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The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which sustainability reporting can be viewed as a simulacrum used to camouflage real sustainable-development problems and project an idealized view of the firms' situations.

The method was based on the content analysis and counter accounting of 23 sustainability reports from firms in the energy and mining sectors which had received application levels of A or A+ from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The information disclosed in some 2,700 pages of reports was structured around 92 GRI indicators and compared with 116 significant news events that clearly addressed the responsibility of these firms in sustainable development problems. Moreover, the 1,258 pictures included in sustainability reports were categorized into recurring themes from an inductive perspective.

A total of 90 per cent of the significant negative events were not reported, contrary to the principles of balance, completeness and transparency of GRI reports. Moreover, the pictures included in these reports showcase various simulacra clearly disconnected with the impact of business activities.

The paper shows the relevance of the counter accounting approach in assessing the quality of sustainability reports and question the reliability of the GRI's A or A+ application levels. It contributes to debates concerning the transparency of sustainability reports in light of Debord's and Baudrillard's critical perspective. The paper reveals the underexplored role of images in the emergence of several types of simulacra.

The purpose of this paper is to take a reflexive look at the cultural experiences of a group of overseas students studying at a business school in the North East of England. The paper uses Baudrillard's work on simulacra and simulation to challenge notions of second culture contact.

Using primary (i.e. interviews with 14 students and four staff) and secondary sources the paper investigates second culture contact truths associated with English higher education for a group of overseas students. To capture the richness of individual cultural experiences for these students and staff a qualitative approach in gathering empirical data is adopted.

First, it seems the mainstream literature that posits cultures as definable, distinct and measurable entities that can be acquired does not capture the complexity of cultural experiences as revealed by the individuals involved in this study. Second, the findings surface questions about the validity of what educators and students take for granted or perceive as “real” in regards to what it means to “be an English student” and the processes of “becoming an English student”. Third, the findings raise provocative questions about the process, content and context of curriculum to those responsible for developing and marketing international programmes.

Education as an international business means strategists, marketers and educators alike need to look closer at the way international programmes are developed, marketed and delivered both for viability and ethical reasons.

Engagement with Baudrillard's work on simulacra and simulation is a playful attempt to see higher education as third‐order simulacra. As an alternative lens in challenging second culture contact it offers interesting and novel insights.

This chapter explores the multiple levels of authenticity involved in son et lumière and projection mapping. Light shows are increasingly staged at historic sites, using monumental buildings as canvases. The use of light allows the buildings to communicate, giving them a performative, additional dimension, generating multiplicity, where the same architectural structure or place is encountered simultaneously in both its light and physical forms. The effect is hyperreal, transforming buildings into simulacra, versions of distorted reality, where no original exists. As the building appears to move, the mind simultaneously informs the viewer that it is static, evoking a co-created tourist experience. Light shows, arguably staged by “imagineers”, reflect the increasing move toward the spectacle essential for creative and experience economies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how automation in the ever-changing technological landscape is increasing integrated into, and has become a significant presence in, our personal lives.

Through post qualitative inquiry, the authors provide a contemplation of automation and its effect on creativity, as a contemporary expression of dis/locations, the simulacrum, performative work and a toxic digital presence in socio-cultural-technical spaces.

The authors discuss how we behave, contribute, explore, interact and communicate within and across automated digital platforms, has salience for understanding and questioning the ways that dominant discourses in the contemporary construction and enactment of subjectivity, creativity and agency are being modulated by the machine.

This paper offers a nuanced consideration of creativity, by considering the way creativity is being performed and situated within the effects of automation and its role in dis/locations, performative work and its potential as a the simulacrum in socio-cultural-technical spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers perceive, experience and engage with the art of filmmaking and the industrial film production process that the film studios present to them during their guided film studio tours.

Drawing on the author’s own film tourist experiences, observations and participatory interactions with fellow visitors at a major Hollywood film studio, this paper takes an autoethnographic “I’m-the-camera”-perspective and a hermeneutic data analysis approach.

