ANT: A decade of interfering with tourism

Hotel industry expansion and sustainable development: A case study of Inle Lake, Myanmar

“…Alternative institutional arrangements (Hall, 2011) that accommodate joint decisionmaking about the allocation of resources, the mobilisation of knowledge, and the creation of rules as suggested by Song et al (2013) and Bramwell (2011) are incompatible with this culture and are historically considered as threats. In the case study, we present accounts of people who have strong views about this, essentially because they cannot address these matters: the agency to do so is effectively kept away from them through an institutionalised form of externalisation (Van der Duim, 2012). As such, this study fills in the knowledge gap identified by Song et al (2013) concerning the effects of governance and its context on the sustainability of tourism value chains.…”

“…Often it concerns public assets, whereas powerful international actors and national elites control tourism flows (Clancy, 2011;Sharpley, 2009). These actors often treat the effects of their operations as externalities (Van der Duim et al, 2012), as they lack incentives to avoid overexploitation (Beritelli, 2011). Considering these power asymmetries, it should be questioned whether effective management of "rich natural and cultural environments" for the (sole) purpose of tourism exploitation (UNWTO, 2015, p. 4) ever leads to sustainable development.…”

“…Governance thus produces externalities, i.e. the effects agents -perhaps intentionally -disregard ( Van der Duim, Ren, & Jóhannesson, 2012).…”

An ecological-phenomenological perspective on multispecies leisure and the horse-human relationship in events

“…Described by its proponents as less of a theory and more of a method or a 'toolbox', ANT focuses less on the 'why' questions of social science, and more on the 'how' -"how it [tourism in this case] is assembled, enacted, and ordered; how it holds together; and how it may fall apart" (van der Duim et al, 2013: 5). One of the basic premises of ANT is the principle of general symmetry: analytically, all actors -human and nonhuman -are supposed to be treated in the same way, and are seen as equally able to create effects (van der Duim et al, 2017). The methodological result of this approach is that no assumptions can be made in advance about who or what will act in any given circumstance (van der Duim, 2007).…”

A (Deleuzian) posthumanist paradigm for tourism research

“…The neglect by tourism researchers to posthumanism is not strictly true, for some attempts have been made. Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a milder, analytical and non-critical version of posthumanism in tourism research ( Van der Duim, Ren, & Jóhannesson, 2017 ). For instance, Picken (2010) applies ANT to the urban design planning of a hotel In Tasmania, where the hotel is a relational actor in various nets, but surely making non-humans contenders involves far more than network relations.…”