The conference aims to explore different concepts of value that emerge in the social field of tourism. At a general level, we can distinguish here between value as conceptualized by different academic disciplines and value as lived, expressed, and embodied by various actors within tourism as practice and social field. Tourism is often considered a profit generating industry where the utility value paid by tourists is larger than the exchange value of products (in classical terms, the cost of production using labor, capital and land). It is an important element of the conference to discuss conceptions of value in tourism that transcend a strictly economic definition. In this sense we are interested, on the one hand, in the differentiated emotional, moral and ethical cultures by means of which tourists experience attractions and assign value. On the other hand, we wish to explore how various local, regional, national, international, and transnational actors and instances capture, conceptualize and assemble economic, political, cultural, spatial value associated with touristic places.

Regimes of Value in Tourism: Concepts, Politics and Practices. 2nd Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network Conference, Sion, Switzerland | 2 - 4 July 2012

The conference aims to explore different concepts of value that emerge in the social field of tourism. At a general level, we can distinguish here between value as conceptualized by different academic disciplines and value as lived, expressed, and embodied by various actors within tourism as practice and social field. Tourism is often considered a profit generating industry where the utility value paid by tourists is larger than the exchange value of products (in classical terms, the cost of production using labor, capital and land). Yet, a large number of tourism-related practices, services and exchanges escape any strict definition of commodities—such as forms of free hospitality, sites located in the public domain, or intangible tourist values such as the “atmosphere” of a city, the “beauty” of a landscape or artwork, the “purity” of a natural or spiritual site, the “friendliness” of a local population, etc. It is an important element of the conference to discuss conceptions of value in tourism that transcend a strictly economic definition. In this sense we are interested, on the one hand, in the differentiated emotional, moral and ethical cultures by means of which tourists experience attractions and assign value. On the other hand, we wish to explore how various local, regional, national, international, and transnational actors and instances capture, conceptualize and assemble economic, political, cultural, spatial value associated with touristic places. 



Debating Value in Tourism


Value is a highly controversial concept. Most debates about value and regimes of value are transpired by political projects, aims and ideologies. For some value represents a practical tool to account for the wealth an object or a practice is able to generate or maintain. For others it is a moral instrument to govern and legitimize the justice of social action and political order in society. For others still, it is an essential quality of Self inherited from various types of relatives, spirits or ancestors. Tourism is one of the social fields in which these different meanings of, and ideological claims to, value become visible and often clash. Through the public display of social life, sites and cultural artifacts, value is mobilized here as a tangible resource, as an ethical claim and as a cultural device governing tourism production. It is simultaneously exchange value for touristic producers, utility value for tourism consumers, magical value for tourists and social and symbolic value for the participating host societies. Regimes of value in tourism are often either relativistic (promoting forms of belonging, i.e. nationalism, cosmopolitanism, ethnicism) or mercantile (heritage economics, tourism economics, heritage marketing). In all cases, their specific configuration and underlying moral order, and their ability to impose themselves as dominant model to think about places reshape entire territories and the life worlds of their inhabitants. For instance, the historical invention of the seaside, mountains, the picturesque, and monuments as videnda has led to the emancipation of new spatial values in and of destinations. Economically, by financing infrastructures for mass tourism, developing tourism clusters and implicating World Bank sponsored tourism development programmes, tourism generated a new form of monetary valorization of land and sites that have not previously had any considerable “exchange value”. Tourism often induced here a land revolution transforming formerly marginalized spaces such as seashores, rural centers, remnants of ancient architecture and mountains into new economic resource bases, by that means provoking a subversion of previous symbolic meanings and spatial structures. Politically, it created “growth coalitions” in tourist destinations where economic and political values of tourism were reconsidered in terms of an urban development logic of tourist resorts, and where tourist resources became regulated through law and/or less formal power relationships. Culturally, it led to the reorganization of societies in terms of emerging tourism cultures, where tourism related heritage displays and performances began to constitute an economic and moral value in itself, allowing people in destinations to generate livelihoods and participate in social life. Ethically, the production and display of such heritage allowed political stakeholders to emancipate different claims to identity – e.g. nationalist, ethnic, cosmopolite – as guiding ethical principle to govern a person’s, community’s or humanity’s being in the world and thus to operate a civilizing control of violence between people, societies and cultures. The universalizing ethics of world heritage promoted and institutionalized by international organizations such as UNESCO represents here a specific case. A particularly important current issue brought about by cultural policy stakeholders, heritage site managers and economists concerns means by which to account for the value and regimes of value in tourism, especially with regard to intangible heritage, privately owned properties in public places and sites that belong to the commons. 



