Local Authorities, Tourism and Competition

Abstract

Tourism development has become a popular pursuit for local authorities seeking to generate new economic horizons. This requires the existence of some special attraction or package, something to distinguish an area from the basic diet of potentials that everywhere else can offer, or a strong competitive edge in what might be labelled as conventional markets. Unfortunately, new ways of nurturing tourism activity are increasingly hard to find and the tourism development scene is an increasingly competitive arena. Yet, competition is an unspoken word within the realms of tourism professionals, and a matter that is rarely confronted in any overt way by researchers.

Tourism and Local Economic Development

“…In an earlier paper (Ball and Stobart, 1998), we have argued that, despite the quite compelling evidence and argument that has been put in place by an array of experienced researchers (Williams and Shaw, 1988;Agarwal, 1997), the tourism arena has often been nurtured and encouraged by local authorities and their partner organisations without much critical and effective challenge to its value and viability.…”

“…Industrial towns seek to, and successfully do, record impressive detail on the impact of tourism, but the methods used are suspect, and the database is often rather generously interpreted. The popularity of SWOT analysis cannot conceal the fallibility of such an approach -it simply fails to address the feasibility issue (Ball and Stobart, 1998).…”

Theorising northernness and northern culture: the north of England, northern Englishness, and sympathetic magic

“…By the nineteenth-century Robin Hood has become a Saxon (English) hero fighting to protect his people from the despotic violence of the villainous Normans, exemplified by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Dixon-Kennedy, 2013). In the twentieth-century iterations of the story, Robin's northernness is sometimes lost under the lights of Hollywood, but in Britain, various local history societies, councils and tourist boards claim Robin Hood as an authentic son of Yorkshire, or Nottinghamshire (Ball & Stobart, 1998). 6 In the 1980s television series Robin of Sherwood (production details at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086791/), many of the supporting characters around Robin are played by actors speaking with Yorkshire accents, and there are frequent mentions of real places in the north of England as destinations and origins for various agents.…”

Theorising northernness and northern culture: the north of England, northern Englishness, and sympathetic magic

“…Then another set of conquerors, the Normans, take over England's hegemonic elite, and retain the view that the north of England is a source of rebellion, a place to be held tightly by feudal barons, a place to be turned into hunting forests or donated to religious houses (Daniell, 2013). (Ball & Stobart, 1998).…”