Renegotiating organisational crisis management in urban tourism: strategic imperatives of niche construction

This paper reviews the literature on distance decay in urban and rural tourism. Through a systematic literature review, this paper aims to understand the current state of knowledge regarding distance decay in tourism including (1) reveal the main topics and domains, (2) variables applied in past studies, while simultaneously distinguishing them in the form of urban and rural tourism as well as (3) identify potential areas and gaps for future studies. The findings indicate a growing interest among tourism researchers to examine distance decay, with studies predominantly focusing more on urban tourism than rural tourism. Additionally, this review recommends future studies to investigate distance decay in crisis and disaster management for future study regardless of urban or rural tourism settings.

The main concepts of urban tourism development and ecological urban tourism are analyzed. It is shown that such types of modern tourist business, despite its rapid development, need a clear scientific basis that will ensure its orderliness and targeted optimization. Along with such purely tourist resources as attractiveness, historical value, aesthetic appeal, recognizability, the ecological safety of tourist groups and individual tourists is an essential point. These are complementary factors that not only contribute to the development of urban tourism, but also ensure its optimized safety.
 Urban tourism is one of the most intensive tourist destinations in modern society. In general, the concept of "city tourism" is relatively new. Its concept was formed in world tourism in the late twentieth century. thanks to the work of German scientists L. Hartmut, G. Neuenfeldtut, O. Rose (1980-1990). For example, L. Hartmut's dictionary (1997) defines urban tourism as “a short-term (usually 1–4 days) visit to a city with the following purpose: interest in the history and culture of the city; participation in various events; purchase of various goods. Often such a visit is carried out in the form of a weekend excursion and can take place both individually and in groups, ie both organized (through a tour of the company and with guides), and independently.
 The growing intensity of the development of urban tourism in Ukraine, as well as the intensification of the development of related industries, makes scientific developments in the perspective of justifying the optimization of such a component of the tourism industry is extremely relevant. At the same time, there are certain components of such relevance that are related to the structure of urban tourism. It includes scientific developments that aim to reveal the possibilities of tourism development in a particular city, from purely quantitative indicators of the intensity of possible tourist flows to ensure their quality, including environmental safety.
 As a result, the relevance and novelty of such studies is a holistic expression, where each component is characterized by its own structurally oriented place and complements other components.
 Urban tourism and its component urban ecological tourism are among the most promising tourist destinations. Along with their spontaneous development, there is a need for scientific understanding of such activities, which will contribute to the development of the necessary legislative solutions. Today there are discussions on defining the main concepts of urban tourism development such as urban tourism itself, the ecological environment of urban tourism development, ecological safety of urban tourism development, tourist ecological resource, etc.
 In general, the prospects of such a tourist destination are beyond doubt, and the scientific basis that can optimize such tourism development is a necessary and timely completion of it today.
 The researches presented in the article encourage to improve the optimization of urban tourism development in any city of Ukraine. At the same time, the identification of the main problem situations contributes to focusing on them, which can significantly reduce time and money resources when planning the development of the tourism industry in cities. Such approaches allow to optimize urban planning in the field of tourism development.
 Since the scientific developments presented in the article are largely generalized, they can be used in the development of the tourism industry in any city of Ukraine.
 Key words: urban tourism, ecological city tourism, urban tourist resources, ecological safety of tourists.

SUMMARY Anticipating and preparing to deal with the threat of crises precipitated by disaster from natural and people-made catastrophes is an important challenge facing tourism. As an industry tourism is particularly susceptible to such negative events putting the sector under almost constant threat of a crisis. Before the catastrophes of 9/11 and the Asian Tsunami of 2004 crisis management in tourism was essentially a reactive response, as opposed to a state of proactive anticipation. A review of the emerging literature on crisis management in tourism is given to identify the foci of the current academic discourse. More systematic input by human resource management was identified as a way to assist tourism businesses in preparing for and dealing with crises. By discussing crisis management within a services management context, a contribution is made to the debate on the need for proactive crisis management within the tourism industry. A central plank to this position is that the preparation stage of crisis management in tourism is the actual beginning of any strategic response to recovery. Well conceived and executed human development is promoted as an initiative and key component of crisis preparation and management. Developing the potential of human capital at the industry and enterprise level to deal with crisis management is a way of reducing the vulnerability of tourism enterprises to crises. Measures are suggested that may be taken to prepare tourism businesses for crisis situations.

