Resident attitudes towards gaming and tourism development in Macao: Growth machine theory as a context for identifying supporters and opponents

Abstract

Despite global recession, Macao continues to develop as an international gaming destination. However, as the intensity of development increases, the government is losing support for the gaming industry among some residents. This loss of support may be examined within the context of growth machine theory. This paper surveys residents regarding their attitudes towards gaming and development. The fi ndings suggest residents can be divided into two groups -gaming supporters and gaming opponents. From these fi ndings, recommendations are made for future planning, development and marketing in Macao.

Residents’ Attitude toward Tourism Development: A Sociocultural Perspective

“…This is in line with the notion of social exchange theory that deems that regardless the type of destination, locals in a host community will decide whether to support tourism development by weighting and assessing benefits and costs of economic, socio-cultural and environmental concerns [3,6,9,28,44]. Furthermore, a positive effect of perceived socio-cultural benefits and a negative effect of perceived socio-cultural costs on support for tourism found in current study is in line with past studies over the past few years [6,[8][9][10][11][12]16,23,28,36,38,63].…”

“…Reviewing previous studies reveals that a wide range of dimensions have been engaged for measuring perceived impacts of tourism development [6,[8][9][10][11][12]16,23,28,36,38,63]. However, some of the introduced dimensions in previous studies are not applicable in this study.…”

Applying and Expanding the Theoretical Framework of Emotional Solidarity in a Festival Context

“…Much can be learned about the relationship while considering context. For instance, how would emotional solidarity be impacted by considering supporters and opponents of tourism development similar to the work concerning the growth machine theory (Harrill, Uysal, Cardon, Vong, & Dioko, 2011) and Butler's tourism area life cycle (see Latkova & Vogt, 2012). The relationship between residents and festival visitors may be advanced by considering frameworks such as the integrated threat theory or the contact hypothesis to determine if prejudices, threats, stereotypes, or anxiety of interaction in conjunction with emotional solidarity impact the relationship, as Ward and Berno (2011) found.…”

Segmenting Spa Customers Based on Rate Fences Using Conjoint and Cluster Analyses

“…A number of studies published in the leading tourism and hospitality journals have applied the combination of hierarchical and non-hierarchical to select the optimum cluster solution (e.g. Bigné & Andreu, 2004;Biran, Poria, & Oren, 2011;Chen et al, 2013;Harrill, Uysal, Cardon, Vong, & Dioko, 2011;Mueller & Kaufmann, 2001;Park, Lee, Choi, & Yoon, 2012;Rid et al, 2014;Tan & Lo, 2008). First, a hierarchical cluster analysis was used to determine the optimum number of clusters.…”

“…On the contrary, it helps to determine an intermediate result which can be used to select the number of clusters. Second, K-means cluster analysis was employed to classify spa customers, with cluster centres from the hierarchical results as the initial seed points (Harrill et al, 2011). Kmeans cluster analysis is non-hierarchical clustering which has the characteristics that render it less sensitive to outliers (Hair et al, 2006;Park et al, 2012).…”