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RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Jack Carlsen & Alison Morrison
School/Work Place : Curtin University, Australia (Jack Carlsen), University of Strathclyde, UK (Alison Morrison)
Contact : j.carlsen@curtin.edu.au
Year : 2008

Lifestyle has been oft cited in the literature as the main motivation for those establishing or acquiring tourism related businesses in attractive destinations. However, the term has many different dimensions and connotations, both positive and negative, that have emerged in the tourism literature since the 1980s. Furthermore, the trend towards increased migration, reinforced
by the baby boomer generation pursuing new opportunities for enhanced quality of life has given rise to the phenomena variously referred to as 'lifestyle migration' in Europe (Vaugeois and Rollins, 2007), 'amenity migration' in North America (Moss 2006) and 'sea- change' in Australia (Stehlik 2007) that underwrites the growth of lifestyle firms in tourism and hospitality. Demographers have noted the internal migration of urban dwellers to rural areas of Australia since the 1970s and refer to this as 'population turnaround' because it has arrested the decline of rural communities that had occurred in previous decades (Burnley and Murphy 2004). Coastal and mountain locations are also popular destinations that receive this flow of migration, creating significant impacts in resident communities, land use and economic activity, both positive and negative. In light of these trends and impacts, the need to understand this phenomenon and those that pursue an ideal lifestyle through tourism and hospitality related business endeavors has never been more acute.

This understanding is premised on the assumption that lifestyle is a socially constructed phenomenon (Russell and Faulkner 2001) which, when applied to a tourism and hospitality business context, creates a degree of complexity in motivations, meanings and values that sets it apart from other business models. However, lifestyle oriented small tourism [LOST] firms have significant influence in tourism destinations through the quality of the experiences they provide, service standards, investment decisions and environmental performance so the business dimensions of lifestyle firms are also important.

There is an obvious connection between LOST firms in a destination and the promotion of a desired lifestyle to their potential customers, the lifestyle-led consumer groups. It has long been recognised in marketing that consumers do not only purchase physical products and services, they also buy concepts and associated images attached to those products and services. For example, Kamman et al (1998) has suggested that rural life could be conceptualized as meaning quietness, space, physical activities, feeling of belonging to a community, small and human scale, sparsely populated, low density building, fresh air, healthy and peaceful. Kamman et al (1998) suggest that these lifestyle concepts and associated products can be 'reverse network engineered' in certain geographical locations to provide a blue print for policy and planning and encourage and stimulate certain forms of activities while excluding others that conflict with the lifestyle concept.

Walmsley (2003) contends that there will be winners and losers in the emergent lifestyle-led consumption oriented society, citing places such as Denmark, on the south coast of Western Australia as having an image that "can accommodate a lifestyle oriented tourism industry" (2003:68). In this way, tourism is critical to the changing nature of rural locales that are the target of lifestyle consumers as well as those small tourism firms that seek to exploit the locational and lifestyle benefits that are vested in these places. Potentially all 'post-rural' places could offer the 'otherness' that urbanized Australians are increasingly demanding and thereby capitalize on the centrality of lifestyle in the consumer society, increasing mobility and prosperity of lifestyle oriented groups, such as retired baby boomers and advances in technology for place promotion. The need to generate an income during the transition from farming to tourism, or from salaried to selfemployment or retirement is also a significant driver of change in rural areas. Thus, opportunity and necessity is evident in many rural areas, including the Ferguson Valley in Western Australia that forms the case study in this paper. Descriptions of the valley in the words of the LOST firms designed to appeal to lifestyle oriented consumers provide insights into the multiple dimensions of lifestyle firms as depicted in a systemic model of LOST firms proposed in this paper.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
294 Think Tank X Sustainable Destination Management and the Marketing-P... file 6380 Oct 13, 2013

A traditional and widely held view is that a sustainable approach to destination planning and management ideally requires that marketing and product development are undertaken in an integrated manner. However, if we take just two activities...

Author: Tazim Jamal & Dianne Dredge 

Year: 2010 

293 Think Tank XIV The Roles of the Public, Private and Voluntary Sector ... file 6351 Jun 26, 2014

Social tourism refers to initiatives that aim to include groups into tourism that would otherwise be excluded from it. The earliest definition of social tourism by Hunzicker (1951) described social tourism as ‘‘the relationships and phenomen...

Author: Lynn Minnaert 

Year: 2014 

292 Think Tank VIII Responding to Climate Change in Australian Resort Hote... file 6336 Oct 13, 2013

Extensive infrastructure and client expectations of luxury will mean that their carbon footprint and water usage is likely to exceed significantly that of average urban households. Often located in coastal or riverine settings, they are vuln...

Author: Charles Arcodia & Chantal Dickson 

Year: 2008 

291 Think Tank XIII Measuring Tourism: Developing a Regional Level Framewo... file 6310 Nov 06, 2013

In the field of tourism impacts research it is often assumed that certain characteristics of tourism are related to the nature and extent of tourism impacts on the destination’s community well-being. However, a standard set of measures for t...

Author: Elena Konovalov, Laurie Murphy & Gianna Moscardo 

Year: 2013 

290 Think Tank IX The elusiveness of sustainability in tourism: The cult... file 6281 Oct 13, 2013

Sustainable tourism is perhaps the most prominent feature of contemporary tourism discourse. However, despite its prominence for several decades, achieving sustainability remains as elusive as ever. This paper explores the concept of the cu...