Academic researchers were provided with an additional forum to exchange knowledge, research and agendas on the critical study of urban tourism and tourism cities with the emergence of the International Journal of Tourism Cities in 2015. Since then, the Journal has been recognized for its outstanding contribution to the urban tourism research by numerous scholars. This recognition was embodied in prestigious academic abstracting and indexing, such as achieving the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and Scopus and SJR indices of above 0.5. International Journal of Tourism Cities also welcomed numerous international scholars to its editorial board, of which some also serve as the theme editors. Theme editors were invited to provide their insights on future research agendas in urban tourism research. With this gesture, the Journal wishes to mark the celebration of the fifth volume in the fifth year of publishing and many above mentioned recognitions, as well as acknowledging the valuable time and effort of many scholars dedicated to its recent success. Therefore, this Special Editorial serves as the roadmap for future research on the opportunities and challenges for urban tourism. It initially touches upon more recent technological advancements and their impact on tourism in cities, calling for better understanding on the concept of smartness and highlighting the importance of social media. Furthermore, sustainability, quality of life, and tourism planning and development have been heavily challenged by sharing economy and tourists' quest for unique experiences enabled by new technologies. Several important questions and perspectives have been outlined – from responsible tourism, to ethnoscapes, to acknowledgement that urban tourism not only impacts the quality of life of local residents but also its visitors. Lessons learnt from crises may bring new opportunities to managing urban tourism, just as in the case of Post-Communist countries. However, with the potential of terrorism at every corner of the world, new research on crisis management is anticipated. Looking further down the line of challenges for urban tourism, tourists’ behaviour has dynamically changed with the help of new technologies. So, has the behaviour of business travellers, for whom we need better understanding of their experiences of being invited, to attending, to post-travel behaviour in relation to business events. Moreover, the need for better understanding of special interest tourism and its impact on tourism management, supply and demand business perspectives, and host community. Similarly, new research agendas should also focus on the conservation of nature and its importance for city tourism. In conclusion, the Special Editorial brings a fresh perspective on new visual research methodology that offers numerous possibilities for research by elicitation techniques and researcher- or research participant-produced visuals.

1. Introduction: Urban Tourism in China Mimi Li and Bihu Wu 2. Measuring Tourism Spillover Effects among Cities: Improvement of the Gap Model and a Case Study of the Yangtze River Delta Shan Li, Min Xiao, Kun Zhang, Jing Wu, and Zheng Wang 3. Urban Morphology and Tourism Planning: Exploring the City Wall in Pingyao, China Feifan (Philip) Xie and Kai Gu 4. The Impacts of Heritage Tourism on Public Space in Historic Towns: A Case Study of Lijiang Ancient Town Xiao-bo Su and Chun-yuan Huang 5. Leisure in an Urban Environment - A Perspective of University Students Shan Yang, Honggen Xiao, and Chau Yeung Tse 6. A Residential Survey on Urban Tourism Impacts in Harbin Yu Wang, Gang Li, and Xuemei Bai 7. The Social Impacts of Tourism in a Beijing Hutong-A Case of Environmental Change Chris Ryan and Huimin Gu 8. A Study of Inbound Business Tourists' Shopping Behaviour and Influencing Factors - A Case Study of the Canton Fair in Guangzhou Qiuju Luo and Xiangyu Lu 9. Visitor and Resident Images of Qingdao, China as a Tourism Destination Shaojun Ji 10. Developing a Framework for Assessing Visitors' Responses to Chinese Cities Philip L. Pearce, Yongzhi Wu, and Aram Son

