
Can-Seng OoiUniversity of Tasmania · School of Social Sciences
Can-Seng Ooi
PhD
About
135
Publications
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Introduction
Can-Seng Ooi currently works at the School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania.
Publications
Publications (135)
This special issue has been published in the "Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching" (Kaplan Business School, Singapore), and it engages with the different possibilities of practicing green education within schools and higher educational institutions through innovative pedagogical tools like graphic narratives, intertwined natures, animist pract...
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are key elements in the physical and biological Earth system. Human-induced climate change, and other human activities in the region, are leading to several potential interacting tipping points with major and irreversible consequences. Here, we examine eight potential physical, biological, chemical, and social Anta...
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (A&SO) has a unique environment that plays an important role in the Earth’s life-support systems. It has no indigenous human population but hosts around 5000 researchers and is visited by more than 100 000 tourists per year. In this paper, we describe the biophysical processes that create the region’s ecosystem ser...
A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Regional tourism management Tourism resources and community assets Educational attainment and community development Young people and children A B S T R A C T This article examines the current state of knowledge and gaps in existing research regarding the uses of tourism resources for regional children and young peopl...
The links between tourism and community wellbeing are complex as tourism benefits do not translate directly into community benefits. The indirect ways that tourism development contributes to the community seem to be illusory. Instead of giving up hope, this paper addresses the tourism-community nexus directly, in the context of bringing lifelong le...
The global tourism industry was severely affected by the COVID-19pandemic. New economic, social and political realities have emerged, and destinations are facing the changes. This research compares three popular destinations among Chinese tourists (i.e.Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore) to illuminate key political economic shifts of tourism in South...
Purpose
This paper explores the collaborative dynamics and dimensions within a virtual multi-cultural and interdisciplinary workplace. The study focusses on the use of online communication technologies to enhance social inclusion and networking within academia.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses an autoethnographic approach to draw on the...
This study explores the status and contexts of tourism development and implementing diverse tourism resources in regional communities to enhance local cultural capital through associated learning opportunities. This systematic literature review and secondary data analysis identify a significant gap in current scholarship regarding promoting tourism...
Purpose
The objective of this study is to examine Chinese consumers' behavioural intentions to reduce restaurant food wastage (i.e. intentions to order moderate meal size, and to pack leftovers) in a group context from both psychological and cultural perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper used an online self-administered survey for d...
ABSTRACT
Regenerative tourism has gained ground during the pandemic crisis as a set of practices and processes that have the potential to refashion the industry. Based on a co-created ethnographic case study focussing on a local restaurant in a popular tourism region in Tasmania, this study raises the question as to what business strategies offer o...
This paper performs analysis of Instagram posts for the 2018–2019 Tasmanian wildfires to identify the key ways that locations were visually and textually represented. It identifies key themes and it looks at visual and photographic forms and genres typical of the survey. The findings add complexity to known ideas about mass media representations of...
Purpose
This research conceptualises the hallmark event, Melbourne Cup in Australia, as a major sporting brand experience. While numerous studies have explored consumer engagement and experiences in major sporting events, few research studies highlight the negative issues, such as alcoholism, gambling and violence, that may affect consumer engageme...
Studies on the resilience of islanders often strip them of their political agency and reduce their resilient actions to no more than adapting, mitigating and recovering from an exogenous hazard. In this chapter, we challenge this apolitical understanding of island populations by contextualising their acts of resilience within the ongoing and histor...
Resilience as a complex concept has been recognised and employed to strategise mitigation policies and processes during disruptive events. Island resilience in particular is used to frame islanders and their societies as vulnerable entities combating uncertainties with limited resources and capacities. On the one hand, public discourse on island na...
Using case studies from Indonesia, Australia and Fiji, this chapter presents an alternative model for operationalising resilience. It takes a holistic approach and argues that islands and the communities that live on them are interconnected; thus, they are subject to both internal and external influences. The chapter argues that the forces that sha...
This book explores island resilience and how island communities come together to achieve wellbeing, have agency over their future and resist ongoing neo-colonialism during disruptive events such as COVID-19 and the increasing threats of climate change. This collection provides examples of lived experiences and the responses of island communities, m...
This chapter looks at a small Tasmanian food business, nestled in one of the oldest wine regions in Australia, as it enters the tourism industry in an attempt to contribute to community building and development. In so doing, this business answers calls for tourism to move away from just being sustainable and be regenerative instead. This transition...
The COVID-19 pandemic created an extremely challenging landscape for the tourism and hospitality industry, particularly in terms of the wellbeing of those employed in the sector. In mid-2020, in response to the pandemic, the University of Tasmania, in conjunction with the Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania, designed a fee-free Graduate Certificat...
This study draws lessons from Australia to suggest that tourism-society entanglements are negotiated, dynamically woven, and the processes may subvert established relations in tourism and society. Entanglements assume separateness, as in a compartmentalized reality. Yet, the processes of entanglement involve bargaining and are dynamic. We contend t...