The findings reveal that visitors experience the “authentic” representation of the working studio’s industrial film production process as an opportunity and “invitation to join” a broader filmmaker community and to share their own amateur filmmaking experiences with fellow visitors and professionals – just to discover eventually that the perceived community is actually the real “simulacrum”.

Although using an autoethnographic approach means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the gain in depth of insights allows for a deeper understanding of the actual visitor experience.

The findings encourage film studio executives, managers and talent agents to reconsider current practices and motivations in delivering film studio tours and to explore avenues for harnessing their strategic potential.

Contrary to previous studies that have conceptualised film studio tours as simulacra that deny consumers a genuine access to the backstage, the findings of this study suggest that the real simulacrum is actually the film tourists’ “experienced feeling” of having joined and being part of a filmmaker community, which raises question regarding the study of virtual communities.

In this article, research as “mass media” (Luhmann) is appraised. “Videocy” or videoed research results are examined. A form of video research with its roots in action research, Delphi methodology and visual anthropology is reported on. The simulacra it produces, wherein feedback loops are used to produce an effect similar to the fractali‐zations of complexity, achieves a powerful reality‐effect. But is it a “responsible” form of (research) practice?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate accounting as first visible-sign statement form, and also as the first writing, and analyse its systematic differences, syntactic and semantic, from subsequent speech-following (glottographic) writing forms. The authors consider how accounting as non-glottographic (and so “unspeakable”) writing form renders “glottography” a “subsystem of writing” (Hyman, 2006), while initiating a mode of veridiction which always and only names and counts, silently and synoptically. The authors also consider the translation of this statement form into the graphs, charts, equations, etc., which are central to the making of modern scientific truth claims, and to remaking the boundaries of “languaging” and translatability.

As a historical–theoretical study, this draws on work reconceptualising writing vs speech (e.g. Harris, 1986; 2000), the statement vs the word (e.g. Foucault, 1972/2002) and the parameters of translation (e.g. Littau, 2016) to re-think the conceptual significance of accounting as constitutive of our “literate modes” of thinking, acting and “languaging in general”.

Specific reflections are offered on how the accounting statement, as mathematically regularised naming of what “ought” to be counted, is then evaluated against what is counted, thus generating a first discourse of the norm and a first accounting-based apparatus for governing the state. The authors analyse how the non-glottographic statement is constructed and read not as linear flow of signs but as simulacrum; and on how the accounting statement poses both the practical issue of how to translate non-linear flow statements, and the conceptual problem of how to think this statement form’s general translatability, given its irreducibility to the linear narrative statement form.

The paper pioneers in approaching accounting as statement form in a way that analyses the differences that flow from its non-glottographic status.

The purpose of this paper is aimed to examine natives' Fervid Attachment to religious rites, as a part of cultural heritage, in its extrinsic (sense of belonging, rituality) and intrinsic (intimate bond, emotionality) characteristics, by shedding light on how leveraging on these characteristics could be emphasized to promote sustainable local development.

Based on the principles of an ethnographic research approach based on observational methods, this paper analyzes the rites of Holy Week in Taranto, a city located in the Southern Italy, by capturing individuals' behavior according the concept of Fervid Attachment.

Results show that tourism destinations preserving their traditions and religious rites as part of their cultural heritage can satisfy tourists' spirituality needs and, by promoting the interaction with the local population (natives) in terms of relationship between them and tourists, supporting local communities' development. Moreover their Fervid Attachment in terms of sense of belonging, rituality, intimate bond and emotionality could be empathized to promote sustainable local development.

Our results provide suggestions on how local policymakers and tourism marketers could leverage natives' attachment to religious rites to boost religious tourism.

This paper shows from a new perspective based on the concept of natives' Fervid Attachment how local people are relevant in promoting a tourism destination.