Scott Cohen

• BSc, MA, PhD
• Invited Full Professor at University of Algarve

This study challenges the assumption that international students from the Global South migrate to advanced Western economies primarily for economic gain and social distinction. Through temporally focused interviews with Chinese student switchers in the United Kingdom, that is, migrants who moved from China for university and remain working in situ...

Existing work on senior lifestyle mobilities in China has predominantly focused on therapeutic landscape imaginaries and second-home cities. This paper shifts the focus to the group-oriented lifestyle pursuits of Chinese urban seniors who temporarily reside in rural areas for extended vacations. By interviewing Chinese senior long-stay tourists in...

Previous work identified Northern Swedish skiing as a beneficiary from worsening climate change, with its relative improvement in snow reliability increasing its attractiveness over areas of the European Alps. This study advances the supply-side discussion of Northern Sweden as a ‘last resort’ with demand-side insights. It examines whether Europe’s...

Previous research demonstrated Northern Sweden may have a future competitive climatic advantage over the European Alps for ski tourism, yet knowledge of climate change risk perceptions, adaptation, and mitigation strategies undertaken by the Swedish ski industry remains limited. This study combined top-down ski season modelling and bottom-up semi-s...

Despite growing recognition of the material impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use, many economic sectors remain highly dependent on these fuels. Amid growing pressure to-at a minimum-appear to be doing something , businesses increasingly communicate the actions they (seek to) take to reduce their environmental impacts. Oftentimes they aim to bu...

Travel bragging refers to showing off or boasting about travel experiences. Despite its ubiquity on social media, travel bragging has been relatively under-researched. This study examines travel bragging from a dual perspective of both braggers and audiences. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with participants who frequently posted or bragged...

Air transport and tourism are interdependent systems wherein idealized gender performances are shaped by organizational cultures and particular commercial interests that have implications for gendered representations. Organizations use social media spaces to influence public perceptions, yet in doing so they may (re)construct hegemonic notions pert...

Despite attempts by airlines and the wider tourism industry to cultivate more diverse working environments, gendered practices and pressures persist. A feminist poststructuralist approach involving interviews with flight attendants from three airlines is used to examine how airlines attempt to construct the ideal aesthetic flight attendant, and how...

Most research on visits focuses on (semi)successful connections that equate valued intimacy to adaptation to transnational life and ethno‐national kin obligations. In contrast, we highlight important migrant relationships where adaptation is minimal and contact diminishes, yet they also take on heightened affective intensity. Drawing from a multi‐s...

Background Organisations frequently rely on international business travel when operating in internationalized business environments. Yet, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on their international business travellers (IBTs) being physically and psychologically well enough to productively perform across different working environments. The sal...

Tourism industry and government demand for knowledge of the impacts of climate change on ski tourism is growing. Despite the more than 70-year history and large cultural significance of alpine skiing in Sweden, little is known about the industry's future under a changing climate. This study applies the SkiSim2 model with low to high emission scenar...

Tourism research on visiting friends and relatives remains normative and family-centric. The literature has yet to question the normative underpinnings of relationships and remains oriented around physical proximity. This paper therefore aims to understand the shifting qualities and intimacies of migrant personal relationships developed across dive...

The Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI) portray luxury lifestyles on social media. The potential roles of travel and transport within these online displays of affluence have not yet been examined. This paper’s purpose is to analyse how transport modes and luxury travel are depicted and interrelated through RKOI images. Co-occurrence analyses were conduct...

Aviation remains a problematic sector of the global economy in times of climate emergency. Grounded in the ideology of reconfiguration, we adopt a system transitions perspective to address high emissions leisure travel. Our focus falls on the marketing communications of airlines as a critical component in the prevailing sociotechnical regime. Thema...

People travel by car for a wide variety of reasons. A large proportion of household travel is for non-commuting purposes, including social and recreational journeys. The emergence and (potential) diffusion of highly automated vehicles, also known as autonomous vehicles (AVs), could transform the way (some) people work and travel. Should they become...

Air transport and tourism are interdependent systems wherein representations of gender are shaped by organisational cultures. Although airlines have progressed their gender balance, cabin crew work remains archetypically feminine. Taking a feminist poststructuralist approach, this paper uses thematic document analysis to examine how gendered discou...

Tourism is central to late-modern life, and tourism research that threatens this centrality is prone to media attention. Framed by sociotechnical transitions theory, we introduce the concept of 'shadowcasting' to show how tourism knowledge disseminated through the media, combined with public comments on its reporting, cast shadows that co-constitut...

