Mandi Baker

Torrens University Australia · School of Business

Limited research has examined how employees’ cultural competency may influence customers experience and behaviors. Building on social exchange theory, this study proposed and tested a model focusing on how guest gratitude mediated the relationships between three dimensions of servers’ cultural competency, cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, and...

Deploying Foucault’s panopticon and technologies of self, this article examines how discourses, practices, and norms that circulate within the outdoor recreation industry to produce, what we have called, an “impossible job” for outdoor leaders (OL). Drawing on a case study conducted in Australia, we examine and critique how the expectation discours...

This book presents various studies on leisure activities in the outdoors. Indeed, the benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutic recreation, camps, education, adventure and recreation) (Humberstone et al., 2015). These benefits include the devel...

This book presents various studies on leisure activities in the outdoors. Indeed, the benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutic recreation, camps, education, adventure and recreation) (Humberstone et al., 2015). These benefits include the devel...

The benefits of being outdoors in a leisure context are widely acknowledged across a range of disciplinary perspectives (including tourism, therapeutics, education and recreation). These benefits include the development of: health and wellbeing; social skills; leadership and facilitation skills; personal, emotional and reflective abilities; confide...

In the process of doing research, I have experienced being an insider and outsider, belonging and exclusion, and feeling messy while trying to look tidy on multiple levels and, often, all at once. While these experiences sharpened my critical awareness, these seemingly dichotomous subjectivities often went unresolved. This article draws on post-str...

This study discusses gendered discourses of summer residential camp experiences and, in particular, the gendered roles performed by camp counsellors. By drawing on feminist poststructuralist concepts, this article considers how gender power-relations operate and how camp counsellors perform gender within camps. We start by considering the history o...

Summary of the National Survey on the Affective Abilities of Australian Outdoor Leaders.

This report discuss the outcomes of a national survey about the Affective Abilities of Outdoor Leaders in Australia.

This chapter explores the kinds of selves that are discursively produced for and mobilised by camp participants (campers and employees). The chapter opens the discussion with the promises made by camp publications about the value and benefits of camper experiences which shape how camp participants view and govern themselves accordingly. The chapter...

In this chapter, I bring Foucauldian concepts of power-knowledge and governmentality together with the sociology of emotions to illustrate how the delivery of camp shapes the emotion work and experiences of camp counsellors. This chapter discusses three major themes in regard to the emotional demands of "being" a camp counsellor. The first theme co...

In this chapter, I explore a post-structural framework for considering the embodied experiences of camp counsellors, emotional work and work-leisure boundaries. Understanding how these experiences come to be shaped through the negotiation of power, in a Foucauldian sense, underlies this book. In particular, this chapter considers how camp counsello...

This chapter explores the historical, social and cultural contexts of summer camp via the dominant articulations of camp experiences in popular culture and academic publications. The genealogy of summer camp, addressed in this chapter, reviews the many discourses that shape both the expectations and experiences of contemporary summer camp participa...

This chapter focuses on the processes of developing camp counsellors (usually former campers). Training processes offer insight into the power relations at work in shaping certain subjectivities. This chapter also considers the liminal status, and thus influence, of training programmes. This is followed by an exploration of the technologies of camp...

The final chapter provides an opportunity to (re)visit the author’s personal camp employment experience through a critical lens and in light of the knowledge gained through the study that informs this book. This chapter considers how ethics can derive from the care of the self and underpin a way of conceptualising camp counsellor experiences critic...

This book explores the complexities of the recreational summer camp experiences and its reliance on the expertise and emotion work of young people. Drawing on post-structural theory, Baker illustrates the discourses, power relations and emotional demands that shape camp counsellor employment experiences and well-being. Through analysis of everyday...

The performance and embodiment of inter and intra-personal skills, or as we have conceptualised in this paper as Affective Abilities (AA), is often considered central to the fulfilment of outdoor leader roles. This article examines Australian outdoor recreation and education higher education curricula to identify what AA training opportunities are...

Summer camps have been conventionally associated with the positive development of individual character through the promotion of recreational ‘fun.’ However, popular narratives obscure more critical questions concerning the power-knowledge relations that have shaped the provision of summer camp fun as a significant site of child development in Canad...

Summer camps provide a special time and space for youth growth and transformation. This growth is possible, in part, due to the physical and social isolation that contribute to the liminality of traditional residential camps. Camps act as a sort of ‘bubble’ in which alternative realities, norms and identities emerge. For many campers and camp couns...