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Towns and cities across Canada face rapidly changing economic circumstances and many are turning to a variety of strategies, including tourism, to provide stability in their communities. Community Economic Development (CED) has become an accepted form of economic development, with recognition that such planning benefits from a more holistic approach and community participation. However, much of why particular strategies are chosen, what process the community undertakes to implement those choices and how success is measured is not fully understood. Furthermore, CED lacks a developed theoretical basis from which to examine these questions. By investigating communities that have chosen to develop their tourism potential through the use of murals, these various themes can be explored. There are three purposes to this research: (1) to acquire an understanding of the “how” and the “why” behind the adoption and diffusion of mural-based tourism as a CED strategy in rural communities; (2) to contribute to the emerging theory of CED by linking together theories of rural geography, rural change and sustainability, and rural tourism; and (3) to contribute to the development of a framework for evaluating the potential and success of tourism development within a CED process.

Two levels of data collection and analysis were employed in this research. Initially, a survey of Canadian provincial tourism guides was conducted to determine the number of communities in Canada that market themselves as having a mural-based tourism attraction (N=32). A survey was sent to these communities, resulting in 31 responses suitable for descriptive statistical analysis, using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). A case study analysis of the 6 Saskatchewan communities was conducted through in-depth, in person interviews with 40 participants. These interviews were subsequently analyzed utilizing a combined Grounded Theory (GT) and Content Analysis approach.

The surveys indicated that mural development spread within a relatively short time period across Canada from Chemainus, British Columbia. Although tourism is often the reason behind mural development, increasing community spirit and beautification were also cited. This research demonstrates that the reasons this choice is made and the successful outcome of that choice is often dependent upon factors related to community size, proximity to larger populations and the economic (re)stability of existing industry. Analysis also determined that theories of institutional thickness, governance, embeddedness and conceptualizations of leadership provide a body of literature that offers an opportunity to theorize the process and outcomes of CED in rural places while at the same time aiding our understanding of the relationship between tourism and its possible contribution to rural sustainability within a Canadian context. Finally, this research revealed that both the CED process undertaken and the measurement of success are dependent upon the desired outcomes of mural development. Furthermore, particular attributes of rural places play a critical role in how CED is understood, defined and carried out, and how successes, both tangible and intangible, are measured.

This primer defines and describes conscious and nonconscious perception and assessment processes by tourists. The primer links the field of tourism perception studies to the literature of experimental social psychology. The primer describes the important roles that metaphors play in connecting conscious and nonconscious thinking and how both tourism brand managers and tourists use metaphors to use stories to enable enactments and favorable outcomes of archetypal motivations. The primer introduces formal implementable models of the major tenet in Urry’s tourist gaze – visitors’ home culture automatically and mostly nonconsciously profoundly influences their perceptions, assessments, and interpretations of what they see when traveling and visiting away destinations. Model implementation includes applying Boolean algebra-based asymmetric tests instead of symmetric matrix algebra-based statistical tests – the asymmetric tests examine for the consistency of high scores in perceiving, assessing, and behaviors of complex configurations of antecedent conditions. A detailed empirical example of asymmetric testing includes consistent high scores for Americans, Brits, Canadians, and Germans for not shopping for gifts to take home during their visits to Australia. This primer also introduces the concept of the tourist meta-gaze – seeing and assessing outside the automatically activated culturally based tourist gaze.

This paper deals with the international development of firms through the online sales channel. Despite the ever-growing importance of the issues involved in such internationalization strategies, they have received limited attention in the literature.

The paper presents an analysis of an expressly developed database of 20 multibrand luxury retailers in the online fashion market

The analysis highlights the international dimension of these players and sheds some light on internationalization through e-commerce of the luxury fashion retailers. In particular, the paper states that e-commerce may be related to different degrees of internationalization in multibrand luxury fashion retailers and that internationalization of multibrand luxury fashion retailers through e-commerce is unrelated to physical stores abroad.

Future research should be aimed at analyzing the characteristics of a greater number of actor, such as mono-brand luxury manufacturers, also comparing the fashion system with other sectors where the online channel exhibits a similar important trend.

The paper’s originality is related to a new phenomenon that has yet to receive appropriate consideration in the literature, the online international company growth with particular focus on the online channel as a new means to develop into foreign markets

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive overview of virtual tourism and its potential contribution to sustainable development in the tourism industry.

In this chapter, a qualitative approach is used to analyse relevant documents and resources to explore the relationship between virtual tourism and sustainability.