Author: Freya Higgins-Desbiolles 

Year: 2009 

289 Think Tank V Using Theories of Stigma Management and Impression Man... file 6258 Oct 13, 2013

Researchers have noted that impression management is key to tourism crisis management planning and recovery (Ritchie et al., 2003:201); indeed, some have suggested that “crisis management is as much about dealing with human perceptions about...

Author: Bonalyn Nelson 

Year: 2005 

288 Think Tank X Innovation of and in Informal Actor Network file 6256 Oct 13, 2013

How the informal sectors create and share innovation in gaining competition is very important in tourism development. Commonly, informal sectors are embedded in their routines and lack of innovation capacities. Based on the case of pedicab ...

Author: Maya Damayanti 

Year: 2010 

287 Think Tank XV A vacation from capitalism; what happens when the ‘mas... file 6244 Jul 27, 2015

Philosophical and theoretical debates in tourism must be situated not just within economic and cultural contexts, but also political and social ones (Ataljevic, Pritchard & Morgan, 2007). Tourism is more than an ‘industry,’ Freya Higgins...

Author: Amy Savener 

Year: 2015 

286 Think Tank XVII From Sustainability to Resilience: Understanding Diffe... file 6168 Aug 17, 2017

The tourism literature on the relationship between resilience and sustainability is still in its infancy. Some argue that resilience planning has emerged as an alternative to sustainable development to provide new perspectives on socio-ecolo...

Author: Girish Prayag & Caroline Orchiston & Mesbahuddin Chowdhury 

Year: 2017 

285 Think Tank XII Creating Tourism Transport Flow Maps with GIS: A Pract... file 6113 Nov 06, 2013

This paper explores various options to visualize tourism transport flows with spatial analysis tools and show them on maps. To facilitate implementation of these options, procedures for data preparation and map creation are explained through...

Author: Martin Landré & Paul Peeters 

Year: 2012 

284 Think Tank VII Volunteer Tourism: Sustainable Innovation in Tourism, ... file 6074 Oct 13, 2013

This is a study of the relationships between two volunteer tourism host communities and the volunteer tourists who visit them. One is a declining rural community located in the Appalachian mountains of the United States. The other is in a ra...

Author: Nancy McGehee 

Year: 2007 

283 Think Tank XIII Striving for Environmental Sustainability through Soci... file 6024 Nov 06, 2013

The question how native societies cope with the increasing pressure of global values, such as sustainability, westernization and democratic institutions has been asked in the last decades (Smith, 1989; Honey, 1999; Nash, 2001; Honey, 2008). ...

Author: Peter Varga 

Year: 2013 

282 Think Tank XII Opportunities and Obstacles for Sustainable Tourism Mo... file 5922 Nov 06, 2013

Cross border destination management is characterized by some extra challenges: national, district or county interests, different administrative structures, a high impact of politics and policies, inequality of tourism infrastructures, power ...

Author: Tatjana Thimm 

Year: 2012 

281 Think Tank V Managing Risk and Crisis for Sustainable Tourism: Rese... file 5908 Dec 14, 2013

Many tourism professionals are afraid to speak about terms such as tourism security and tourism safety. There is a common feeling among tourism and travel professionals that these terms will frighten customers and that the less said the bett...

Author: Peter E. Tarlow 

Year: 2005 

OPA: Keynote Speech 

280 Think Tank XI Visualising Sustainability: Reflections on Applied Stu... file 5864 Oct 14, 2013

As Sontag (1979) stated, we live in an image-based world within which we are continuously bombarded with visuals in countless formats and guises. However, despite such image saturation, academic engagement whether through teaching or resear...

Author: Caroline Scarles 

Year: 2011 

279 Think Tank IX Tourism Relationship Model and Intermediary for Sustai... file 5856 Oct 13, 2013

This paper proposes a simple model that depicts the relationship between community and extra-community stakeholders that will enable the effective development of sustainable tourism. “Sustainable tourism” in this paper is defined as tourism ...

Author: Asami Shikida, Mami Yoda, Akiko Kino & Masayuki Morishige 

Year: 2009 

278 Think Tank IX Valuing Open Innovation Environments in Tourism Educat... file 5822 Oct 13, 2013

The world has changed tremendously since the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission for Environment and Development (1987), which elevated the concept of sustainable development from grassroots initiatives to the forefront...

Author: Janne Liburd & Anne-Mette Hjalager 

Year: 2009 

277 Think Tank VI Corporate Social Responsibility and Marine Tourism Org... file 5821 Oct 13, 2013

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an important issue for some governments but the tourism industry appears to be slow in adopting CSR strategies. By focusing on CSR, we argue that the implementation of CSR audits could help t...

Author: Ya-Ting Huang, David Botterill & Eleri Jones 

Year: 2006 

276 Think Tank XIV Can "Slow Travel" Contribute to Sustainable Tourism? file 5791 Jun 27, 2014

Slow travel as a research field has increased in popularity in the last decade. The concept started to gain attention through online communities, and tourism researchers have become interested in the possible benefits that slow travel may ha...

Author: Tina Roenhovde Tiller 

Year: 2014 

275 Think Tank XII Causality Between Inbound Tourism and Economic Growth:... file 5790 Nov 06, 2013

This paper examines the existing studies of the relationship between inbound tourism and economic growth. After a brief discussion of general economic growth theory and the reasons why a positive causal relationship may exist between export ...

Author: Mondher Sahli & Simon Carey 

Year: 2012 

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