Investigating sustainable tourism heterogeneity: competing orders of worth among stakeholders of a Nordic destination

Abstract

This paper contributes to increased knowledge of sustainable tourism heterogeneity by identifying how different underlying mindsets characterise negotiations among community stakeholders in a popular Nordic destination. Based on convention theory (orders of worth), this paper theorises how sustainable tourism is negotiated in-between tourism regimes that are shaped by order structures of society. While much research argues for stakeholder heterogeneity by presupposing the influence of a dominant tourism-centric logic, our ethnographic inspired study reveals the co-presence of an “activist” regime that brings about social change among “welfare” and “professional market” regimes. Assessing the disputes among stakeholders we reveal six orders of worth that constitute opposing justifications of sustainable tourism and thus the underlying mindsets of heterogeneity. We discover that stakeholders from various local cultures legitimise their positions quite arbitrarily across the various regimes to question previous theoretical accounts of the community-based perspective. We theorise the challenge of “boundary worth”, i.e. when a tourism initiative receives its identity on behalf of different orders of worth that blurs expectation and intentions. Finally, we argue that activist involvement in a destination can result in “composite compromises” that ease heterogeneity by balancing conflicting regimes without converging to either of the respective logics.

Keywords:

• Sustainable development
• sustainable tourism heterogeneity
• order of worth
• community-based approach
• stakeholder
• tourism mindset

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Frank Lindberg is a Professor of Marketing at Nord University Business School, Norway. Email: [email protected]. He earned his PhD in 2001 at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Since then he has worked as Associate Professor at University of Nordland and University of Gothenburg, and Vice Dean and Dean at Bodø Graduate School of Business. Lindberg has been Visiting Scholar at Copenhagen Business School, University of California, Berkeley, USA and at University of Southern Denmark. His research covers areas such as the dynamics of tourism markets and tensions and challenges of consumption.

James Fitchett is a Professor of Marketing and Consumer Research at University of Leicester, UK. Email: [email protected]. His research has been published in Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Theory, Journal of Macromarketing, European Advances in Consumer Research, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Business Ethics: A European Review, European Journal of Marketing and British Journal of Management.

Diane M. Martin is a Professor of Marketing in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University. Email [email protected]. Her research focuses on consumer culture, market development, gender and sustainability. She is a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum and the author of Sustainable Marketing. She has published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Consumption, Markets & Culture, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Macromarketing, Qualitative Marketing Research, the Journal of Applied Communication Research and Communication Research Reports.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through the project Northern Insights: Service Innovation and Tourist Experiences in the High North (project no. 195306).