Cities offer the advantage of allowing diverse tourist attractions to be visited in a specific location without the need to travel long distances. Historical sites, vibrant cultural practices, sports facilities, shopping centres and business tourism facilities, along with easy access and places to stay, have made cities the centre of attraction. Although urban tourism research dates back to the 1960s, it has disproportionately received meagre attention from scholars, especially in Africa. The extant literature on urban tourism is quite fragmented and limited to major cities of the world. There is thus a dearth of urban tourism research in developing countries such as Ethiopia. Addis Ababa is endowed with rich cultural, historical and religious treasures and serves as a gateway for international visitors to the country. It is also the third diplomatic city of the world, after New York and Geneva, providing immense opportunity for business tourism. Notwithstanding its untapped potential, the city is not sufficiently benefiting from the tourism sector. The main aim of this research is, therefore, to discuss the nature, challenges and opportunities of urban tourism development in Africa with specific reference to Addis Ababa. To this end, data were gathered using semi-structured interviews and document analysis (mainly policy documents, statistical bulletins and research outputs). The research findings indicate that urban tourism in Addis Ababa is still not well developed. The major supply related factors affecting urban tourism in the city are lack of professional service offered by accommodation establishments, a hospitality industry often dominated by substandard hotels incapable of satisfying customer demands, insufficient budget allocated to protect and conserve heritage, lack of diversified tourism products, weak promotion, lack of well qualified tourism and hospitality manpower, hassle and pickpocketing problems, and infrastructural problems such as substandard roads, power cuts and a poor telecom network. These problems are further compounded by the absence of a stakeholder collaboration framework, which leads to the duplication of activities, the loss of precious cultural heritage and, overall, weakens the synergistic effects. Due to these, the number of tourist arrivals in Ethiopia is still below one million, which is far less than other African cities. There should thus be a concerted effort by the government and private sector to tackle the abovementioned setbacks.

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Cities covers key issues, trends and challenges for urban tourism destinations worldwide as well as contemporary debates related to research and practice in this field. Topics discussed include the marketing and branding of tourism cities, the growth of smart city tourism destinations, sustainability in urban tourism management, overtourism, sharing economy influences on urban destinations, cultural-heritage tourism in cities, business tourism, urbanisation, terrorism, among others. The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Cities merges the latest academic research with insights drawn from practice in urban destinations internationally to provide recommendations for tourism management professionals as well as researchers. Unlike other texts, the Routledge Handbook of Tourism Cities adopts a multidisciplinary approach to tourism drawing from fields such as sociology, psychology, urban management, business and critical management perspectives. In addition to this, a balance is provided between urban destinations in emerging economies and more established tourism cities in G20 countries. This book is structured into four parts. Implementing the balanced approach mentioned earlier, Part I addresses “Contemporary issues, challenges and trends in urban tourism”. Issues are discussed including terrorism, sustainability, the sharing economy, urbanisation, gentrification, overtourism, micro-shocks and public outrage. Part II adopts a positivist approach with “Marketing, branding and markets for tourism cities”. It covers city destination management and marketing, and urban branding with case studies from Melbourne (Australia) and Vancouver. Key markets of business tourism, millennials, families, visiting friends and relatives (VFR), dark tourism, and bird watching are reviewed. The positivist theme continues with Part III on “Product and technology developments for tourism cities”. Topics discussed are culture and heritage, outdoor and indoor city markets, touristic urban spaces, attractions, old and new sections of cities, coastal city development, smart urban tourism destinations, eTourism challenges, social media, urban transport, and the artistic medium of walking. Part IV presents “Worldwide tourism cities and urban tourism” and demonstrates there are differences around the globe related to these concepts. The geographic areas featured are Australia. Europe, United States, Latin America, China, ASEAN, and former socialist countries.

A growing body of research has explored the climate change tourism nexus. Changes in climate are posited to result in winners and losers within the tourism sector, as regions, attractions and seasons become increasingly better or worse suited to attracting visitors. Much of this literature has ignored urban tourism. This is in part because the urban setting plays host to many other tourism subsectors which have been considered in the climate change and tourism literature. It is also because urban tourism is often erroneously conflated with business tourism, which is posited to be less, or potentially non-, climate sensitive. This chapter explores the case of ten major cities in South Africa, first considering their climatic suitability for tourism as calculated using the Tourism Climate Index (TCI), demonstrating that nine of the ten destinations are classified as ‘excellent’ in their suitability for tourism. This is followed by tourists’ experiences of weather in these cities as documented in TripAdvisor reviews, where the greatest sensitivity to climate is recorded for Nelspruit at 10% of reviews, and temperature mentioned most frequently in reviews for each city. The chapter then explores the major climate threats to urban tourism in South African cities in the decades to come based on their regional threats. Finally, prospects and challenges for adaptation and resilience-building are considered. Urban tourism in South Africa is indeed at risk of climate change, but the improvements in climatic suitability for individual cities should be maximized in tourism planning.KeywordsCitiesFloodingDroughtsUrban heat islandTourism climate index