Despite its recent emergence as an alternative way of travel, hitchhiking in China remains significantly understudied, with its gender aspects unexplored. Investigating the (re)constitution of gendered Chinese hitchhiking subjects in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the paradox of agency largely unexamined in tourism gender research. Ethnogr...

Non-commuting journeys, which include social and recreational journeys, make up a substantial proportion of household travel and these journeys are mostly taken by car. Autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment has the potential to dramatically transform the way people work and travel, as well as reshape leisure travel patterns. Yet, the wider societal im...

Recent and projected growth in global aeromobility is poised to substantially expand aviation's contribution to anthropogenic climate change. With limited prospects for technical-or policy-based reductions in sectoral carbon emissions, behavioural shifts in the form of decreased demand for flying become increasingly important. This conceptual artic...

Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied...

Social media users are increasingly harming destination brands through their posts. This article examines how to counter brand co-destruction in social media through the application of storytelling practices. Based on a netnography of TripAdvisor and Facebook, combined with a case study of the Danish destination management organization (DMO) VisitD...

Air travel is often justified as ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable’, in the sense that trips have purpose and value. Yet it is evident that people travel for reasons that may include forced and voluntary movement, with motives ranging from visiting friends and family, to leisure, or business. In light of the challenge to decarbonise transport, and the ne...

This editorial for the special issue on 'Desirable Tourism Transport Futures' explores approaches to transitioning the tourism sector to a sustainable emissions path. It starts by describing an undesirable tourism transport future associated with a business-as-usual scenario, which will inevitably cause the climate mitigation goals outlined in the...

Young independent Chinese travellers are increasingly visiting Pai, a small town in northern Thailand, in part influenced by the popularity of the 2009 Thai movie 'Pai in Love'. Using a performance perspective, combined with theory on affordances, which have not yet been applied in the growing body of research on Chinese tourists, this paper examin...

This review article starts with an examination of the shifting nature of tourism discourse from the 1960s up to the present, and then focuses on seven topics that we consider to be on the forefront of current developments in the sociological study of tourism: emotions, sensory experiences, materialities, gender, ethics, authentication and the philo...

Despite recognition that Chinese backpackers travel in small, self-organised groups, studies have yet to examine how group dynamics affect the travel experience. Multi-sited ethnography and netnography were deployed to follow Chinese backpackers in Europe to explore their group dynamics. The findings reveal that Chinese backpackers sustain hierarch...

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt all industries tied to transport, including tourism. This conceptual paper breaks new ground by providing an in-depth imaginings approach to the potential future far-reaching implications of CAVs for urban tourism. Set against key debates in urban studies and urban tourism, we d...

This article introduces the concept of the 'publication regime' into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently...

Whereas much previous culture-related business research has focused on cross-cultural differences among various groups, this special issue departs from this trajectory through a focus on transculturalism. It examines various aspects of transcultural issues in business research, that is, business-related concepts that transcend the boundaries of nat...

Individual aspirations of associating with role models are routinely harnessed by marketers, who for instance, use celebrity endorsement in selling brands and products. It appears there has been no research to date, however, on the potential for celebrity activism, or role model advocacy beyond celebrities, such as from politicians, to form effecti...

Late modernity in developed nations is characterized by changing social and psychological conditions, including individualization, processes of competition and loneliness. Remaining socially connected is becoming increasingly important. In this situation, travel provides meaning through physical encounters, inclusion in traveller Gemeinschaft based...

A large part of the global population is now connected in online social networks in social media where they share experiences and stories and consequently influence each other's perceptions and buying behaviour. This poses a distinct challenge for destination management organisations, who must cope with a new reality where destination brands are in...

The publication of ‘A darker side of hypermobility’ (Cohen and Gössling, 2015), which reviewed the personal and social consequences of frequent travel, led to considerable media coverage and sparking of the public imagination, particularly with regards to the impacts of business travel. It featured in more than 85 news outlets across 17 countries,...

The current trend of increasing demand for air travel runs contrary to climate-related sustainability goals. The absence of behavioural and near-term technological solutions to aviation's environmental impacts underscores the importance of policy levers as a means of curbing carbon emissions. Where past work has used qualitative methods to sketch p...

This overview article for the special issue on 'Desirable Transport Futures' sets out with a brief introduction of the current development of the global transport system, suggesting that it remains unclear whether transport systems are heading towards desirable change. This desirability is defined as a reduction in the system's negative externaliti...

There has been an inherent bias in studies of 'mobility regimes' toward the perspective of the authorities. This article suggests the concept of 'subversive mobilities' to offer a novel perspective on the construct of mobilities regimes, by stressing the ways such regimes are penetrated by adversaries through diverse routes and practices, despite t...