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the complexities of engaging with local stakeholders in destination branding. As the main creators and drivers of the destination brand, many brand authorities metaphorically “give ownership” of the brand to local stakeholders, for them to “take ownership” of it. This paper examines the inherent challenges of this...
In 2011, the Swedish national tourism organisation, Visit Sweden, together with the Swedish Institute, launched a campaign – Curators of Sweden (CoS) – on Twitter, which ended in 2018. Each week a ‘Swedish’ person was chosen as a curator to tweet whatever they liked through the @Sweden account. All the curators were chosen because they represented...
Food waste is a serious problem with regard to social equity and environmental challenges across the world. In recent decades, a dramatic growth of restaurant food waste has been seen in China. This study integrated the norm activation model (NAM), Chinese cultural values (i.e. face saving and group conformity) and information publicity to examine...
Many tourists want to travel in a more socially sustainable manner, which may mean that they have to engage more meaningfully with the host community. Tourists however inadvertently travel in bubbles. Tourist bubbles reduce tourist anxiety but they also build tourist walls between them and the host society. The wall seems to prevent tourists from a...
Despite its entanglements with society, tourism is still an industry that uses the market for economic exchange, so as to price tourism goods, services and experiences. The market serves important functions in society but there are two moral limits. The first is on how market exchange may transform some products, services and experiences in ways th...
Current tourism scholarship emphasises the critical need for tourism providers to become more environmentally and socially responsible. Regenerative tourism principles seem to provide a suitable lens to understand and implement change, but adopting these principles requires a significant shift in the way businesses perceive and approach their opera...
The project compared various strategies by tourism authorities in different Australian states and different countries in managing the Chinese tourist market. In collaboration with experts in different destinations, this study conducted a media survey of five Australian states and three popular Chinese country destinations on how they attract and ma...
Local participation and support are integral to any successful place branding exercise. However, this is easier said than done. The tools for cultivating support from local players in place branding are quite limited. To expand on participation as a conceptual framework, this paper explores the application of public management lenses to place brand...
The tourism industry and research community are cognizant of the importance of mediation in creating desirable tourist experiences. This paper argues that the mediation process should not be general but needs to be situated, that is a tourism mediator must take into account the nature of the tourist product, the specific social and environmental ci...
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on the re-presentation of the cultural phenomena hygge in Denmark and fika in Sweden in destination branding and address the inevitability of their essentialization through the branding process.
Design/methodology/approach
Three relevant semi-structured interviews with destination marketing organisation’s employees...
This chapter complements the many streams of gay tourism research by situating gay tourism as part of the perpetual transformation of modern society. The issue focused here is not on queer differences but on understanding how these differences are selected, framed and accentuated. Consequently these processes conflate many shades and layers that ch...
This exploratory study focuses on the diverse appreciation of the Tasmanian wilderness in the eyes of Chinese visitors. In response against an essentialist approach to understanding Chinese visitors and in addressing the criticism that a more dynamic and fluid understanding of culture is mainly academic and not useful for the practice community, th...
The purpose of the paper is to reveal the complexities of negotiating justice. We present the case of workers’ experiences during a long-running industrial dispute at Australia’s first legal casino. First, we consider the concept of justice, drawing on discussions from tourism studies. This notion is considered in relation to an industrial dispute...
Tourist bubbles reduce tourist anxiety but they also create walls. This exploratory study looks at how Chinese visitors publicly review Malaysia on mafengwo.com and qyer.com. There is conspicuous silence on the discriminatory policies against Chinese Malaysians in those reviews even though manifestations of that policy is omnipresent. Thus, we look...
Experiences are personal, subjective and felt. Visitors have different cultural backgrounds and expectations, how is it then possible to create similar positive and personal experiences for most if not all visitors? Tourism mediators play an important role in the process of managing and crafting the tourist experience. Using diverse examples, this...
Views from the editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Tourism Cities
As our International Journal of Tourism Cities approaches its third “birthday”, we asked the
members of IJTC’s editorial advisory board to share their views on trends likely to affect the future of urban tourism over the next ten years and the role of the Interna...
Tourism promises to be the panacea for many economic and social inequalities, particularly in regional areas. Tasmania, Australia, is one of those places. Combined with aspirations for higher levels of educational attainment and a prospering tourism industry, optimism is evident on the island. However, while tourism is growing its economic contribu...
In the last three decades, Singapore has transformed from a cultural desert to a global arts city, thanks significantly to tourism. The Singapore Tourism Board was proactively shaping the cultural dynamics and policy of Singapore until 2012. But since then its official role in the country's arts and cultural development almost disappeared. The disa...
In the media, Tasmania has been referred to as the roadkill capital of the world. Locals and tourists alike may feel disgusted when confronted with the amount of wildlife roadkill
on ethical, emotional and aesthetic grounds. Unfortunately, many locals seem to be hardened to the day-to-day confrontations with roadkill, and the awareness among touris...
International tourist numbers to Tasmania have grown steadily in the past decades. Tasmania has experienced a surge of Chinese tourists following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s presidential visit to Hobart on 18 November 2014. Pure and pristine nature, lavender bears, gourmet seafood, the Port Arthur Historic Site, and the recently popularised auro...
