Conspicuous non-consumption in tourism: Non-innovation or the innovation of nothing?

Abstract

Referring to current phenomena and consumer behaviour in tourism, this article develops the concept of conspicuous non-consumption. It addresses the deliberate avoidance of (over)spending during holidays and states that this behaviour may be just as conspicuous and provide social signals that are just as strong as those connected to the consumption of expensive luxury goods. The conceptual development is based on a combination of the two dichotomies of ‘consumption versus non-consumption’ and ‘conspicuous versus inconspicuous’, resulting in four conceptually distinctive categories of behaviour: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous non-consumption, inconspicuous non-consumption and conspicuous non-consumption. The latter, conspicuous non-consumption, is of special interest in this article, exemplified through personal vignettes. Explorative readings of travel blogs lead to the identification of five themes that characterize conspicuous non-consumption in tourism: ‘identity building’, ‘recycling, upcycling and repurposing’, ‘spiritualizing’, ‘retreating and detoxing’ and ‘slowing down’. Usually, tourism innovation policies are characterized by a ritual growth compulsion, and do not celebrate non-consumption, which is found to be synonymous with non-innovation. This is a paradox for the timely modernizing of tourist services and destinations. Increasingly, there is a need to reorient innovation and to give consideration to how the innovation of ‘nothing’ can also undergo a distinctive progression and even contribute positively to tourism economies. This article highlights the entry points for innovation at the tourism business and destination levels.

Application of Knowledge Map Information Technology in Regional Tourism Innovation and Development

“…It is an important index to measure the development trend of the discipline and is of great significance to analyze the development trend and future trend of the research field. Through the annual statistics of the selected literature [5], literature [8], literature [9], and literature [10], it can be seen that there are some differences in the time evolution of the number of papers on tourism economic benefits at home and abroad, but on the whole, they all show the development trend of "first stable, then increasing, and then natural decline". Three experiments were carried out, respectively, and the experimental results are shown in Figures 3, 4, and 5.…”

“…Knowledge map reasoning plays a great role in discovering wrong information and mining hidden information. However, due to the increasing amount of KG information and the increasing relationship between entities, the traditional knowledge map reasoning method cannot meet the needs of large-scale KG completion [9,10]. In the practice of China's urban tourism management, in addition to some conventional management problems, there are also some special problems for this emerging tourism form.…”

Who Has the Right to the Coworking Space? Reframing Platformed Workspaces as Elite Territory in the Geomedia City

“…Such workplace geographies help establish CWS as high-performance workplaces for aspiring, hard-working individuals, as does the semiotic landscape of many CWS. As also pointed out by Sørensen and Hjalager (2020), digital media play a significant role in "the amplification of visibility and conspicuousness" (p. 228). Thus, to speak with Jansson (2019), CWS eliteness derived from consumption relies essentially on the representational affordances of (geo)media.…”

“…While not interchangeable, both concepts have been used to refer the consumption of goods and services that may be affordable but nonetheless are valorized within a smaller, exclusive community (Currid-Halkett et al, 2019). Importantly, conspicuous non-consumption does not necessarily imply that no consumption takes place; oftentimes, rather, consumer attention is simply shifted from one category of consumer goods or services (e.g., newly produced clothes) to another (e.g., secondhand garments) (Sørensen & Hjalager, 2020). As also demonstrated by Pierre Bourdieu (1984Bourdieu ( , 1991 cultural goods, and knowledge about such goods, play a significant role in the formation of class identity.…”

Antecedents of Conspicuous Consumption, Status Aspiration, and Its Consequences: An Empirical Study on Migrant Blue-Collar Workers in GCC

“…1) Consumptions in public context through luxury products and services to impress the reference group. Researchers observed this as ostentation and signaling, and it influences status consumption (Shukla, 2010;Amaldoss & Jain, 2005;Bagwell & Bernheim, 1996;Sørensen & Hjalager, 2020;Keinan et al, 2019;Oe et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2017).…”