This chapter examines the negative consequences for individuals who undertake leisure-motivated lifestyle mobilities or frequent business travel, and considers these movements in light of their potentially differing impacts on climate change. It explores the question of whether adherents of hypermobile lifestyles will be willing to change their mob...

Transport is a significant and growing contributor to climate change. To stay within ‘safe’ global warming guardrails requires substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. This represents a global political consensus, but there is evidence that current legislation in the transport sector is not significant enough to achieve medium- and longer-term...

Emissions from aviation will continue to increase in the future, in contradiction of global climate policy objectives. Yet, airlines and airline organisations suggest that aviation will become climatically sustainable. This paper investigates this paradox by reviewing fuel-efficiency gains since the 1960s in comparison to aviation growth, and by li...

Debates surrounding the human impact on climate change have, in recent years, proliferated in political, academic, and public rhetoric. Such debates have also played out in the context of tourism research (e.g. extent to which anthropogenic climate change exists; public understanding in relation to climate change and tourism). Taking these debates...

This overview paper examines three areas crucial to understanding why, despite clear scientific evidence for the growing environmental impacts of tourism transport, there is large-scale inertia in structural transitions and a lack of political will to enact meaningful sustainable mobility policies. These include the importance of addressing socio-t...

Freedom is a widely discussed and highly elusive concept, and has long been represented in exoticised, masculinised and individualised discourses. Freedom is often exemplified through the image of a solitary male explorer leaving the female space of home and familiarity and going to remote places of the world. Through in-situ interviews with famili...

Since the formulation of the mobilities paradigm, research has shown that movement is increasingly at the heart of our social identities. This paper argues that mobility, and indeed, hypermobility, constitutes to a growing extent who we are, whilst societal perspectives on mobility increasingly dictate how we need to move in time and space in order...

This paper suggests that phenomenological studies of tourism mobilities can be informed by non-representational approaches. We extend recent developments in sensory tourism research and non-representational works to argue that methods upon which tourism researchers have long relied require ‘pushing’ or merging in previously underutilised ways that...

This paper addresses critiques of Eurocentrism in tourism studies, which have called for a ‘paradigm shift' in response to the rapid rise of tourism from emerging world regions. We clarify the concept of a paradigm shift, and examine arguments for a shift in tourism studies on epistemological, theoretical and empirical levels. We argue for a shift...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

This final response to the two climate change denial papers by Shani and Arad further highlights the inaccuracies, misinformation and errors in their commentaries. The obfuscation of scientific research and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change may have significant long-term negative consequences for better understanding the implications of...

The increasing number of people leading more mobile lives, with spatially dispersed families, raises questions over how they maintain their family life and friendships and how this is shaped and shapes different forms of migration and different patterns of visiting friends and relatives (VFR). This paper develops an explanatory framework for concep...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

Market segmentation is ubiquitous in marketing. Hierarchical and nonhierarchical methods are popular for segmenting tourism markets. These methods are not without controversy. In this study, we use bagged clustering on the push and pull factors of Western Europe to segment potential young Chinese travelers. Bagged clustering overcomes some of the l...

Anthropogenic climate change poses considerable challenges to all societies and economies. One significant contributor to human-induced climate change is tourism transportation, particularly aviation. This paper addresses the relationship between climate change concerns, the energy-intensive nature of tourist consumption, and unrestrained tourist a...

Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article, we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist...

This study examines the propensity for long-haul independent travel amongst young Chinese travellers and evaluates the corresponding management implications. The paper reports findings of a survey of 403 potential travellers to Western Europe. Three clusters of visitors were identified based on their service expectations and profiled using their mo...

Although consumer behaviour (CB) is one of the most researched areas in the field of tourism, few extensive reviews of the body of knowledge in this area exist. This review article examines what we argue are the key concepts, external influences and opportune research contexts in contemporary tourism CB research. Using a narrative review, we examin...

Free copy: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jQtkPypX6w8WGG2IAdWg/full The period leading to and immediately after the release of the IPCC's fifth series of climate change assessments saw substantial efforts by climate change denial interests to portray anthropogenic climate change (ACC) as either unproven theory or a negligible contribution to nat...

Tourism has been critiqued as an environmentally destructive industry on account of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with tourist mobility. From a policy perspective, current and projected growth in aviation is fundamentally incompatible with radical emissions reduction and decarbonisation of the global energy system. Efforts to address the...

