“Connecting the divide between theoretical and practical applications in the tourism industry”
Faculty Spotlight: Interview with Professor Bruno Ferreira, Assistant Professor, Hainan University-Arizona State University International Tourism College in Haikou, Hainan Province, China
Interview conducted by Tanner Caterina-Knorr, PhD Student, Community Resources & Development
TCK: Welcome, Professor Ferreira! Thanks for joining us for this interview. Let’s start by learning a bit about your academic background, where you went to school, and how that influenced the way you think about the tourism industry?
BF: My bachelor’s is in Sport Sciences from the University of Lisbon. When I graduated, I started working as a PE teacher, which was my dream job. I also worked with underserved communities, where I deployed sports as a tool for community development. But somehow it didn't feel fulfilling enough and I wanted to get out in the world and do more. So I went abroad and spent six months in Mozambique, in southeast Africa, where I taught Didactics of PE at a teachers training college.
From there, I went to Norway to train future volunteers. By this time, I had developed a desire to travel and work in as many countries as possible. In 2011, I moved to Brazil where I also worked with community sports. I was hired to lead a big grant proposal for a community-based Volleyball project to be submitted to the Ministry of Education. That didn't pan out so I had to focus on other community needs. The area where I lived was rural, impoverished, and there was a big drought during this time. People were living off of subsistence agriculture and could not produce enough to meet their needs. At the same time, I found the local ways fascinating and started wondering whether urbanites would be interested in visiting these communities and learning from the locals.
I reached out to universities and NGOs nationally and internationally who had programs focusing on community-based tourism. North Carolina State replied saying they had this program called People-First Tourism which supported individuals pursuing dignified and sustainable livelihoods through tourism microentrepreneurship. I invited them to our project in Brazil and we were able to develop two networks of microentrepreneurs in two different municipalities.
Microentrepreneurship refers to firms of up to five people, usually family-owned and run. In tourism, microentrepreneurship refers to ventures offering experiences or services in the food, accomodation, transportation segments to a global market. The ultimate goal of the tourism microentrepreneur is to support a desired lifestyle. This is a different mindset from growth-oriented entrepreneurship where the focus may be sales, going public, and then conquering the world here. I particularly like the description that was put forth in 2000 by Ateljevic and Doorne - “staying within the fence”. That is, making enough to make a decent living and at the same time creating the conditions to pursue a passion or a hobby.
Coincidently, the professor from NC State mentioned he was recruiting graduate students… and the rest is history. I thought I would do the masters program and that would be it. But faculty in the department persuaded me to apply for the PhD program. This was an interesting turn of events because I was an average student during my undergrad and never had any aspiration of enrolling in grad school. Before I started in the program I had the idea that academics spent their time in their “ivory towers” writing papers that nobody seemed to read. But then I realized that universities like NC State or ASU actually put considerable effort in their extension and outreach programs. My participation in longitudinal participatory action-research projects was instrumental in this realization, that we have a duty to serve the communities that we work with, and that's how I began looking differently at academia and started equating the possibility of becoming a professor.
TCK: Tell us a little bit more about your Ph.D. program at North Carolina and your work there.
BF: I was part of a research lab or research group called People-First Tourism (P1t), which is focused on understanding the ways underserved communities can be best involved in the tourism industry. There's a large body of literature describing how locals are often passive “tourees”, using Cohen’s terminology, which can create resentment in the community. P1t lab’s research suggests that locals are more meaningfully involved in the industry as microentrepreneurs. It's not just about the fact that they are self-employed and that they can provide for their family. It's also about a sense of pride and ownership that comes with managing their own businesses. This is a central tenet in the model of community development that researchers in the lab are trying to put forth. In practice, we used participatory action-research methodologies to engage with communities. That meant a lot of time spent in the field recruiting participants, conducting interviews (e.g. demographics, social capital, self-esteem, self-determination, self-efficacy), co-creating experiences based on their interests and their passions, or even organizing potlucks with nascent and experienced microentrepreneurs in order to foster the exchange of information within the network’s members. Then we worked with community stakeholders (e.g., cooperative extension, CVB, Chamber of Commerce, local attractions) to promote the co-created experiences, journeys and packages and integrate them with the other tourism products in the region. This became the focus of my dissertation - how can we meaningfully integrate off-the-beaten-path experiences offered by informal tourism microentrepreneurs into the destination’s mainstream tourism product?
Giving an Ignite Talk on the potential of farm tourism at a local foods systems conference for cooperative extension staff in North Carolina
TCK: I'm curious, have you remained in contact with the individuals you worked with during this project? Have you seen their businesses grow?
BF: Right now it's a bit of a difficult situation because of the pandemic. In general, when microentrepreneurs are committed, offer good quality experiences, and they have supportive networks, they are able to make a buck. Of course, some people just realize this is something they’re not interested in doing after all. My understanding is that this kind of experiences are in high demand. And actually, that's probably going to increase over the next five years. It’s going to be a growing trend as people want to stay away from tourist hotspots and avoid crowded spaces. The trend will be small-group, tailored, off-the-beaten-path experiences. Even admitting that in five years we can go back to normalcy as we knew it, people will have been exposed to these experiences and they will likely go back to it. Overtourism will continue to be a problem in many regions, but at least a larger share of discerning tourists will be inclined to engage in more responsible recreation alternatives. Perhaps one of the few good things about this pandemic is that tourists have been pushed outside of their comfort zones and that may have a positive impact on their future travel plans.
