Time as culture: exploring its influence in volunteer tourism

ABSTRACT

Volunteer tourism engages the volunteer in a cultural exchange that is personal and often influential in their life experience. This paper explores one aspect of this exchange, the idea of time in travel, and finds that the volunteer tourist experience is particularly influenced by cultural time differences. When volunteer tourists travel and return home, the emotions and behaviours which emerge in their narratives of experience are usually framed by a range of reference points. One of these is the notion of time. ‘Time' appears to play a role in travel across cultures and continues to affect tourists when they return home. This idea is explored here through the experiences of 12 volunteer tourists. Although all of their experiences, both in-country and on re-entry, were very unique, each volunteer tourist spoke directly or indirectly about adjustment to cultural time differences and this was the key factor in their ability to adapt in both settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• pace of life
• re-entry
• time
• volunteer tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Simone Grabowski-Faulkner, PhD, is research associate with the UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research interests and current research areas include ecotourism, sustainable tourism, volunteer tourism, volunteerism, tourist behaviour and accessible tourism, leisure and sport. She has been a research assistant and tutor in the School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism, UTS, in these areas since 2005.

Stephen Wearing is associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and a long-standing Visiting Fellow at Wageningen University's World Leisure International Centre of Excellence (WICE) in the Netherlands. He is recognized by industry and government for his contributions to Parks and Leisure, Volunteer Tourism and Ecotourism, and for his teaching both nationally and internationally. He has authored 10 books in the field of leisure and tourism, over 100 refereed papers, and a wide range of industry-based articles.

Jennie Small is a senior lecturer in the UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney. Her specific teaching and research interest is tourist behaviour from a Critical Tourism approach, focusing on equity and social justice issues in tourism. She is recognized for her research contributions in the areas of mobility, embodiment, gender, disability (vision impairment), obesity, age and the life course.

Notes

1. At the time of the study, Youth Challenge Australia was a not-for-profit, secular organization operating out of Sydney, Australia, which sent youth between the ages of 18–30 to volunteer in developing countries as well as having programmes in Central Australia. The difference between the Youth Challenge model and other volunteer tourism organizations is that the approach to development is through engaging and empowering youth through collaborative development initiatives. This extends beyond youth volunteering in an international context to the involvement of local youth ensuring sustainability in the regions they work. Now called VOICE: Volunteers in Community Engagement, the organization has expanded its age range to 70.

2. Names of all participants are pseudonyms.