نشریه مطالعات اجتماعی گردشگری
سال هشتم شماره 1 (پیاپی 15، بهار و تابستان 1399)

As Women who form almost half of each society’s population significantly contribute to the fulfillment of national goals, their effective role in the service sector of societies is becoming increasingly important. While the positive impact of forgiveness climate on organizational performance has been confirmed, many organizations have neglected this factor in their performance improvement. This applied survey research, therefore, sought to investigate the effect of perceived forgiveness climate on the efficiency of service recovery through the mediating role of psychological safety and organizational fairness. The population of the study consisted of 390 female employees who were selected from four and five-star hotels of Mashhad. The findings of this study indicated that perceived forgiveness climate had a positive and significant impact on women’s psychological safety and organizational fairness. It was also found that psychological safety and organizational fairness were effective in the efficiency of service recovery. Moreover, the mediating role of psychological safety and organizational fairness was also confirmed.

Taking the increasing growth of the Iranian tourism industry and the mounting competition between various active tourism companies to recruit talented workforce into consideration, the conduct of studies on employer branding from the perspective of potential employees of such companies could be useful in employing top talents. In this regard, it could be argued that Job advertisements are the first contact zones where the job hunters may cross into, and that at this critical stage, employer branding could play a significant role in recruiting talents before other competitors do so, providing the companies with a sustained competitive advantage. The population of this applied-qualitative study comprised of all Iranian companies acting in tourism industry. As for collecting the required data, 177 relevant tourism job advertisements released in 12 different job hunting websites in autumn 2018 were identified and recorded. Then the content of the ads were coded via quantitative content analysis method and the frequency of each code was computed. The findings of the study indicated that work missions, company’s location, flextime, working hours, holidays, teleworking facilities, co-worker quality, work challenges, international mobility, company size, reputation of the company’s product or service, basic salary and bonuses, and welfare facilities were the items which normally appear in job advertisements published by tourism companies. Job seekers, therefore, mentally examine the messages they receive from various organizations and select the organization that best suits them. Tourism companies, thus, need to feature as much dimensions of their brands as possible in their job advertisements and internet-based recruitments so that they manage to recruit top talents.

"As tourist satisfaction plays a significant role in the economic prosperity of tourism industry, researchers are seeking to identify the various influential factors in that regard. While the findings of some studies indicate a negative impact of overcrowding on visitors satisfaction, other studies suggest that the collective sense may affect the directionality of overcrowding effect. This study, therefore, sought to examine the effect of overcrowding on the satisfaction of visitors with the intervening role of the collective sense. Applying a descriptive-quantitative method based on library and field studies, the required data for the study were collected through surveying 384 visitors of the historical Tabriz Bazaar who visited there from March to April 2018. Moreover, structural equations and SMART PLS software were used for analyzing the collected data. The findings of the study indicated that overcrowding had a positive impact on the perception of the collective sense. Furthermore, although many visitors found overcrowding unpleasant, such factors as the joy of being together, the feeling of sympathy with other people, and the opportunity to establish widespread social communications with other tourists made the collective sense act as an intervening variable, ending in the visitors’ satisfaction. The results of this study could be used in planning the development of tourism and preparing touring packages, especially for rare tourist destinations. "

In today’s competitive world, the key to success of tourism and hoteling organizations lies in their provision of creative products and services with regard to the different needs of their customers. As the staff’s creativity could provide organizations with some competitive advantages, they need to try more to increase their employees’ creativity so that they may enjoy such advantages. This applied descriptive-correlative study, therefore, set out to investigate the relationship between the culture of cooperation and the creative performance of those staff members working in tourism organizations and two, three and four-star hotels in Yazd, Iran. To this end, a population of 172 supervisors and employees from all two, three and four-star hotels of Yazd city were selected through stratified random sampling. Having administered the standard questionnaires on culture of cooperation, working environment, and creative performance, the collected data were analyzed through the path analysis model, using LISREL software. The findings of the study indicated a significant positive and direct correlation between the culture of cooperation and the employees’ creative performance, while the culture had no such effect on the creativity of the staff when enforced through the procedural justice as an intervening variable. It was also found that there was a significant indirect relationship between the culture and the employees’ creative performance when the sharing of knowledge acted as a mediator, and that the cooperative culture had an indirect effect on employees’ creativity with the motivation acting as a mediator. Moreover, the culture of cooperation proved to have a significant indirect influence on the employees’ creative performance with the promotion factor acting as an intervening variable.