Increasing numbers of people from the emerging world regions, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East engage in tourism practices at domestic, intra-regional and long-haul international scales. In this article, we deploy an innovative application of the mobilities approach, which we argue moves beyond the Eurocentrism implicit in modernist...

There is widespread consensus that current climate policy for passenger transportation is insufficient to achieve significant emission reductions in line with global climate stabilization goals. This article consequently has a starting point in the notion of ‘path dependency’ (Schwanen et al., 2011) and an observed ‘implementation gap’ (Banister an...

This paper introduces and explores the psychological and social factors that both contribute to and inhibit behaviour change vis-à-vis sustainable (tourist) mobility. It is based on papers presented at the Freiburg 2012 workshop. Specifically, it reviews climate change attitudes and perceptions, the psychological benefits of tourism mobilities, add...

Encouraging positive public behaviour change has been touted as a pathway for mitigating the climate impacts of air travel. There is, however, growing evidence that two gaps, one between attitudes and behaviour, and the other between practices of “home” and “away”, pose significant barriers to changing discretionary air travel behaviour. This paper...

This article examines how the mobilities paradigm intersects with physically moving as an ongoing lifestyle choice. We conceptualise a lens of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ that challenges discrete notions of and allows for a wider grasp of the increasing fluidity between travel, leisure and migration. We demonstrate how contemporary lifestyle-led mobilit...

While leisure and tourism researchers have come some way in addressing issues of reflexivity in their own research, this effort towards engaging with positionality has lagged approximately 10 years behind when the broader social sciences confronted the ‘reflexive turn’. This research note draws upon two cases from my own research with lifestyle tra...

The “flyers’ dilemma” describes the tension that now exists between the personal benefits of tourism and the climate concerns associated with high levels of personal aeromobility. This article presents the first international comparative analysis of attitudes toward climate change and discretionary air travel, providing insights into areas of conve...

This conference communication summarizes the major outcomes of the Surrey Tourism Research Center's “Reconceptualising Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR Travel)” think tank held on July 13th, 2013, at the University of Surrey in Guildford, U.K. This conference communication will briefly highlight the context, approach and main discussion themes o...

Being mobile in today's world is influenced by many aspects including transnational ties, increased ease of access to transport, growing accessibility to technology, knowledge and information and changing socio-cultural outlooks and values. These factors can all engender a (re)formation of our everyday life and moving - as and for lifestyle - has,...

This article reviews the changing nature of contemporary tourism and sociological approaches to its study. We examine the broad social trends and specific historical events that recently affected tourism and discuss how the focus of sociological inquiry in tourism studies shifted from earlier discourses of authenticity and the tourist gaze to three...

Seeking to shift the discussion of the concept of authenticity in tourism scholarship from the dominant concern with tourist experiences to the more sociological problem of the processes of authentication of tourist attractions, we conceptualize two analytically distinct, but practically often intersecting, modes of authentication of attractions, “...

Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with...

Recent popular press suggests that ‘binge flying’ constitutes a new site of behavioural addiction. We theoretically appraise and empirically support this proposition through interviews with consumers in Norway and the United Kingdom conducted in 2009. Consistent findings from across two national contexts evidence a growing negative discourse toward...

The contemporary justification for zoos is based on their ability to act as sites of wildlife conservation. Alongside this is the reality that zoos have historically been defined as sites for the entertainment of the general public and continue to be dependent on the revenue raised through visitor receipts. Consequently, zoos are, today, identified...

The purview of climate change concern has implicated air travel, as evidenced in a growing body of academic literature concerned with aviation CO 2 emissions. This article assesses the relevance of climate change to long haul air travel decisions to New Zealand for United Kingdom consumers. Based on 15 semi-structured open-ended interviews conducte...

Accelerating global climate change poses considerable challenges to all societies and economies. The European Union now targets a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. Indeed, the Labour-led Norwegian government is committed to carbon neutrality across all sectors of the economy by 2030. Aviation has been identified as a rapidly growing contribut...

This paper problematizes the concept of searching for self in the context of lifestyle travellers — individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings on the search for self from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thaila...

This article explores the personal identity work of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings from in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are interpreted in light of theories on ident...

This paper assesses the extent to which dog owners located in Brisbane, Australia, wish to holiday with their pets, and whether there is a gap between this desire and reality. The paper also examines the extent to which this demand is being catered for by the tourism accommodation sector. The need for this study reflects the increasingly significan...

This thesis examines the search for self in the context of lifestyle travellers. It has been suggested that maintaining a coherent sense of self has become problematic in late modernity as the socially constructed notion of a 'true self' has come to be regarded as concrete, whilst choice has increasingly replaced obligation or tradition as a basis...