Drawing on multiple culinary traditions, foodways, and networks of trade, food is both good and important in Singapore. Brand Singapore relies on food culture to market itself to the world, but also to its citizens. Hawker food, that is, street foods, are at the core of that marketing, becoming a by-word for Singaporean culinary culture. Cheap and...
Asian tourist behaviour is often characterised along essentialistic terms such as Asians are collectivistic and hierarchical. The essentialist approach to understanding culture faces serious criticisms. In using cultural complexity instead of culture, this paper introduces functional culture and negotiated culture perspectives, as derived from stru...
Time is scarce for most tourists. This posts challenges for fieldworkers when conducting face-to-face interviews with them. This is particularly pertinent to Chinese tourists. This paper explores the use of the social media app WeChat for mitigating the time pressures faced by researchers and tourists as subjects. Hugely popular in China, WeChat ha...
This chapter looks at food safety in tourism, rather than food tourism. Often taken for granted in food tourism research, food safety is an issue that matters in tourism practices, to both visitors and residents. How food safety and tourism evolved in Singapore encapsulate the story of the meteoric development of Singapore from a Third World to a F...
The changing economic, social and political circumstances of China in the last decades, together with the uneven rolling out of social engineering programmes in the country, such as the promotion of selected Chinese traditions, urbanization, standardized education and exposure to plethora of popular cultures, have created a diverse group of Chinese...
This article looks at the branding of Copenhagen as a food destination through the advent of the New Nordic Cuisine movement and how this may change the way we think about destination branding. The destination management organization of Copenhagen opportunistically embraced the New Nordic Cuisine concept, which then posed several destination brandi...
This paper looks at the branding of Copenhagen as food destination through the advent of the New Nordic Cuisine. The New Nordic Cuisine (NNC) offers two destination branding ‘puzzles’. The first puzzle is that a destination brand should accentuate the authenticity and uniqueness of the locality. This allows relevant stakeholders—e.g. attraction man...
This paper explores higher education development and policy shifts in Singapore over the last decade, within a landscape of an increasingly globalised creative economy and international cultural policy transfer. Using qualitative interviews with key players in policy and higher education institutions, the paper aims to explain the push and pull fac...
The UNESCO World Heritage (WH) site recognition assures cultural value and quality by branding the place as highly worthy of conservation and visit. The WH brand offers many advantages, especially in tourism development and destination marketing. The process of getting recognition is lengthy, and well documented. This study, however, moves beyond p...
We outline a strategic response capability framework drawing on cognitive neuroscience to explain stakeholder sensing and anticipations as essential input to environmental analysis. Stakeholders receive stimuli from ongoing interactions with the firm and thereby sense current environmental changes and form anticipations about future performance tha...
The European Capital of Culture (ECoC) project was designed to promote European identity and integration. Hosting cities have since carried a variety of visions and objectives, ranging from the improvement of material infrastructure and urban revitalization, over the enhancement of cultural life to the alleviation of poverty through increasing empl...
As an integral part of individual lives and one of the strongest inputs to global economies, tourism is affected by such social tensions and can play an important role in reducing them; therefore it offers an interesting challenge for serious discussions regarding tourism and regional sustainability. Tourism is traditionally associated with pleasur...
Reviews of Ground Zero, New York on TripAdvisor show a diversity of interpretations. Amidst the cacophony of voices, there is communication and a semblance of community. This sense of community-despite the lack of strong coherent and consistent views, a plethora of diverse topics, and heterogeneous perspectives-is brought together and built on chro...
Using the concepts of auto-communication and micro-Orientalism, this article argues that nation branding at World Expos produces and propagates notions of difference and Otherness. We examine how Denmark presents itself in China, and how the message inevitably tells how the Danish authorities view the Chinese. Using the Danish ‘Welfairytales’ pavil...
Purpose
Researchers rarely present accounts of their awkward encounters in ethnographies. Awkwardness, however, does matter and affects the ethnographic accounts we write and our understanding of social situations. The purpose is to bring these hidden sides of organizational ethnography to the fore, to discuss the consequences of ignoring awkward e...
The arts and culture are considered core in a creative industries strategy. But the promotion of the creative industries brings about revised notions of creativity. These revised notions are being applied to the arts. Creativity is now seen to be largely manageable. All individuals are made to believe that they can be creative. Not only that, creat...
The 2009 United Nations Climate Summit (COP15) attracted more than 45,000 people to Copenhagen. The world watched the unfolding of the two-week conference. With international attention and the hope of finding an agreement on managing global warming, the event was a city branding scoop for the Danish capital. The summit started with optimism; the Co...
Can the arts and culture prosper under a less than democratic political regime? This paper looks at the soft authoritarian Singaporean government and the making of Singapore into a ‘City for the Arts’. Many scholars advocate that a culturally vibrant and creative city must also celebrate diversity, tolerance and experimentation. This implies that a...