Female entrepreneurship plays a crucial role in fostering tourism-led development (TLD). However, TLD narratives often focus on individual women's empowerment while overlooking underlying gender ...inequalities. They also neglect broader societal changes needed. To address this, we examine the interplay between empowerment and gendered social innovation in the context of a TLD project aimed at women entrepreneurs. Using a qualitative approach, this research involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with 32 women tourism entrepreneurs from Ecuador and México; and dialogues with 7 project team members. Results shed light on the intricate connection between individual and relational empowerment and gendered social innovation. This study's original contribution is a multiangled framework of gendered social innovation as an ongoing process of social change attached to female tourism entrepreneurship, empowerment, and evolving social practices of working with and among women tourism entrepreneurs as local partners. Theoretical and practical implications for policymakers and tourism-led development practitioners are discussed.
While increasingly more economic and social exchanges are taking place in the digital environment globally, women entrepreneurs' access to, and adoption of, digital platforms cannot be assumed to ...happen naturally due to gender and social inequalities that are being replicated in the online environment. This study investigates the opportunities and challenges of entrepreneurial digital competencies for women tourism entrepreneurs (WTEs) in Latin America from a gendered perspective. A total of 33 interviews were conducted with women tourism entrepreneurs in Mexico and Ecuador. The findings reveal that women tourism entrepreneurs can and have been empowered through utilising digital technologies and digital platforms, but they face significant challenges and barriers, including the lack of digital competencies; lack of access to digital devices, infrastructure, and training; reliance on supporting staff and family members; and concerns around safety, security and work-life balance. This study contributes to existing entrepreneurship literature by identifying the social and structural inequalities that impede growth in women's tourism business. The findings also highlight how women are disadvantaged in gaining digital competencies because of the macro gender digital divide and micro-level factors. Implications for women's entrepreneurship policy development in relation to digital competencies are provided.
"Informality" as a global economic category and normative standard to measure economic activity is rooted in western cultures, implemented through legal, fiscal frameworks and development doctrines. ...This work argues that the informal/formal economic binary masks economic diversity in tourism destinations in the Global South. A prism of non-compliance to tourism legislation as a barometer for formal/informal economic activity evidence disconnection between modern regulatory frameworks and the ways in which local networks of small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) operate. Census data from four popular beaches of Ecuador are analysed with descriptive clustering statistics. The research uncovers a diverse range of economic forms of tourism enterprise: unincorporated associations, unregistered tourism establishments, and SMEs operating to varying extents outside officialdom, which reframes the paradigmatic distinction between formal and informal tourism economies. Further, this innovative research reveals tensions associated with such characterization as "alternative economies" as globalized research and political objects.
As a sociohistorical byproduct of the mutations that occur in the rural world and of a demography punctuated by a radical increase in inequalities, the process of socioeconomic or environmental exile ...towards cities rose inexorably throughout the twentieth century. Some authors, such as Manuel Castel and David Harvey, have observed the stigma of dependency through the prism of marginal urbanization. “South epistemology” considers at a symbolic level these pockets of populations whether they ar...
Le travail présenté dévoile une modalité d’accès au logement dans les villes du Sud. Le commentaire de deux photographies saisissant un paysage quotidien de l’avenue Casuarina -la principale voie ...d’accès au secteur du Monte-Sinaï- située en périphérie de Guayaquil, sert de trame aux développements. Entreprise dans la continuité d’un terrain de recherche doctorale couvrant la période de 2010 à 2017, la mise en dialogue de ces images contribue à saisir le passage de modes de normativité considérés, de prime abord, comme non juridiques, à une régulation du logement et de l’habitat empruntant aux formes juridiques modernes du droit ‘de’ ou ‘à’ la ville (la propriété foncière, le service public, la garantie de droits fondamentaux, etc.). Un éclairage original quant à la place du droit, considéré à la fois comme moyen et aléa déterminant la construction du rapport des habitants à l’espace urbain et la fondation des ‘asentamientos’, est offert.