TCK: I've definitely seen that, too, and I think people are looking for different types of activities. I think you're onto something here.
BF: I think that the desire has always been there, but people shied away from the unknown, from the uncertainty of what they’ll see and do. People have been socialized into the staged theatricals of the tourism industry, which makes it hard for microentrepreneurs to meet expectations. That's a big problem because it is hard to script an authentic experience - it defeats the purpose. Because of this lack of consistency, people have been reluctant to try it. But now they have been forced to do it because of the pandemic restrictions, and hopefully they will continue doing it.
TCK: Since your dissertation, what other things have you been working on and what are you working on now in terms of research or practical applications.
BF: In my dissertation I developed a conceptual model called permatourism. The term comes from permaculture. It's a farming system which leverages the biodiversity and the characteristics of the local environment. I came in contact with permaculture during my many visits to agritourism microentrepreneurs in the program. At the time, I was really immersed in the tourism literature and convinced about the need to move beyond reductionist, positivist paradigms, because tourism is just too complex and dynamic to be captured by a bunch of equations. I had also read a paper calling for the integration of insights from the natural and life sciences (e.g. complex adaptive systems) in the study of tourism. That’s when I had this “eureka” moment -- what if we looked at the tourism business ecosystem through the lens of permaculture.
Leading a Permatourism workshop with community stakeholders and tourism microentrepreneurs in Tennessee
I started to explore the writings of permaculture pioneers David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and became ever more convinced that permaculture theory could provide a roadmap for sustainable and equitable tourism management and development. I tried to do this in the context of agritourism in North Carolina by looking at how the strength of farmers’ social ties with select stakeholders in different rings of the tourism system influenced their intentions to pursue tourism microentrepreneurship. Namely, I used SEM (structural equation modelling) to explore the relationship between bridging social capital and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and between the latter and entrepreneurial intention. Results suggest that the higher the social capital the higher the entrepreneurial intention, with the relationship being moderated by entrepreneurial self efficacy. Although intuitive as this might be, there is not a lot out there merging social capital and self-efficacy theories. It was a massive undertaking to do that, and with Permaculture design thinking in the background.
A second study took me to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where I worked with a community of ejidatários, local people who lease public land and are entitled to use it to support their livelihoods. In the past, many communities resorted to unsustainable extractive activities such as logging or quarrying. However, communities are now encouraged by governments and NGOs to steward the land, through a number of payments for environmental services programs. An obvious alternative to extractive industries is tourism. Puerto Vallarta is a famous sol y playa destination with a large number of all-inclusive hotels. Some researchers have described it as an example of socioeconomic apartheid due to the divide between tourists’ and locals’ spaces. There's not a lot of interaction between the two groups. Many inclusive resorts are gated and don't really let tourists outside the complex too much because they want to minimize monetary exchanges with local businesses, making sure that most spending is done within the complex.
TCK: So you need a gatekeeper.
BF: Exactly. I was able to connect with the community through another researcher from Duke University, who had studied the effectiveness of payments for environmentals services programs in the region. I spent a couple weeks living in the community with two families. I observed the way they constructed narratives and designed their tourism offerings, being it horseback rides, culinary experiences, tasting tequila, embroidery workshop tours, or ziplining. They shape these offerings not to compete with, but to complement the formal sector product. Rather than competing directly with the formal sector tourism product, they made it more appealing and competitive. That is permaculture at it’s best. Through injecting diversity in the local tourism product, they were able to enhance the tourism business ecosystem as a whole.
TCK: Not only is there an economic, but also social benefit for the locals to be more involved in the tourist ecosystem. There’s also a potential happiness and wellbeing component for the tourist having that ecosystem at their fingertips.
BF: Exactly. It was a significant revamp of the destination because at the minimum these informal microentrepreneurs became an important complement to the hospitality sector. One of the ejidos has grown into a very substantial player in Puerto Vallarta and may be the destination’s pull factor for a younger market segment. I think that speaks to the democratization of tourism supply in Puerto Vallarta and that's just fascinating to me.
TCK: And also speaks to the new concept that you put forward, not only is it just a theory, but it's in fact working very well. As a last question, where do you find motivation in your research?
BF: I think we should reflect on our goal as academics. What's the point of doing research? Is it to come up with a rather sexy model, but virtually useless? Or should we focus on relevant and useful work for the communities we work with? I think it’s just sad when researchers go into the communities to harvest knowledge, but don’t bother to give back… or sometimes even share the results. I remember this interview in Puerto Vallarta, when a study participant asked me what I was going to do for them after they’d given me all that information? That was a legitimate question and a great eye opener. I committed myself to actually working with the community in a relevant and meaningful way because a nerdy paper published in a top tier tourism journal does not mean much to them. We agreed to co-create a study abroad program focusing on sustainability and entrepreneurship for american undergraduates. Then, I made a pitch to NC State, who were reluctant at first, but eventually agreed to include it under alternative service breaks. It took almost two years to get all the required approvals, but guess what? Last February, just before the COVID restrictions took place, a group of 15 students and faculty travelled to Puerto Vallarta and spent six days in the ejido learning and working, which represented approx. seven thousand dollars of expenditure in the community. This, I think, is a good example of engaged research.
TCK: Thank you for your time, Professor Ferreira!
Learning from tourism coops entrepreneurs in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