This study sought to identify the factors involved in the eco-friendly behavior of students, evaluating the extent they were effective in that regard. The population of this survey study comprised of 320 students of University of Tehran and Science and Culture University who were equally selected through systematic random sampling and classified into two groups of eco-tourism related students and non-ecotourism ones. Having administered a standard relevant questionnaire, we analyzed the data collected from the survey through which the questionnaires were filled, in each individual university, by the two groups of students, half of whom belonged to the first group and the others belonged to the second. The findings of the study indicated significant differences between the ecotourism behavior of male and female students and those of the ecotourism and non-ecotourism students. A significant positive relationship was also found between eco-friendly behavior and environmental awareness, attitude, and active membership in environment NGOs.

Social media activities could, together with other managerial and service factors, substantially contribute to the development of tourism by attracting tourists through promoting the attractions, providing them with useful information on historical places, customs, cultural heritage, tourist attractions, and the historical and cultural potentials of the countries and regions they are supposed to visit. This descriptive survey study, therefore, sought to investigate the effect of social media advertisements, audience participation, and word-of-mouth advertising on European tourists’ brand resonance through the cognitive and emotional images as well as attitudinal and practical loyalties in social media. The population of the study comprised of the European tourists who visited Tehran from March to June 2019. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used for the inferential analysis of the collected data, and KMO was applied to measure the internal consistency of the tool used. Moreover, Bartlett’s test was administered to confirm the sampling adequacy and the correctness of factors separation. The structural equation modeling method was also used for identifying the relationships among the variables. The results of the study indicated that social media advertisement, audience participation and brand awareness were effective on the cognitive image of the European tourists who visited Tehran, and that audience participation and word-of-mouth advertising affected their emotional image. It was also found that cognitive and emotional images would affect the attitudinal and practical loyalties which in turn would influence the brand resonance that could be helpful in attracting tourists provided that it is accompanied by well-defined plans in terms of creativity and innovation in advertising, knowing the audience, and choosing appropriate advertisements to be published in social media.

Today, information technology has made it possible to solicit the views of different people with diverse perspectives and ideological backgrounds. Being one of the benefits of IT, crowdsourcing could, as an easy-to-use public opinion survey tool, be used as a very useful instrument wherever social participation may facilitates the identification and resolution of problems. Having carefully reviewed previous studies of the field, we found that few attempts have so far been made to induce tourists to socially participate in identifying the opportunities for the development of civilian, cultural, and social infrastructures of tourist destinations. As one of the Iranian cultural and historical tourist destinations, Yazd city has recently been enlisted in UNESCO World Heritage sites and has attracted the attention of many tourists worldwide. Having said that, it appears that its tourism capacities and infrastructures need to be developed. This study, therefore, sought to identify the criteria which could be effective in the success of tourist crowdsourcing in offering appropriate solutions for the development of tourism in Yazd. To this end, the primary criteria for the successful implementation of crowdsourcing were extracted from the relevant literature, from which 25 criteria in six general categories were screened and identified via Delphi method. To rank the criteria mentioned, the opinions of Yazd tourism experts were collected through paired comparisons, being analyzed and ranked by fuzzy network analysis. The finding of the study indicated that human resources and cultural indices with the weights of 0.28 and 0.21 respectively were the most important factors in the success of tourist crowdsourcing.

