designed and continuously developed in order to meet needs from new audiences around the world. From this, it could be concluded that the importance of guided tours is continuously growing, as tourism becomes more and more a globalized phenomenon. As early as 1979, Schmidt stated that there are four functions of guided tours. Firstly, tourists do not have to choose themselves which sites to visit on occasions when time is limited. Secondly, travelling in a group with accordingly different positions, guided tours can act as a compromise for the individual group members. Thirdly, tourism can be legitimized by the educational contribution that a guided tour would bring and last, it is a safe way to get to know a new place. No matter if tourists are visiting urban or rural areas, if they are travelling alone or in company, if they visit the nearest museum or a low-accessible place in another continent, guided tours are offered in most places, in different shapes and to different visitors.

The ritual of courtesy — creating complex or uneqivocal places?

This empirical study describes three common traffic situations with associated user actions likely to occur at any complex regulated traffic place. It is a place where the traffic participants are lacking explicit formal traffic rules that are comprehensible and where they have to create informal social rules as they interact. The three actions in question were analyzed with an ethnomethodological method and they are interpreted as revealing important social rules of courtesy that help agents meet in a safe and effective way. The aim is to discuss the successful meeting in traffic by as rituals in a social drama and then compare actions at the complex regulated traffic place with actions likely to be seen at two types of formal and unequivocal regulation instruments -- the traffic light and the roundabout. It is concluded that formal regulation and formal traffic law cannot cover all possible actions likely to appear in traffic. Social rules of courtesy are used as a compensation tool covering the insufficiency in formal regulation and formal traffic rules.

Co-producing and co-performing attractive rural living in popular media

Abstract Rural migration is important in any process of rural economic development. The attraction of immigrants to rural places in Sweden are part of trends that involve a specific set of discursive elements that are being co-produced and co-performed by actors represented in magazines and reality series with a rural theme. The aim of this article is to analyse how discourses on attractive living in rural places are co-performed and co-produced in one Swedish lifestyle magazine about country living and in one British reality show, Country Living (Lantliv), and Escape to the Country (Comeford, 2002; Edensor, 2006; Gustafsson, 2008; Jonasson & Scherle, 2012; Normann & Ramirez, 1993; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramirez, 1999; Sventelius, 2009, 2010; Wikström, 1996; Woods, 2010). These co-produced performances use existing social and geographical structures, such as gender, entrepreneurship and nature–culture categories, and at the same time actors are trying to balance them in such ways that they co-perform an attractive living in the countryside.

The AKKA-board – performing mobility, disability and innovation

This study involves a mobility device with relevance for health and well-being for severely disabled persons. The purpose of this study is to examine some of the geographical, innovative and existential implications of the performance of place through mobility that the AKKA-board produces for severely disabled people. What does mobility and place mean in terms of supporting human skills that are being performed with the help of the AKKA-board? It is concluded that mobility in terms of a self-controlled movement is connected to enabling individual decision-making, independence and well-being.

Performing Guided Tours : Editorial

Guided tours play a key role in the growing global tourism industry, supporting, engaging and diverting visitors who travel to places they want to learn more about and be entertained by. Despite the importance of the role of the guided tour and the many challenges to its narratives from developments in cultural, critical and historiographical theory, the guided tour attracts little in the way of sustained and detailed critical attention within tourism research. Through the International Research Forum on Guided Tours (IRFGT), a more systematic work has now begun; widening the questions and assembling scholars interested in guided tours as a scientific field of inquiry (Adolfsson, Dobers, & Jonasson, 2009; Jonasson, 2011; Zillinger, Jonasson, & Adolfsson, 2012). While still in its early stages, this initiative has already produced networks and publications that have opened up questions regarding guided tours. Rather than remaining a mystifying and closed skill-set in the hands of professional or semi-professional associations and licensed individuals, the IRFGT seeks to open the multiple practices of guiding to careful and serious scrutiny from various theoretical perspectives, initiated and deployed by an emerging interdisciplinary community. Every new place that the conference IRFGT has moved to has brought new perspectives into play. From the last conference in Plymouth in 2011, it is clear that guided tours are increasingly seen by some researchers as productions of extraordinary timespaces within any, even everyday, context. Tours are not merely guided; they are performed as closely scripted presentations or as situated improvisations where audiences are as much the producers of the performance as their guides (Coverley, 2006; Jonasson, 2011; Mock, 2009; Smith, 2010). Thus, the distance between performance studies and tourism studies has narrowed. While many important questions, such as those of economy, professional conditions and political control, remain to be addressed, what performance and theatrical perspectives are adding to studies of guided tours are new and innovative ways of considering the small elements within the micro-cosmological worlds produced by guided tours, as well as connecting these elements to a wider social, cultural and political landscape of tourism. Grounding guided tours on a performative platform also produce new ways of connecting guided tours to other scientific disciplines, making it possible to ask other questions, use new methods, and present novel findings. By crossing fields of psychogeography, Internet-based technology, symbolic understanding of heritages, reflective walking methods, gendered literary spaces, and the micro-politics of cultural co-productions, while teasing out the active presence of multiple practices within every act of guiding, such an assemblage of viewpoints on guided tours invites novel and hybrid outcomes. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 2013 Vol. 13, No. 2, 85–87, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2013.796198

Ethnographical mapping of thick places : Teaching and learning practices in teacher training schools

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to use an ethnographic method in order to map where understandings of teaching and learning practices (TaLP) are being discussed in three schools. The questions posed are: what are the relations between thick places, meaning, affect, and TaLP? This study uses an ethnographic method outside the classroom and in between different activities as a starting point for understanding TaLP and where many students at the same school produce thick places of affect and meaning. The main conclusion from this study is that matters of where, what, and who are shaping TaLP. Another important conclusion from this study is that training schools offer new conditions for teacher students, but also offer new opportunities for ethnographic studies that aim at understanding these school environments with a range of new questions.

Horizontally organised and innovative spaces of dialogue for dealing with ‘wicked problems’ related to housing in rural Sweden

The aim of this paper is to discuss co-productive and collaborative processes in rural housing construction in Sweden. The ‘wicked problem’ addressed here is why it is so difficult to build new homes in Swedish rural areas. Our analysis shows that horizontally organised competences may be used in order to form innovative and creative spaces for dialogues around the realisation of house building. These spaces for dialogues are transformed into collaborative and co-productive social events for reconfiguring thoughts and actions in relation to ‘wicked problems’. Using Fagered, Sweden, as a case study, our results show that timing, as well as understanding the motivation of local groups and acknowledging the slowness of planning processes, are crucial for making change.

Introducing work, welfare, and qualitative studies of health

Halmstad University’s profile as the University of Innovation consists of the strong area of Health and Lifestyle. As many European societies are characterized by societal challenges, this strong area will turn out to be an area of research that has strong future relevance. Challenges related to an aging population, increased mental illness among young people, marginalization of disabled people, and the issues related to working life and health will be monitored by researchers within work and welfare with the help of qualitative studies. (Published: 14 March 2014) Citation: Int J Qualitative Stud Health Well-being 2014, 9 : 23800 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v9.23800