27th Nordic Symposium in Alta

From 24th to 26th September the annual Nordic Symposium conference took place – this time in Alta, Finmark, Norway. AIHR was present with three members: Elena Cavagnaro, Sarah Seidel and Klaes Eringa as well as former Master student Marijke Nicolai. The main theme of the conference was Tourism Dilemmas Implications and Dilemmas. As became clear from the conference sessions, one of the main themes dealt with was sustainability.

One of the sessions, namely “Influencing sustainable behaviour in tourism and hospitality”, was organised by the research group Sustainability in Hospitality and Tourism. Sarah and Elena chaired the session and Sarah presented a paper on the role of storytelling in the context on LF2018 based on bachelor students research. The session was very successful, not only because it had seven paper presentations (split over two time slots) but also because it was very well attended, sometimes even extra chairs needed to be added. The session has been hosted by the research group at the Nordic Symposium for three years now and has always been quite successful, giving insights into different perspectives. Though none of the perspectives was considering values as antecedent of your behaviour, all of the presentations touched upon the conflict between gain or hedonic values on the one side and altruistic and biospheric values on the other side. A very interesting addition was made by Bianca Koroschetz (a regular in the session), who researched the role of convenience in changing habits in the context of antifouling practices of boats. If you wish to know more, all abstract can be found on the Nordic Conference website.

In addition, Klaes Eringa presented two papers. One presentation was dedicated to a stakeholder analysis of Leeuwarden Friesland (co-authored with Oleksii Khrebtiievskyi) and one to management leadership styles and their impact on employee service quality orientation, both in the context Leeuwarden Cultural Capital. The second paper was based on the master thesis of Marijke Nicolai, who co-presented it. Marijke managed to get cooperation from 62 of the restaurants in Leeuwarden. She will report the results back to the restaurants later this fall.

Next to the parallel presentations and keynotes, there was also a welcome meeting on the first day as well as a dinner organised together with all participants. As it happens sometimes, very fortunate and interesting things can also happen in these meetings, outside the main sessions: Elena and Sarah were seated at a table with Sami entrepreneur Siv Merethe Sara and researcher Vigdis Nygaard of the Northern Research Institute and had interesting conversations on climate change (which impacts are not nearly as slowly visible in Northern Norway as it is in the Netherlands and can have dramatic and quickly even deadly consequences for the reindeer herds), the tricky relationship of an indigenous culture to tourism and tourism research and some lovely traditions of the Sami culture.