A reply to the response by Mark Griffiths to the JOST Special Issue on Volunteer Tourism

This is a brief reply to the Opinion Piece by Mark Griffiths reflecting on the construction of volunteers in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism's recent Special Issue on Volunteer Tourism, Volume 22 (6). It is indeed through debate that we advance our understanding not only of what academics do, but also their reasoning and the implications of their work. The reflections in the Opinion Piece were helpful to contextualise much of the volunteer tourism research, and for the authors of this reply to consider their positionality as researchers. We therefore take this opportunity to respond to some of the critique we feel is either directed to our paper, or implicitly relevant (Smith & Font, 2014).

We agree with Griffith's Opinion Piece that it is important to understand how academics position volunteers in the discourses of research outputs. Language is constitutive and orients us as academics to see things in a certain way by representing sustainability problems as symbolic action (Bourdieu, 2012; Burke, 1966). Griffith's critique is that an overemphasis on articles focusing on the volunteering organisations, and not on the volunteers themselves or the supposed beneficiaries of the act of volunteering, negates agency. Messages do not just transmit information, but they also reflect how its producer thinks the receiver will perceive them, and by extension what the message producer believes is important to the receiver (Goffman, 1974). This was true in producing the article by Smith and Font (2014) that was critiqued – the authors deliberately attempted to engage industry in an experiment to test their willingness and ability to identify, recognise and address irresponsible marketing practices in relation to volunteer tourism.

The Opinion Piece suggests that the articles in the special issue of JOST ignore the agency of volunteers themselves. The position of the supposed beneficiaries of volunteering, and host community by extension, is not clear in much of the research done. We believe this is symptomatic of the conspicuous limited reference to beneficiaries in the monitoring and evaluation of development projects more generally (Diallo & Thuillier, 2005). To the marketers of the volunteer tourism product, the supposed beneficiary is part of the emotive appeal to purchase the product, but the functional appeal of such product is the “customer experience”. That was certainly the approach taken by Smith and Font (2014) in choosing to analyse sustainability communications.

This is because that article was framed in the understanding that we live in a commodified society where the dominant social paradigm is that of consumerism. That frame accepted that volunteer tourism is a market transaction – the volunteer is a client, with consumer needs and expectations of how a suite of products may satisfy such needs. Attempting to solve the current societal challenges through the interface of sustainable production and consumption is central to the work of the United Nations Environment Programme, and other agencies globally, and fits within the concept of ecological modernisation that assumes that the marketplace is the mechanism through which society can self-regulate itself out of the current unsustainable mess we are in (Christoff, 1996). We realise this could be problematised, and we are happy to see others do it. Alexander (2010) believes that approaching sustainability through the discourse of market economics is damaging because it aims to distract and distort audiences which is at the root of this dominant social paradigm (Kilbourne, 2004).

Mark Griffiths expresses hope that the articles published in the special issue “make for productive dialogue with those who can influence change in volunteer tourism”, and yet this in itself deletes agency in whose responsibility it is to promote social change. McGehee (2014) introduced the special issue by speaking of the change we might seek to build, as academics. As academics we saw this as an opportunity to contribute to affect change in the terms of achieving impact, understood as a positive change for society. The intent of our research was always pragmatic and realistic.

Our paper does not make any explicit reference to volunteers as passive subjects of capitalism, but it does implicitly assume that the location of power is with the consumer. This is not only because today's travellers’ “search and purchase” behaviour is largely conditioned by the online market place and consumer usability, but also because the press coverage of our article ranged from the National Geographic to the Telegraph and the Guardian, to many online platforms in volunteering. This was central to our experiment of changing behaviour of the volunteer tour operators, not only to highlight where their own web content (and consequently operations) could be more responsible, but also through the power of the media read by the potential consumers. The company with the highest scores told us informally that they received more website hits on the weekend of our press release than during the rest of the previous year. The worst performing company threatened us with legal action if their name was disclosed. The double-edged sword of consumerism is that consumers rule: by researching the volunteer operators, we only delete the agency of volunteers when we believe our role as academics is to publish, not to generate impact from what is researched.

As academics we have reflected for years on the poor practices of industry, but without often understanding why these are the way they are. Our critique of the sector means that academics have little impact on actual practices, as Mark Griffiths suggests of the patronising and racist marketing identified in Smith and Font (2014). That article reported on the baseline data of eight volunteer operators’ communication on issues considered ethically important by the International Ecotourism Society's guidelines. We found poor performance, and correlated this to the pricing structures of the companies, reporting essentially that “the more expensive, the less responsible” the operator was. We deliberately used the journal article to provide robust evidence, in order to then engage with the eight companies, as reported in the conclusions, so they were aware of their shortcomings and given an opportunity to reflect, learn and improve their communications. In Smith and Font (2015) we report the outcomes of the process after two years, and in doing so consider whether the exercise and analysis could influence market improvement.

The responses were mixed. Some organisations with quality product are better signalling responsibility, while others are pulling back from over-positioning and communicating with less emotive hyperbole and more realistically where product is less responsible volunteer-related and more holiday-oriented, and in so doing improving their responsibility; and some were surprised at their poor performance but had the data to provide evidence for their claims, and the control over their websites to adjust and improve the content. Smith and Font (2015) provide extensive industry intelligence and an unusually high level of industry detail for an academic study to explain why these companies may have repositioned their management and communication practices to respond to the agency of volunteers.

Overall, we noted a shift to higher responsibility through improvements by all organisations except one; most criteria aggregated across organisations were more highly scored; and responsibility in communications increased 50% on an average page basis. Combined with a static average price per day, a better “responsible value” was being offered in the market on average. We assume these companies have seen some benefits from responsible marketing signalling, which could suggest that responsibility is moving to become a quality signal in the market, to appeal to volunteer agency. We found that responsibility communication can improve with external feedback, a concerted effort and media dissemination of analysis and market improvements followed, but also that website redesigns common in the sample are largely for online usability, customer journey and commercial purposes, arguably geared to volunteer agency and more marketing-oriented approach as well as a maturing product. We managed to achieve and measure impact from our research.

This short reply therefore responds to the critique that research on volunteer operators deletes agency of the volunteers, and adds to this debate by considering the agency of academics in relation to the need for impactful research. May we have further opportunities to debate on the role of academia in transforming society take responsibility towards a more sustainable path.