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The purpose of this paper is to develop accessible tourism in two areas of Greece and Turkey. The areas of Drama in Greece and Mersin in Turkey have cooperated in the frame of MEDRA project to assess their potential and set up a plan for developing accessible tourism.

The choice of the two areas was not random. Mersin currently enjoys continuous development, as one of Turkey’s biggest ports and a free trade zone. Drama is a developing area in agricultural manufacturing and high-tech sectors with a rich physical environment which aspires to develop a healthy alternative tourism industry.

The findings include, amongst others, the identification of needs of tourists with disabilities, and the relevant historical evolution, legislative framework, international good practices, policy-improvement proposals, accessibility assessment in Mersin and Drama, and suggestions for developing accessible infrastructure together with the training of stakeholders.

Greece although made a lot of progress regarding the issues of disability and accessibility still is not on the same level as many European countries, while Turkey has a lot to learn in order to deal with accessibility from a holistic point of view.

Both countries owe a large percentage of their national income, to the tourist industry and seek ways to gain advantages in this highly competitive sector.

The successful implementation of the MEDRA project constitutes an example worthy of a wider application in the development of accessible tourism, not only in the two countries but also to countries with similar characteristics.

This study used a visual research approach to investigate how small business (SB) entrepreneurs in Nigeria, a low-income country, perceive digital transformation (DT). The study aims to improve and broaden the understanding of DT by uncovering its metaphors. Making metaphorical sense of DT will increase its knowledge among populations who are unfamiliar with digital technology concepts, as well as communicating and collaborating with them to develop future research and strategies on the subject of DT. This study is significant because scholars have paid little attention to social imaginations of DT depicted through metaphors, more so when considered from a worldview of SBs in low-income countries.

The uniqueness of the research objective motivated the use of social theory to frame the research approach, and picture-elicitation techniques to drive data collection through in-depth interviews with 17 SB entrepreneurs and business owners in Nigeria. Data were analyzed using a content analysis procedure known as metaphor analysis.

The study revealed three metaphors of DT: a drama, a war and a pregnant elephant. A triangulation of the metaphors with English lexicon, extant literature and interview excerpts supported the war and drama perceptions of DT but opposed “DT as a pregnant elephant.”

It argued that the social perception of DT can improve the sustainable, purposeful and successful execution of DT strategies for SB DT. As a result, this study pushes the boundaries of DT, particularly for SB entrepreneurs in low-income countries.

Metaphors pervade our daily lives, not only in our language and communications, but also in how we think and act; as such, they can play an important role in understanding and implementing DT, a concept that has received little attention in the SB settings.

This is one of the first empirical studies to figuratively explain DT and its implications for literature and practice in SB entrepreneurship and information systems domains.

This paper presents a study of a system that allows remote and onsite visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. The remote visitors are older adults at a care home and their relatives and/or friends who are at the museum. The museum visits are interactive. Meaningful stories accompany the museum exhibits, and there’s an audio channel between onsite and remote visitors. The aim of the study is to determine whether the remote visitors, i.e. older adults are able to use such technology and to study the mediated sense of spatial presence, social closeness, engagement and enjoyment in the visit. This study discusses the relationship between these aspects and factors leading to a better remote experience for older adults.

This study has 14 onsite and 12 remote older adult participants. Standardized questionnaires measured the mediated sense of spatial presence, the experienced social closeness and the level of participants' engagement and enjoyment in the visit of the older adult participants and traced onsite visitors in their position during the visit. The audio logs were subjected to thematic content analysis.

The results show that older adults enjoy and engage in remote visits, and that there is a positive correlation between enjoyment, engagement and social closeness. The findings argue that both the audio channel and the interactive story are important for creating an affective virtual experience: the audio channel increases the sense of closeness, whereas the interactive story makes the visit more engaging, providing structure, direction and purpose to the visit.

This work advances the state of art in the domain of technologies for older adults and addresses the needs of this population to stay in contact with both people and places.

In this paper, I argue that English could be of more relevance to the Arabian Gulf if we conceptualized it as an educational forum for familiarizing students with socio-linguistic conventions relating to a wide variety of text types and for sharpening their critical awareness of the political implications of the uses of English. I make my case against the backdrop of a particular local context in the Arabian Gulf: the current BA programme in English at the College of Arts and Social Science, Sultan Qaboos University, the Sultanate of Oman. I maintain that the programme is predicated upon conceiving of English as a field (or rather fields) of knowledge, as academic disciplines of English literature, linguistics and translation, each with its own sets of concepts and frames of reference. As such, the programme both falls short of being fully theoretically coherent and fails to take into account the recent educational developments in Oman. Drawing upon the theoretical construct of discourse, I propose an outline of an alternative BA programme in English that revolves around the uses of English and their political implications.

This paper aims to contribute to understandings of the dynamics of marketplace exclusion and explore the benefits of a performative approach to knowledge production.

Interactive documentary theatre is used to explore the pressing issue of marketplace exclusion in a deprived UK city. The authors present a series of three vignettes taken from the performance to explore the embodied and dialogical nature of performative knowledge production.

The performative mode of knowledge production has a series of advantages over the more traditional research approaches used in marketing. It is arguably more authentic, embodied and collaborative. However, this mode of research also has its challenges particularly in the interpretation and presentation of the data.

The paper highlights the implications of performative knowledge production for critical consumer learning. It also explores how the hitherto neglected concept of marketplace exclusion might bring together insights into the mechanics and outcomes of exclusion.

While theatrical and performative metaphors have been widely used to theorise interactions in the marketplace, as yet the possibility of using theatre as a form of inquiry within marketing has been largely neglected. Documentary theatre is revealing of the ways in which marketplace cultures can perpetuate social inequality. Involving local communities in the co-production of knowledge in this way gives them a voice in the policy arena not hitherto fully addressed in the marketing field. Similarly, marketplace exclusion as a concept has been sidelined in favour of marketplace discrimination and consumer vulnerability – the authors think it has the potential to bring these fields together in exploring the range of dynamics involved.