In this article, we demonstrate how Actor-Network Theory has been translated into tourism research. The article presents and discusses three concepts integral to the Actor-Network Theory approach: ordering, materiality, and multiplicity. We first briefly introduce Actor-Network Theory and draw attention to current Actor-Network Theory studies in tourism with a focus on how the approach is sensitive toward heterogeneous orderings. The following section discusses how more recent Actor-Network Theory approaches emphasize multiplicity and thus multiple versions of every ordering attempt. This leads us toward ontological politics, which have bearings on how we approach and understand research methods and how we perform tourism research. In conclusion, we argue that Actor-Network Theory enables a radical new way of describing tourism by critically investigating its ontological conditions.
This chapter explores tourism through the application of the actor-network theory. This approach introduced a new methodology with which to research and describe tourism entities through a symmetric levelling of the social and material, human and non-human, natural and cultural, hence including matters typically excluded from the social or cultural field of research.
Greenland continues to undergo decolonization, the ultimate political ambition being a 'self-sustaining economy' and political independence from Denmark. Drawing on a recent survey in combination with ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the connection between political independence and entrepreneurial activities in Greenland. While entrepreneurs are increasingly expected to play a central role in fostering economic change, we are curious about what motivates them, and especially whether their motivations are related to the struggle for national independence. While entrepreneurship generally seems primarily motivated by a desire for personal autonomy, entrepreneurship in the context of an Indigenous island community seems driven by certain communal values, such as supporting the local community, cultural pride, family, and place. Our research supports the notion that entrepreneurship is motivated by non-pecuniary values, and we find entrepreneurship to result from a mesh of intertwined motivations. While we were unable to identify a direct link between the ambition for national autonomy and entrepreneurship, the paper contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurship as an instrument for decolonization drawing on a range of empirical cases and a multidisciplinary approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.