Petra Adolfsson

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.

Look What's Back! Institutional Complexity, Reversibility and the Knotting of Logics

Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, the authors examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. It is found that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. It is found that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field-level arrangements. The authors suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work that allows multiple logics to coexist in local arrangements with variable durability.

Objectives, objects, and objectivity: On practitioner–academic collaboration in tourism and leisure research

In the area of tourism management, the previous research shows that collaboration among stakeholders is crucial in achieving or aspiring toward sustainable development because the field is highly fragmented with numerous stakeholders constituting the tourism product. In a single-case study, the analytical concept of boundary objects is used to show that not only the human relationships but also the objects created and used in such collaborations must be considered to understand how such collaboration can influence sustainable tourism practices. The results show the importance of such objects in becoming part of everyday practices and thereby support a sustained collaboration. Additionally, the results indicate that the creation of boundary objects can contribute to a reduced focus on consensus, and therefore, the professional integrity of the parties involved can be maintained.

Just a Box of Pills? When Pharmaceuticals Came to the Supermarket

Actor Network Theory (ANT) has taken on a central role in social sciences, highlighting the importance of actions in shaping relations and organizations. Studies inspired by ANT have enhanced our understanding of how knowledge and power are produced in laboratories, political arenas, and knowledgeand technology-intensive organizations. However, so far, ANTinspired studies have not paid similar attention to situations that lack obvious controversies, but can still have a huge influence on ordinary life. We thus want to contribute to the ANT literature by showing how ANT can be useful in situations that are not necessarily characterized by controversies and heated debates, but rather by (cooler) negotiations. In this case it is the negotiations between the regulator and the regulated that succeed (hot) situations. Regulations are formulated then enacted in (new) local practice. The performative perspective, prevalent in ANT, makes it possible to study processes that can otherwise easily pass unnoticed, as they are rather silent. It also helps us to understand how changes can be comprehended as the transformation of assemblies in practice and how the taken-for-granted products in our daily lives are part of (de)stabilized assemblies. In the study reported on here, we examine the process of introducing non-prescription pharmaceuticals into the Swedish retail sector, how this affects the day-to-day work of supermarkets, and thus also how these products may not be seen simply as boxes of pills on a shelf, but as plural entities that are (trans)formed in practice by (re)assembling, (re)connecting, and (re)labelling.

Young People, Big Ideas: Participatory Budgeting Fixes a River

Citizen participation in local government budgeting is an important emerging public management reform movement in many countries including Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Australia and now Sweden. ‘Participatory budgeting’ programs bring local communities into the decision- making process around formal resource allocation plans, and have the potential to give new levels of voice and choice about service and infrastructure expenditure to disconnected or disadvantaged and marginalised citizens and groups. This case study explores the form and function of the first tranche of participatory budgeting programs in a new major initiative that is sponsored by the central agency for local governments (kommuns) in Sweden. The kommun’s program set aside a substantial sum of money to be used in a new project around safety or the environment, and used groups of final year school students to design the participative processes, produce alternative proposals for a project, and vote on a final decision. The paper interrogates how the participatory budgeting program intersects with the themes of economic, cultural, social and environmental sustainability. The case study details the causes and dynamics behind the unanticipated choice made by the groups to compete rather than cooperate, and considers the way in which the final project decided upon was bolstered in funding, scope and execution by linking its main strands to other policy objectives. In the end, this engagement initiative was as much about strengthening democracy and a sense of community as it was about generating, capturing and implementing good ideas.

The Creation of New Ways of Acting in the Water Administration Field – the Implementation of the EU-WFD in Sweden

EU’s water framework directive (EU-WFD) demand geographical grouping of the administrative bodies in EU according to river basins [12]. In this paper we follow the implementation process in Sweden. The theoretical perspective is based on organizational theories, influenced by new institutionalism and sociology of translation. The study is based on observations of meeting between authorities and other actors in the west part of Sweden but also interviews with various actors taking part in the process. This paper shows that, this far, ways of working in order to establish cooperation differ among different local areas, e.g. the councils have adjusted their work depending on their interpretation of the existing situation in their own council. I claim that in one way we could say that old ways of acting, institutionalized action nets according to Czarniawska’s vocabulary, are questioned. New actions are taken in the field, replacing or complementing old actions. Actors try to see what actions that are needed, make sense of action taken and defend actions.