PurposeThe aims of this paper are to share how one cohort of tourism practitioners viewed the transformative change needed within the tourism industry and to explore the implications for leadership ...in the future.Design/methodology/approachThe research design is based on a virtual whiteboard brainstorming activity incorporating both the individual and collective thinking of 20 participants in a global cohort class. Using conversational techniques to elicit cognitive knowledge and felt experience, the methodology generates shared understandings about the opportunities and challenges of implementing regenerative tourism.FindingsThe conversations reported in the findings of this paper provide important insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by tourism professionals as enablers of regenerative tourism. Findings included, first, that participants within the course demonstrated characteristics of transformational leadership including a strong moral positioning, embodied self-awareness, collaboration and collective action. Second, specific points of inertia that impede regenerative tourism are identified including embedded culture, power and organisational structures. Third, professionals are calling for practical tools, new frames of reference, and examples to help communicate regenerative tourism.Research limitations/implicationsThis is a viewpoint, not a research paper. Nonetheless, it provides a rich vein of future research in terms of disruptive pedagogy, potentially gendered interest in regenerative tourism, issues of transforming the next generation and power.Practical implicationsGovernance, organisational, destination management strategies, planning and policy frameworks, individual issues as well as contradictions within the tourism system were revealed. Transformative change in an uncertain future requires transformational leadership, characterised by moral character and behaviours that trigger empowered responses.Originality/valueThis paper shares insights from a unique global cohort class of tourism professionals wherein the challenges and opportunities for regenerative tourism are identified. The methodology is unusual in that it incorporates both individual and collective thinking through which shared understandings emerge.
La réflexion proposée prend forme à partir d’un projet de vie établi entre l’Equateur et la France. La thèse interroge les conditions de conduite du travail juridique dans l’orbite du phénomène de ...territorialisation des ‘établissements humains informels’ -asentamientos urbanos informales- de Guayaquil, ailleurs connus comme ‘slums’ ou ‘taudis’. La mise en cause de l’incidence économique, sociale, culturelle ou environnementale des usages et pratiques professionnelles du droit sur la ville en devenir, l’évocation d’une dimension éventuellement marginalisante, discriminatoire ou traumatique du travail juridique depuis la perspective des ‘usagers’ ou des ‘administrés’, paraissent troublantes au premier abord. Inscrits dans un mouvement d’itération constante entre l’observation participante et la théorie de l’agir juridique, les travaux entreprennent de poser les jalons épistémologiques et méthodologiques pour un travail de situation de l’agir juridique aux portes de la ville Sud. La lecture renouvelée de la contextualité urbaine marginale et le développement d’instruments de cartographie de la fonction sociale du juriste ‘en situation’ constituent les principaux résultats de l’investigation. Les développements coïncident, par ailleurs et d’une manière générale, avec l’investiture du gouvernement de la « Révolution citoyenne » -Revolucion ciudadana-. Ils offrent, dès lors et chemin faisant, un aperçu « vu d’en bas » sur le devenir des réformes traversant le pays aux lendemains de l’adoption de la Constitution du « Buen vivir ».
The investigation is building upon a life project established between Ecuador and France. The doctoral thesis questions social legal work’s conditions in the ambit of Guayaquil’s informal human settlements’ territorialization -elsewhere known as “slums” or “taudis”-. The mention of economic, social, cultural or environnemental’s downfalls associated to legal practices’ development in forthcoming cities, the pointing out of ongoing discriminations, marginalization and traumas caused by legal malpractices does create, at first glimpse, an awkward feeling among the legal development practitioners’ community. Through a continued iteration between participative observation, fieldworks and legal endeavor’s theory, the doctoral thesis develops epistemological and methodological backgrounds in order to better situate legal work in city peripheries of the South. Means to renew our understandings of marginal urban contexts, on the one hand, and to reevaluate the social function of legal practices, on the other, are the principal outcomes of our research work. The fieldwork coincided, otherwise, with the investiture of the “Revolucion ciudadana government”. Hence, the thesis does offer some bottom-up insights on the becomings of legal and political reforms in the aftermaths of the “Buen vivir” Ecuadorian Constitution’adoption.
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