Topics and Themes

• How is value in tourism and travel conceptualized, normalized and measured, according to different disciplines and social actors (tourism and heritage planners, cultural policy makers, tourists, local populations, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, geographers) ?
• What values are mobilized and experienced by tourists? To which emotional cultures and morals do they pertain? What are the values inherent in concepts like nature, god, world heritage, or humanity? How have they been historically formed? What kinds of society do they reflect? What political projects and which humanities do they articulate ?
• How is value produced in tourism and for tourists? How is this production of value governed? Who owns such value? Who derives an economic or symbolic remuneration of it? How are values and their remuneration regulated? What systems of value accountancy and redistribution are in place? How are tensions, contradictions and controversies over values constructed and negotiated when touristic referents are invoked ?
• Why, and how (through which processes), are such regimes of value maintained? What kind of social order and forms of participation do they reflect and help to reproduce in the construction of tourism? How do different actors construct and cope with contradictions between value regimes? And how do they function as devices for social inclusion and exclusion? What ethical claims do they imply, and how do they translate these in social life ?

Organisation

The conference takes place from 2 to 4 July 2012 in Sion, Switzerland (a two hour ride from Geneva airport). It is jointly organised by the Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network (TOCOCU) and the Department of Tourism Studies of the University Institute Kurt Bösch (IUKB). IUKB’s mission focuses on inter- and transdisciplinary approaches in teaching and research. The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Tourism (CRIT) is one of the programs, bringing together anthropological, sociological, geographical, politological and economic approaches of tourism. TOCOCU was created in 2009 as a means to bring together social scientists interested in research on tourism. The first conference of the network, “Tourism and Seductions of Difference,” organised in 2009 at New University of Lisbon in Portugal attracted more than 200 international scholars and represented a major milestone in the recent history of critical tourism research. This second biannual event again aims to generate interdisciplinary debate about a specific topic. As in previous TOCOCU events, the maxim of the conference is to be accessible and to create spaces of exchange between academics. All abstracts will be assessed by the scientific committee. 



Call for Papers and Abstract Submission (deadline 15 March 2012)


The conference wishes to bring together academics from all social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, geograpgy, economics, political sciences, etc.), tourism and heritage policy, and the emerging fields of heritage and environmental economics.

The Call for Papers is open untill 15 March 2012.

• All abstracts will be reviewed individually by the members of the academic board (based on a point system). Based on this review, a short list of accepted abstracts will be created and communicated in early-mid April 2012.
• If presentation slots become available at a later stage, late abstracts may be accepted.
• The conference will initially accept a maximun of 100 papers. 



To submit an abstract, please use the following link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHlCekt2RC1Sb0tjN19mMTJKSVk1LVE6MQ

Opportunity to Organise Thematic Panels


We encourage scholars to organise thematic panels focusing on any aspect of the conference theme. We would expect panel organisers to prepare and constitute these panels well before the deadline for abstract submissions. Panel organisers must make sure that all panel participants will submit individual abstracts through the abstract submission system of the conference. All abstracts, be they part of pre-arranged panels or not, will be reviewed anonymously at the same time by the academic board of the conference. If some or all abstracts of pre-arranged panels are not accepted, panel organisers will be asked to reconfigure their panels by reducing their size or by including papers that were submitted through the general Call for Papers. To constitute a panel that fits in the organisation time frame of the conference, we advise panel organisers to group sets of three papers (corresponding to 90 minutes in the conference), with a maximum of 12 papers (corresponding to 4 90-minute sessions) for each panel. Please drop us a line if you wish to organise a panel. 


Convenors


• Dr. Mathis Stock, Professor of Tourism Geography CRIT, University Institute Kurt Bösch, Switzerland 

• Dr. David Picard, Senior Research Fellow, CRIA, New University of Lisbon, Portugal 



Scientific Committee 


• Simone Abram, CTCC/Leeds Met, Leeds, UK 

• Olivier Crevoisier, Univ. Neuchâtel, Switzerland 

• Christophe Clivaz, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland 

• Saskia Cousin, IIAC-LAIOIS/EHESS, Paris, France

• Michael di Giovine, Anthrop/Univ Chicago, Chicago, USA

• Pamila Gupta, New York New School, NYC, USA

• Naomi Leite, Anthrop/Univ Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

• Kenneth Little, Anthrop/York Univ, Toronto, Canada 

• Stéphane Nahrath, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland

• David Picard, CRIA-UNL/FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal 

• Mike Robinson, Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK

• Noel Salazar, CuMoRe/Leuven Univ, Leuven, Belgium

• Valerio Simoni, Anthrop/Lisbon University Institute, Portugal

• Lina Tegtmeyer, America Stud/Free Univ, Berlin, Germany

• Mathis Stock, CRIT, IUKB, Sion, Switzerland 

• Laurent Tissot, Univ. Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Further information

• tourismcontactculture@gmail.com
• www.tourismcontactculture.org.uk
• www.iukb.ch/index.php?id=11