Search

This thesis examines consumers’ ethical agency within the responsible tourism experience. It aligns with a post-structuralist, (late) Foucauldian position, adopting the theoretical constructs of ‘power struggles’ (1982), ‘problematisations’ (1984a) and ‘self-care practices’ (1984c) to engender a more fluid view of the market-consumer interface. It investigates (i) how consumers conform to, critique or resist market-promulgated ways of being a ‘responsible tourist’; (ii) how consumers (re)negotiate alternative meanings of how to be ethical and act ethically; (iii) what this reveals about the ways in which consumers retain, apportion or relinquish a sense of autonomy over their ethicality; and (iv) the tensions, struggles and dilemmas that consumers concurrently face. The thesis adopts a participative methodology in order to foster the involvement of participants across the total tourism experience. More specifically, the thesis conducts a PARTicipative inquiry in order to facilitate data collection before, during and after the holiday; enabling ‘prospective’, ‘active’ and ‘reflective’ triangulation (Ingram et al, 2017). To this end, the thesis presents data from participants’ pre-holiday and post-holiday interviews, as well as their (on-holiday) diaries and photographs. The findings of this thesis suggest that consumers’ ethical agency manifests in three main ways. Agency is represented through a critical awareness of the rhetorical construction of ‘responsibility’ within three types of market-consumer interface, namely ethical tourism spaces, ethical policies and market materials. Agency is also represented through consumers’ resistance towards three key areas of the organised tourism industry, specifically large corporations (e.g. chain hotels, international franchises), the tourism ‘package’, and tourism ‘hotspots’. Further, agency is represented through consumers’ self-reflexivity. Tourists are highly introspective of the ways in which they transform personal ethical reflection into action (‘walk the talk’); the ways in which they reflect on ethics but are unwilling to make any material alterations to their behaviour (‘reflexive inertia’); and the personal, product, and destination level considerations that impede their engagement in certain ethical practices (‘pragmatic utility’). Overall, this thesis aims to contribute to existing literature by fulfilling four research gaps. First, it focusses on the practices and narratives of responsible tourists, as opposed to the ‘responsibility’ discourses of travel companies (e.g. Caruana & Crane, 2008; Hanna, 2013). Second, it attends to the current lack of Foucauldian ethics within the consumer responsibility and responsible tourism literatures (Crane et al, 2008). Third, it progresses from studying the ethical consumption of commodity goods to focus on experiential consumption; specifically, highly performative experiential consumption in a potentially environmentally and socio-culturally disparate context to the ‘home’ setting (e.g. Jamal, 2004). Finally, it focusses on the total responsible experience by triangulating tourists’ prospective, active and reflective data. This thesis also has important practical implications. A stronger awareness of how tourists experience responsible tourism will better enable the tourism industry to tailor their products, services and spaces in a way which more effectively matches consumer demand. Further, an improved understanding of how consumers evaluate discourses on ‘responsibility’ will inform the tourism industry as to how responsible policies, guidebooks and other marketing messages are interpreted, and thereby constructed and communicated.

We hypothesise that data about the requirements and design stages of a software development project can be used to make predictions about the subsequent number of development changes that software components will experience. This would allow managers to concentrate time-consuming efforts (such as traceability and staff training) to a few at-risk, cost-effective areas, and may also allow predictions to be made at an earlier stage than is possible using traditional metrics, such as lines of code. Previous researchers have studied links between change-proneness and metrics such as measures of inheritance, size and code coupling. We extend these studies by including measures of requirements and design activity as well. Firstly we develop structures to model the requirements and design processes, and then propose some new metrics based on these models. The structures are populated using data from a case study project and analysed alongside existing complexity metrics to ascertain whether change-proneness can be predicted. Finally we examine whether combining these metrics with existing metrics improves our ability to make predictions about change-proneness. First results show that our metrics can be linked to the quantity of change experienced by components in a software development project (potentially allowing predictions to take place earlier than before) but that best results are obtained by combining existing complexity metrics such as size, or combining existing metrics with our newer metrics.