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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