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests, burrows, and mounds and alternation of physical and chemical conditions by animals, and the creation of shade, influencing of wind speed, and alternation of nutrient cycling by plants. Here the “niche” is construed as the set of natural selection pressures to which the population is exposed (discussed in Ecology). By transforming natural selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution, on a scale hitherto underestimated and in a manner that alters the evolutionary dynamic. Niche construction also plays a critical role in ecology, in which it supports ecosystem engineering and eco-evolutionary feedbacks and, in part, regulates the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Niche construction theory is the body of formal (e.g., population genetic, population ecology) mathematical theory that explores niche construction’s evolutionary and ecological ramifications. Many organisms construct developmental environments for their offspring or modify environmental states for other descendants, a process known as “ecological inheritance.” In recent years, this ecological inheritance has been widely recognized as a core component of extra-genetic inheritance, and it is central to attempts within evolutionary biology to broaden the concept of heredity beyond transmission genetics. The development of many organisms—and the recurrence of traits across generations—has been found to depend critically on the construction of developmental environments by ancestors. Historically, the study of niche construction has been contentious because theoretical and empirical findings from niche construction theory appear to challenge some orthodox accounts of evolution. Many researchers studying niche construction embrace an alternative perspective in which niche construction is regarded as a fundamental evolutionary process in its own right, as well as a major source of adaptation. This perspective is aligned intellectually with other progressive movements within evolutionary biology that are calling for an extended evolutionary synthesis. In addition to ecology and evolution, niche construction theory has had an impact on a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, biological anthropology, conservation biology, developmental biology, earth sciences, and philosophy of biology.

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g., evolutionary process).

Niche Construction Theory (NCT) has been gaining acceptance as an explanatory framework for processes in biological and human evolution. Human cultural niche construction, in particular, is suggested as a basis for understanding many phenomena that involve human genetic and cultural evolution. Herein I assess the ability of the cultural niche construction framework to meet this explanatory role by looking into several NCT-inspired accounts that have been offered for two important episodes of human evolution, and by examining the contribution of NCT to the elucidation of two “primary examples” mentioned often in the NCT literature. The result, I claim, is rather disappointing: While NCT may serve as a descriptive framework for these phenomena, it cannot be said to explain them in any substantive sense. Especially disturbing is NCT’s failure to account for differing developments in very similar situations, and to facilitate evaluation and discrimination between divergent and contradictory causal accounts of particular phenomena. I argue that these problems are inherent, and they render NCT unsuitable to serve as an explanatory framework for human phenomena. NCT’s value, at least as related to human phenomena, is therefore descriptive and heuristic rather than explanatory. In conclusion, I discuss and reject comparisons made between NCT and the theory of natural selection, and examine several potential sources of NCT’s explanatory weakness.

The research in this dissertation thesis is entitled “The Analysis of the Impact of External Business Environment and Internal Business Environment and Characteristic of Competition on Strategic Planning and its Implication on the Cement Industry”. The goal of this research is to acquire empirical evidences and to discover explanation on the phenomena of impact of external business environment, internal business environment, and characteristics of competition toward strategic planning and performance of the cement companies in Indonesia. This research, it is hoped, would give a contribution to the development of economics, in particularly; and accounting management, production management, strategic management, marketing management, human resource management and management science in general as well as international economics. The research was conducted by the descriptive and inductive methods, that is : gathering, presenting, analysing, and testing, and also drawing conclusions and making recommendation. Out of the analysis several conclusions were made, as follows : 1. Information is acquired that partially the variables of External Business Environment, Internal Business Environment, and Competitive Characteristic have a significant influence of the level of 5% significance on Strategic Planning. In the details it could be explained as follows : the Variable of External Business Environment has the biggest impact on the Strategic Planning variable, that is 46%. The Variable of Competitive Characteristic has the second biggest influence, that is 42%, while the Variable of Internal Business Environment gives the smallest effect, 37%. 2. The magnitude of the co-effect of the variables of External Business Environment, Internal Business Environment, and Competitive Characteristic toward Strategic Planning is 40 %. 3. There is a partical influence of the variables of External Business Environment, Internal Business Environment, and Competitive Characteristic on the Cement Industry performance; broken down as follows : The External Business Environment variable of 34% significance; The Internal Business Environment variable of 30% significance; while The Competitive Characteristic variable of 32% significance. 4. The significant influences of Strategic Planning toward the Cement Industry Performance is of the magnitude of 38,62%. 5. There is a Joint influence of the variables of External Business Environment, Internal Business Environment, Competitive Characteristic and Strategic Planning on the Cement Industry performance is of the magnitude of 74 %. This research, it is hoped, would be useful for researchers, practitioners, and the Government, to provide beneficial information for all parties involved in Strategic Planning in anticipation of changes in External and Internal Business Environment as well as in the characteristics of competition in the development of The Cement Industry in Indonesia .

