Beyond the Mass Tourism Stereotype Power and Empowerment in Chinese Tour Packages

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Author(s)
Wang, Ying
Weaver, David B
Kwek, Anna
Year published
2016
Metadata
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Low-priced tour packages are mass tourism power projection sites where providers attempt to restrict tourist power. This study adopts a hybrid design that incorporates dual analytic autoethnography and blog analysis, sharing not only the authors’ experiences and insights into the negotiation between supplier attempts to disempower tourists and reciprocal efforts of tourists to self-empower in all-inclusive tour packages, but also viewpoints of other tour participants collected during the tours and from the Internet. Tour experiences were negotiated through power exchanges. In this “powerscape,” we were subjected to disempowerment ...
View more >Low-priced tour packages are mass tourism power projection sites where providers attempt to restrict tourist power. This study adopts a hybrid design that incorporates dual analytic autoethnography and blog analysis, sharing not only the authors’ experiences and insights into the negotiation between supplier attempts to disempower tourists and reciprocal efforts of tourists to self-empower in all-inclusive tour packages, but also viewpoints of other tour participants collected during the tours and from the Internet. Tour experiences were negotiated through power exchanges. In this “powerscape,” we were subjected to disempowerment strategies, including domination, intimidation, reliance creation, and trust building, while our self-empowerment ranged from active resistance to nonresistance. Different disempowerment strategies appear to solicit specific reactions. Our exploratory study provides insight into the power dynamics implicit in mass tourism and identifies several contextual factors that shape power relationships.
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View more >Low-priced tour packages are mass tourism power projection sites where providers attempt to restrict tourist power. This study adopts a hybrid design that incorporates dual analytic autoethnography and blog analysis, sharing not only the authors’ experiences and insights into the negotiation between supplier attempts to disempower tourists and reciprocal efforts of tourists to self-empower in all-inclusive tour packages, but also viewpoints of other tour participants collected during the tours and from the Internet. Tour experiences were negotiated through power exchanges. In this “powerscape,” we were subjected to disempowerment strategies, including domination, intimidation, reliance creation, and trust building, while our self-empowerment ranged from active resistance to nonresistance. Different disempowerment strategies appear to solicit specific reactions. Our exploratory study provides insight into the power dynamics implicit in mass tourism and identifies several contextual factors that shape power relationships.
View less >
Journal Title
Journal of Travel Research
Copyright Statement
Ying Wang, David B. Weaver, and Anna Kwek, Beyond the Mass Tourism Stereotype: Power and Empowerment in Chinese Tour Packages, Journal of Travel Research, Vol. 55(6) 724–737, 2016. Copyright 2015 The Authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.
Note
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Tourism not elsewhere classified
Commercial Services
Marketing
Tourism