The findings of this study indicate that virtual tourism has numerous applications in the tourism industry, with evident potential for the future. Furthermore, this research identifies virtual tourism as a promising alternative for sustainable tourism, offering the potential to address key sustainability issues in the field.

This chapter adds to the existing literature by examining the link between virtual tourism and sustainability, highlighting the potential of virtual tourism as an alternative to traditional sustainable tourism practices. The insights generated from this study can inform the practices of both academics and practitioners in the tourism industry, promoting more sustainable and responsible tourism practices.

Family engagement is a central tenet of high-quality early education practice. However, the ways in which programs interact with families have varied significantly over time and in relationship to program type. This chapter extends traditional notions of family involvement by emphasizing the potential of early care and education programs to effectively support parents and other primary caregivers in enhancing daily interactions with their children. Specifically, home visits are described as an important mechanism to influence parent-child interaction particularly when intentional, evidence-based curricula are employed. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on developing and implementing such home visiting models. In this chapter, we describe a specific example of the integration of the Promoting First Relationships (PFR) parent-child interaction curriculum (Kelly, Zuckerman, Sandoval, & Buehlman, 2008) into home visits in both home and center-based Early Head Start practice. Implementation aspects for enhancing existing family engagement strategies with an intentional home visiting curriculum are discussed with recommendations for future programming and research.

The objective of the current study was to examine the relationship between visitation patterns of museums at home when compared to museums visited on holidays taken. The data were collected from a sample of residents of Alta, a fjord town in northern Norway. A multiple discriminant analysis was first conducted to ascertain the factors that increased the probability of visiting a museum at home. The variables that correlated significantly with the discriminant function were collectively named “cultural consumption”. Subsequently, a bivariate correlation analysis was performed in order to examine the relationship between the significant discriminant function and the frequency of visits of the same sample to museums on their holidays. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed.

Prior reports on theory and research focusing on describing and explaining national cultural influences on purchase and consumption behavior use a net effects approach (i.e., theory and analysis relying on main and interaction effects via statistical analysis). Theory and research in this chapter advances qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of a configuration perspective of culture's consequences on consumption behavior. This research informs the view that national cultures represent causal recipes (conjunctions) of cultural values; the study of main and interaction effects offer meager representations of national culture's consequences in comparison to adopting a cultural configuration stance. The configuration research here includes transforming Hofstede's country cultural scores into fuzzy set values and applying Boolean algebra to estimate the relevancy of alternative cultural configurations for each of 14 nations to consuming experiences during visits to Australia. The findings support primary and additional hypotheses that specific cultural configurations are sufficient (but not necessary) for describing substantial culture's consequences on consuming tourism experiences. For example, the animus (i.e., Carl Jung's unconscious masculine personality-force) configuration — the combination of high power (P), high individualism (I), high masculine (M), and low uncertainty avoidance (∼U) (i.e., P·I·M·∼U) — is sufficient in indicating not-shopping-for-gifts while visiting Australia. Western national cultures (e.g., United States) have higher fuzzy set scores than Eastern national cultures (e.g., Japan) for the animus configuration.

This chapter sought to overcome the current theoretical lack of understanding of the memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) phenomena and provide a conceptual framework for guiding destination managers who seek to design and deliver memorable experiences appropriate to their particular destination.

This chapter employed literature-based research methods. More specifically, it sought to (1) summarize the understanding of MTEs gained from a review of others’ work, and conduct a retrospective examination of my own empirical research on the topic; and (2) convey the insights I have formulated regarding the implications for destination managers of this understanding for designing, delivering, and evaluating programs, which may increase the probability a visitor will return home with truly memorable experiences.

The literature review and the content analysis and synthesis identified seven conceptual and theoretical components of MTEs, such as hedonism, refreshment, novelty, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, and adverse feelings.

The current study suggested what characteristics of tourism experiences lead to strong memorability and how to measure each component of MTEs. Thus, the findings provide important implications for destination managers to develop tourism programs that last long in visitors’ memories.

Previous researchers suggested some practical strategies to prepare environments and design experiences. However, a comprehensive, theoretically sound understanding of the fundamental factors of MTEs was left out. This study investigated tourism experiential factors that enable and facilitate MTEs. It also tried to demonstrate the managerial importance of these theoretical components to the design of “on the ground” destination programs, which initially create excitement and anticipation among potential visitors (within the context of a highly competitive marketplace), to the point where a given destination is selected over a multitude of others and where it subsequently delivers the kind of high-quality “truly memorable” experiences that fully meet the inflated expectations initially “promised” by the destination brand.