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1 – 6 of 6Marie Vestergaard Mikkelsen and Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt
Holidays are often conceptualized as an opportunity for individuals to escape everyday life responsibilities, roles and relations. However, families bring with them…
Abstract
Purpose
Holidays are often conceptualized as an opportunity for individuals to escape everyday life responsibilities, roles and relations. However, families bring with them domestic, everyday life responsibilities, bonds and relationships while holidaying. So far, research on family holidays has emphasized the nuclear family, largely assuming that holidays include a husband-wife-child(ren) constellation. However, family holidays come in many different forms, and this paper aims to focus on the under-researched issue of grandparents and grandchildren vacationing together.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on 81 qualitative in situ interviews with grandparents, who vacation together with their grandchildren at Danish caravan sites, this paper explores how grandparents and grandchildren “do” family during joint holidays. Although attempts were made to give voice to children, the paper predominantly uses data from interviews with grandparents.
Findings
Although grandparent–grandchildren holidays resemble nuclear family holidays in a number of ways, significant differences are also identified. Key differences are that these holidays enable grandparents and grandchildren to interact both more intensively and in ways they cannot do (as easily) at home; are a means for grandparents to help and support their children; allow for grandparents and grandchildren to be both together and apart; and are critical to how contemporary families enact and “do” family across generations.
Originality/value
The paper deepens knowledge on the under-explored topic of extended family consumption in tourism and points to grandparent–grandchild holidays as an important element of how grandparents “do” family.
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Marianne Wollf Lundholt, Ole Have Jørgensen and Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt
This study aims to contribute to an increased understanding of intra-organizational city brand resistance by identifying and discussing different types of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to contribute to an increased understanding of intra-organizational city brand resistance by identifying and discussing different types of counter-narratives emerging from the political and administrative arenas.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical material consists of secondary data as well as six in-depth semi-structured interviews with Danish mayors and city managers in three different municipalities in Denmark.
Findings
Intra-organizational counter-narratives differ from inter-organizational counter-narratives but resemble a number of issues known from extra-organizational resistance. Still, significant differences are found within the political arena: lack of ownership, competition for resources and political conflicts. Lack of ownership, internal competition for resources and distrust of motives play an important role within the administrative arena. Mayors are aware of the needs for continued political support for branding projects but projects are nonetheless realized despite resistance if there is a political majority for it.
Research limitations/implications
This study points to the implications of city brand resistance and counter-narratives emerging from the “inside” of the political and administrative arenas in the city, here defined as “intra-organizational counter-narratives”.
Practical implications
It is suggested that politicians and municipality staff should be systematically addressed as individual and unique audiences and considered as important as citizens in the brand process.
Originality/value
So far little attention has been paid to internal stakeholders within the municipal organization and their impact on the city branding process approached from a narrative perspective.
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Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt, Aurimas Pumputis and Kiya Ebba
Travelers are both surrounded by and perform places, thus making places ambiguous sites that “come alive” when travelers use them and engage in various performances. A…
Abstract
Purpose
Travelers are both surrounded by and perform places, thus making places ambiguous sites that “come alive” when travelers use them and engage in various performances. A place many travelers pass through is the airport. Airports are places where travelers’ performances are restricted in many ways and waiting is a key element of the airport experience. This paper contributes with knowledge on what airport terminals “are”, not as designs or material objects but as places enacted by travelers. In doing so, the paper aims to emphasize on both how travelers “see” airports and how they use them.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses different qualitative methods and notions of time and waiting. Sources of data are small-scale netnography, focus group interviews, observations done at airports and qualitative interviews.
Findings
The study shows that airport terminals are heterogeneously enacted environments that are heavily inscribed with the mundane act of waiting and travelers use a series of different strategies to “use”, “spend” and “kill” time. Furthermore, whereas more affluent travelers spend waiting time using airports’ commercial offerings (shopping, restaurants, bars, etc.), less affluent travelers do not have the same options.
Research limitations/implications
The research points to airport terminals as not only “places of movement and mobility” but also “places of waiting” inscribed with boredom and travelers actively fight boredom by spending, using and killing time in a variety of ways. Furthermore, the study points to significant differences between affluent travelers and other travelers and differences between people travelling alone and in groups. Therefore, a call is made for research focusing on less affluent travelers, people traveling in groups and on waiting and waiting time.
Practical implications
The study suggests that airports are more than consumerscapes and places of movement, hereby questioning the current focus on commercial revenues.
Social implications
The study points to airport space as space “inhabited” not only by travelers willingly taking on the roles as consumers but also by travelers that kill, spend and use waiting time in other ways, hereby questioning the idea that airports are places for the “elite”.
Originality/value
Travelers associate airports with boredom and inscribe them with waiting. However, travelers “fight” boredom and waiting with performances and acts designed to use, spend, pass and “kill” time. Hereby, travelers not only accept but also construct the seemingly mundane act of waiting as restricted, negotiated and confined, but nevertheless meaningful performances.
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Malene Gram, Margaret Hogg, Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt and Pauline MacLaran
The purpose of this paper is to address the meaning of food consumption practices in maintaining intergenerational relationships between young university students and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the meaning of food consumption practices in maintaining intergenerational relationships between young university students and their parents.
Design/methodology/approach
Student food consumption has been mainly studied through quantitative methods, treating students as a homogenous group, more or less living in a vacuum, and often with the focus on nutrition. This paper gives voice to young adults to unpack the significance of cooking and food consumption in relation to maintaining or changing family ties. The study is based on 12 qualitative interviews, five focus groups and a workshop, with Danish and international students in Denmark. Theoretically, the study draws on family, consumption and transition research.
Findings
The authors identify four realms of intergenerational relationships in the context of food. The relationships range from a wish either to maintain the status quo in the relationship, or to change and rethink the relationship, and importantly, the act of maintaining or changing the family relationships may be initiated either by the grown-up child or by the parent. The study concludes that the act of moving away from home is a period of intense (re)construction of food consumption habits and skills, which draw several threads back to the family home, and relationships undergo change in various ways.
Research limitations/implications
The limitations of this study are that it has been carried out only in a Danish context.
Originality/value
The contributions of the study are capturing the children’s view of this transition, and providing insights into how apparently mundane consumption can be full of symbolic meaning. The paper will be of interest for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand intergenerational relations and consumption.
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Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt, John Hird and Peter Kvistgaard
Studies of destination management and leadership may over-emphasize unity and collaboration, thus producing romanticized accounts for such processes. This paper discusses…
Abstract
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 power relations at work at the destination. Furthermore, if DMOs are to successfully establish themselves as destination leaders, they need to position themselves in the midst of the power networks entailing relationships and interactions with and between destination stakeholders.
Originality/value
The paper demonstrates that power is not a characteristic of individual actors, but is instead a characteristic of relations. Moreover, power is defined as a potential and might therefore be latent and only occasionally be activated. Furthermore, in a destination multiple power-relations co-exist, effecting attempts to lead the destination. Therefore, the paper points to the existence of a series of bases of power and effects hereof on destination leadership.
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Pantea Foroudi, Charles Dennis, Dimitris Stylidis and T.C. Melewar