Speakers of 2022 conferences
Keynote Speakers

Professor William (Bill) C. Gartner
University of Minnesota, USA
William (Bill) C. Gartner, Ph.D., is professor in the Applied
Economics Department at the University of Minnesota
(Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Email: wcg@umn.edu). His
research interests include branding, image, economic impact, and
tourism development. He has worked extensively in Asia, Europe,
Latin America, and Africa and holds visiting professor positions
at four different international universities. He is the author
of numerous journal articles, book chapters and books on tourism
development. In addition, he has conducted economic impact,
baseline monitoring, policy analysis and branding studies for
the grape and wine industry in twelve U. S. states as part of
the Northern Grapes project. He is a Fellow and past President
of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism.
Destination Brand Equity and Sustainable Tourism Development: “One and the Same?”
Abstract: Many of the earliest scientific writings regarding tourism were pro-development citing numerous economic benefits that come from it. This early stage of academic discourse was termed the Advocacy Platform as it fully supported tourism development (Jafari, 1988) . However, it did not take long before an opposite point of view began appearing in academic journals questioning those economical beneficial claims with examples of environmental and socio-cultural problems caused in large part by tourists and tourism development. The development side had statistics regarding job and firm growth and tax remittance leading to expanding economies to make its case. For the most part the Cautionary Platform (Jafari, 1988) used anecdotal evidence and examples to make their case. Today these two camps (Advocacy and Cautionary) have continued to proceed along different paths. Those in favor of tourism development are armed with data supporting their stance while those arguing against unmitigated development are often hamstrung by the lack of credible data to counter some of the claims made by pro-development forces. This presentation will attempt to make the case that using an accepted definition of brand equity (i.e. return based on marketing) and the characteristics of a brand there is no difference between destination brand equity and sustainable tourism development. A strong form of integration is used to construct equations that measure both concepts simultaneously. The main argument against the advocates of the Cautionary Platform is that their concerns are emotionally and anecdotally based and not compatible with metric measured changes. That argument can now be debunked. By the end of the presentation, it will be shown that these two powerful concepts that have caused long standing disagreements between members of each camp dissolve into shared space and analytical measurement. Instead of proceeding on parallel tracks they become one and the same.