This study set out to investigate the effect of familiarity with a country’s culture on the images created in the minds of the foreign tourists visiting there, and the improvement of the public images made of smaller geographical units of that country such as its provices as well. To this end, Gilan province was selected as the population of the study to research on. To collect the required data for testing the three hypotheses defined for this study, a 24-item questionnaire was administered on some 218 foreign tourists who visited different cities of Gilan province. The hypotheses and relationship between the research variables were analyzed through PLS software, using structural equation modeling techniques. The findings of the study suggested that familiarity with Iranian culture could improve Iran’s image and that of the Gilan province in the mind of a foreign tourist. Moreover, the impact of the Iran’s image on Gilan’s image was confirmed.

Urban tourism is one of the most prevalent and lucrative types of tourism. Enjoying great cultural and historical potentials, Isfahan could be regarded as one of main destinations for urban tourism in Iran. However, while its development in terms of tourism has been defined in some legally binding documents such as "Isfahan’s 1404 Development Strategic Document" and "Isfahan Province Development Document", it has failed to be developed ideally in that regard. This study, therefore, set out to identify the most significant problems hindering the development of tourism in Isfahan. The data of this qualitative research were collected via 26 semi-structured interviews whose size was determined based on saturation effect. The participants of the study were selected through purposive sampling from among the elites, officials, and the practitioners of the tourism industry. Analyzing the data through thematic analysis, one core problem and three axial problems were identified for the Isfahan’s tourism industry. The core problem was, according to the findings, that tourism did not have priority at the macro level, and the axial problems included “inefficient management and lack of well-defined plans”, “abstinence from investment”, and “inadequate human resources”. It was also found that conflicting ideas were the dominant problem in defining the main issues in tourism.

This study sought to develop a social media-based business model for tourism industry. At the first stage, the main elements of the model were extracted from the related literature review and the Osterwalder and Pigneur’s business model framework. At the second stage, to evaluate and prioritize the identified elements, a questionnaire was developed and administered on 119 experts who were selected through snowball sampling. The collected data were then analyzed, using Smart PLS software and the elements were imbedded in the model in order of their importance. Applying multiple case study method, the business model of seven tourism companies who managed to successfully employ the potentials of social media to their benefit were analyzed in the final stage to validate the business model proposed by this study. The findings indicated that active presence in social media would affect the customer-related elements more than those of the supplier-related ones. In other words, the elements related to the relationship with customers, cost structure, value proposition, and distribution channels would be affected more than the elements related to revenue streams, key resources, key activities, and key partnerships.

Having dramatically grown worldwide over the past few decades, tourism has increasingly added to the diversity of its fields. As a subset of tourism, food tourism which includes fast foods as one of its major components has attracted the attention of planners and policymakers in different countries due to its functions and benefits. The required data for this applied descriptive-analytical research were collected from administering questionnaires on 384 people who were selected based on Cochran's formula. The collected data were then analyzed in SPSS software Version 22, using factor analysis, Friedman test, Chi-square, and Pearson correlation. With 13.78% of the variance reported by the factor analysis, culture was identified as the most influential factor. Moreover, Friedman test showed that the most important dimension was the physical one according to mean rank values. The results of the χ2 test indicated a lack of social satisfaction of citizens with fast foods in Isfahan. Pearson's test also found a moderate correlation between luxuriousness and increased damage to local traditions of Isfahan.

Organizational cooperation is regarded as a key factor in the sustainability and competitiveness of tourist destinations. This study sought to investigate the organizational cooperation network and the position of different actors and organizations within the management of Mashhad tourist destinations, using Social Network Analysis. To this end, the data on the organizational interactions of 30 actors involved were collected through surveying and interviewing three key experts in each relevant organization. The data were then analyzed via Ucinet software, using the in-degree, out-degree, and betweenness centrality indicators. The findings of the study indicated that the governmental organizations such as the provincial governments, gubernatorial offices, and the Law Enforcement Forces mostly exercised control and power on Mashhad tourist destinations’ organizational cooperation network. Moreover, with the highest amount of betweenness centrality, the gubernatorial offices, and the Office of Tourism and Cultural Heritage enjoyed the greatest potentials for cooperation within the organizational cooperation network.