This chapter sheds light on the Systematic Review of the literature dealing with the crisis management in the tourism and hospitality industry during COVID-19. The study then made an effort to comprehend how the tourism and hospitality industry dealt with the pandemic problem. The objectives of the study are three folds such as (1) to the corpus of research in the tourism and hospitality industry and COVID-19; (2) to usher the strategies adopted in the tourism and hospitality industry during crisis and (3) to explore the future research direction in rerouting Tourism and Hospitality in crisis. To fulfill the objectives of the study Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been conducted using the extracted dataset on the domain of “crisis management in tourism and hospitality” from the Scopus and Web of Science. The extracted data were merged using the R programming. An extensive bibliometric approach was performed to know the trends of research in this domain through bibliographic coupling, citation analysis, and prestige analysis and coword analysis through the R programming. Similarly, the study also employed co-citation analysis to cluster the articles in this chapter to usher the similarity and proximities. Four clusters have been evolved from the cluster analysis using multidimensional scaling method (MDS) method. Four clusters incorporate four different themes which are interrelated to each other such as cluster one elaborates initial and specific effect of COVID-19 on various domains of travel and tourism. Cluster two likes to elaborate on the holistic approach in defining the narrative for crisis and risk management with broader disaster management. Cluster three is an extension to the research work carried out in the cluster one and two where earlier clusters are dedicated towards impact on travel and tourism sector from the supply side and framework for risk and crisis management respectively. And cluster 4 is dedicated to the creation of smart destinations for improving the lifestyle of the residents along with enhancing the experiences of the tourists. It is the first study of its kind to incorporate SLR to understand crisis management research trends and analyse the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism and hospitality industry. The paper makes an important methodological addition by showing how to use R programming to combine data from Scopus and the Web of Science to do bibliometric analysis. Additionally, it helps advance future study trends by using the R clustering approach to extract themes.KeywordsCrisis managementResilience strategyCOVID-19Tourism and hospitalitySystematic literature review (SLR)Bibliometric analysisCluster analysisR programming

Niches and mechanisms are two important but contested elements in the study of organism-environment interactions. Although they are closely interrelated, with niches playing a crucial role in theorizing about ecological and evolutionary mechanisms such as niche construction, facilitation, and species invasion, philosophical discussions about each issue have been largely disconnected. This collection addresses this gap, bringing together contributions from philosophers and biologists about the niche concept, niche construction theory, and ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. In this introduction we provide some background to the collection, which arose out of two workshops organized within an interdisciplinary research consortium. We also summarize each contribution, organized roughly into three groups with considerable overlap and interrelations: niche construction and evolutionary theory, niches, and ecological and evolutionary mechanisms.

Previous studies are inconsistent in their findings about the relationship between external involvement and performance. The authors attribute this inconsistency to the misfit between external involvement and business environment. Drawing the concept of fit between information processing capabilities and needs from information processing theory, they develop the fitting patterns between external involvement and business environment and examine their impacts on performance. Information processing capabilities are measured by the degree of two types of external involvement in the NPD process and information processing needs are assessed based on three dimensions of business environment. Cluster analysis was used to develop the taxonomies of fit between external involvement and business environment. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to examine the impacts of fitting patterns between external involvement and business environment on performance. The results reveal six fitting patterns between external involvement and business environment. ANOVA results show that the fitting patterns between external involvement and business environment are related to both operational performance and business performance, supporting our fit theory.