Professor Matthias Fuchs
Mid-Sweden University, Sweden
Since 2009, Matthias Fuchs is Full Professor of Tourism
Management and Economics at the Department of Economics,
Geography, Law and Tourism (EJT), Mid-Sweden University.
Previously he was the director of the e-Tourism Competence
Centre Austria (ECCA) where he also supervised four large scale
industry projects in the domain of mobile information systems,
online auctions, and technology impact. Present research
activities and fields of interests comprise Electronic tourism
(i.e. business intelligence and big-data applications for
destinations, UGC-based sentiment analysis and property
detection), tourism impact analysis (Input-Output-based
mulitplier analyses), tourism economics (tourism demand
modelling), destination brand equity modelling and network
analysis in tourism.
As being author or co-author of more than 240 academic
publications, Matthias was granted with the Austrian state sponsored
Rudolf-Sallinger Research Price and was awarded by the International
Research Promotion Council for the Eminent Scientist of the Year 2003. He is
a member of the Royal Academic Council of Eminent Scientists, the
Association International d´Experts Scientifiques du Tourisme (AIEST), the
Strategic Management Society (SMS), the International Data Envelopment
Analysis Society (iDEAs), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Tourismuswissenschaft (DGT) and the Tourism Education Futures Initiative
(TEFI).
From Ontological Inconsistencies Towards a Transformative Tourism Science: Reflecting on the Ideology of a Mechanist (Economic) Science
Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis shows the capacity to challenge current growth-ideology inherited by mainstream tourism science. The aim of this speech is to challenge economic science’s most important weapon, that is economists’ belief that their fundamental ontological assumptions are based on reasonable and consistent arguments (Brodbeck 2012). Following the Cartesian ontology of modern science rooted in classical physics, economists presume that to ‘objective things’ can be assigned the empty and abstract measurement unit of ‘money’ in the form of a ‘price’ (Brodbeck 2019). However, because of this flawed ontological transformation of social acts into a mathematical form, production processes and social acts of exchange, technological processes and even the arts and human skills, such as caring and hospitality, stop being social processes, becoming instead abstract elements in economic equations (ibid, 2019, 16). By referring to this untenable ontology, it is shown that economic science is neither an empirically exact science (humans don’t behave like mechanical objects of classical physics) nor value-free (Putnam & Walsh, 2014). Rather, it represents an implicit ethics (Brodbeck, 2014). The presentation sketches the elements of a post-mechanist economic theory which defines ‘The Economy’ as a socio-communicative network for meaning creation (Brodbeck, 2001). This theory is corroborated by findings from a nationwide survey of Norwegian micro-entrepreneurs in nature-based tourism (Fuchs et al., 2021). The presentation concludes with propositions for a transformative and compassionate tourism science which reclaims the voice of those who are methodologically excluded as ‘things’ and treated as ‘incentive-objects’ (Gretzel et al., 2020). Buddhist philosophy is stressed, claiming that compassion is the highest form of knowledge, thus, ethics cannot be separated from epistemology (Brodbeck, 2011). Transformative tourism scientists are expected to empower humans in tourism-related contexts to use their awareness for their own cognizance (gnosis) and mental self-shaping to realize that there is neither a meta-physical (neo-Darwinian) nor a biological (‘the selfish gene’) reason condemning humans to a particular destiny (Fuchs, 2022).
References:
Brodbeck, K-H. (2001). Umrisse einer postmechanischen Ökonomie, In R.
Benedikter (Ed.), Postmaterialismus (pp. 117-142), Metropolis.
Brodbeck, K-H. (2011). Money: The global power of an illusion: A Buddhist
perspective. In Fay, S., & Bruckner, M. (eds) Buddhism as a stronghold of
free thinking: Social, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of Buddhism.
Ubuntu, Ulm, 119-148.
Brodbeck, K.H. (2012). Die Herrschaft des Geldes: Geschichte und Systematik,
2nd ed., Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt.
Brodbeck, K-H. (2014). Verborgene metaphysische Voraussetzungen in der
zeitgenössischen Wirtschaftslehre, Working Paper 2, Cusanus University,
Bernkastel-Kues.
Brodbeck, K-H. (2019). Die Illusion der Identität und die Krise der
Wissenschaften, Working Paper 47, Cusanus University, Bernkastel-Kues.
Fuchs, M., Fossgard, K., Stensland, S. & Chekalina, T. (2021). Innovation
and creativity in nature-based tourism: A critical reflection and
assessment, In V. Haukeland, & P. Fredman (Eds.) Nordic Perspectives on
Nature-based Tourism, (pp. 175-193), Edward Elgar.
Fuchs, M. (2022). Reflecting on the ideology of a mechanist economic
science: From ontological inconsistencies towards a transformative tourism
science, In Alzua-Sorzabal, A., Femenia-Serra, F. & Xiang, Z. (eds.),
Transitioning towards the future of tourism destinations, Thomson-Reuters,
Toronto (in print).
Gretzel, U., Fuchs, M., Baggio, R., Hoepken, W., Law, R., Neidhardt, J.,
Pesonen, J., Zanker, M., & Xiang, Z. (2020). e-Tourism beyond COVID-19: A
call for transformative research. Information Technology & Tourism, 22,
187-203.
Putnam, H. & Walsh, V. (2014). The end of value-free economics. Routledge,
Oxfordshire.

Professor Atour Taghipour
University of Le Havre, France
Atour TAGHIPOUR is a professor and the head of two international management master programs at Normandy University in France (Master (II) of International Purchasing and Master (I) of International Marketing). He holds an HDR in management from Normandy University and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic School of Montreal in Canada. He received two masters’ degrees, one in Management, Logistics & Strategy and other in Industrial Engineering. He has more than ten years of experiences as a manager in automobile industries. He has published different books and many research papers in international journals. His areas of research are supply chain and operations management.
Coordination of Supply Chains
Abstract: Supply chains are networks of loosely coupled business units characterised by distinct, yet mutually interdependent, planning decision domains. The main question that arises in the management of these networks is the coordination of supply chain members’ operations with minimum exchange of information. In practice, supply chain operations are generally coordinated and planned hierarchically, through the central and aggregated control of a corporate planning unit, which requires a high degree of information exchanges, or through the relatively inefficient upstream planning approach, in which operations are planned and the derived dependent demand is sent to suppliers. High degree of information exchanges leads to difficulties when independent members do not want to share information, such as cost, profit margin, inventory level or capacity utilisation. In order to address these difficulties, decentralised approaches of coordination of operations planning decisions based on some minimal information sharing have been proposed in many academic disciplines. This speech first proposes a systematic review of these approaches, and then outlines some research opportunities.
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