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Embattled consumptionscape of tourism: Networked urban contention against inbound tourist shoppers in Hong Kong
Abstract
This chapter examines the emergence of urban contention against inbound tourist shoppers in the Chinese global city of Hong Kong. Drawing on netnography of citizens’ digitally enabled activities and qualitative analysis of news coverage, this chapter discusses how the local residents self-mobilised on the internet and engaged in a series of contentious activities, ranging from confronting shopping tourists, storming stores in major tourist nodes and nurturing political consumption in the communities. Moving beyond conventional protest demonstrations, the analysis of these networked acts of urban contention adds to our understanding of how bottom-up attempts are assembled with the use of mobile social media to balance neoliberal, tourist-oriented planning of urban spaces and livelihoods. With the case of Hong Kong, this chapter illustrates the impact of shopping tourism on local communities as well as the critical responses it prompts from digitally savvy urban dwellers. It informs the study of New Urban Tourism by revealing the growing tension between local communities and inbound travellers through the lens of cross-border consumption and mundane networked politics.
... These confinements of emancipation, such as the protest camps of Occupy Movements (Castells, 2012;Feigenbaum et al., 2013;Juris, 2012;Ting, 2017) and autonomous social centres ( (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010); Yates, 2014), 'are based on autonomy and selfreliance while often being disconnected from their surroundings' (Véron, 2016, 759). Yet political resistance may also emerge in precarious and ostensibly apolitical settings (Ting, 2022;Ting and Chen, 2021), where people engage in the practices of 'geographical insurgency' to challenge 'normative geographies in ordering of "appropriate behaviour"' (Cresswell, 1996, 38). In particular, discussions about these forms of spatial politics fall short of investigating how resistance towards normalising the rationales of government or oppression can occur in current networked urban spaces that are 'conductive to rhizomatic growth and nomadic movements that allow difference to be related in new and creative ways' (Sreekumar, 2020, 116). ...
Although heterotopia has been widely studied as relating to the marginal or subliminal sites of the city, the ubiquity of social media and mobile technology has facilitated the development of transient forms of heterotopia in support of large-scale urban movements. Using the case of Hong Kong’s networked mall protests, this article examines acts of mobile activism, whereby the urban landscape and its routines are temporarily reconfigured and turned into spaces of popular dissent joined by people in all walks of life. Drawing on multiple data sources and guided by connective ethnography, this study illustrates how digitally connected protestors created fleeting counter-sites in and across shopping centres to defy urban policing and subvert the spatio-temporal order it imposed. Rather than reclaiming urban public spaces to offer reservoirs of freedom, the protestors enacted occasions of opposing otherness not outside of urban repression but rather carved out of it as a nimble, counter-normative type of political resistance. By charting the contours of several types of these networked mall protests, this article reveals how contemporary mobile activism invents and reproduces alternate protest time-spaces. Focusing on their capacity to refashion contentious political life in the city, it offers nuanced insights into the latest form of spatial political engagement in a networked urban setting.
... In this context, local residents, whose access to urban resources, including commodities, infrastructure, and space, was limited by the widespread tourist consumptionscape, began to increasingly use camera-equipped smartphones and social media apps to instantly report and exhibit on prominent Facebook pages the changing urban landscape and livelihoods of affected districts (Ting & Chen, 2021). These mobile and ad hoc Facebook communities constitute a "networked counter-public," where local residents converged to discuss the negative externalities of inbound ST and attempted to use moblogging to address local issues "in the dynamic interaction between cyber-space and urban space" (Castells, 2012, p. 60). ...
Using digital ethnography to examine the daily mobile (micro)blogging (moblogging) practices of local residents as they confronted a wave of inbound shopping tourists in pre-Covid-19 pandemic Hong Kong, this article explores how the latest mode of mundane citizenship emerges from the communicative mobility of urban dwellers equipped with mobile phones and social media applications (apps). Recent research on the role of mobile devices and social media apps in citizen participation has focused on more visible forms of civic-political events, such as protests and voting, and tended to neglect the effects of mobile communication performed during banal travel and quotidian activities. This article offers an alternative reading of the relevance of mobile social media (MSM) in contemporary public lives by examining how they open up new temporalities and spatialities for counter-public engagement in the contexts of mundane urban mobility. The findings demonstrate various moblogging practices that entail modalities of counter-public engagement that traverse the personal, proto-political, and communal, and reveal how local residents used these modalities to articulate alternative public agendas, connect acts of consumer activism, and perform communal belonging vis-à-vis inbound shopping tourism amid their daily routines and modest journeys. Focusing on mobile socialities enabled by smartphones and networking apps, this article explicates how contemporary moblogging can, on the one hand, extend people's capacity to engage in citizen talk and connective action, while on the other hand, allow them to flexibly connect and contribute personal photobiographies and narratives to counter-public communities. By unpacking the novel pathways to citizen participation, it offers insights into new ways in which everyday mobile communication can be transformed into public involvement, albeit often in agonistic and emotional forms, and the role of MSM in this process.
This paper reviews varying theoretical approaches in political economy and their application to the analysis of tourism development. It examines the shifting focus of enquiry and traces the evolution of the political economy of tourism from an earlier generation of predominantly technical, empirically-driven analyses of tourism’s contribution to economic development through to the various strands of development theory that have influenced and which continue to shape critical scholarship in the political economy of tourism. Particular emphasis is given to recent theoretical advances in which the application of cultural political economy and Marxian thinking herald a promising future for the political economy of tourism.
The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses such as “We Are the 99%” that travel easily through social media. in many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. in some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. in other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.
There is great interest in understanding the complex behaviors of consumers. One facet of consumer behavior is the ‘involvement’ construct. Involvement is a person’s perceived relevance of the object based on inherent needs, values, and interests.
There is a plethora of shopping malls all over the US. Major metropolitan cities are over-malled! Despite the abundance of malls close to their residence, American travelers shop at comparable malls while tourists in another city. There exists a gap in the literature about this phenomenon.
This study surveyed 485 tourist shoppers residing in metropolitan areas to address this gap. It examined the interplay of their shopping involvement with demographics, push motivators, pull motivators, shopper-tourist cluster typologies, and the amount of time and money spent shopping while on a trip. This study created a profile of tourists based on their level of shopping involvement. It segmented them into high-, medium-, or low-involvement tourist shoppers.
The more highly involved tourist shoppers were female and had limited formal education. Further, they indicated they were more interested in shopping than in many other activities. Involvement levels were consistently associated with both push and pull factors in a hierarchical manner. Respondents strongly motivated to shop by push and pull factors were consistently found to be highly involved tourist shoppers. Involvement was a significant predictor of overall satisfaction with a shopping center. Involvement levels were significantly linked to tourist-shopper cluster typologies. High-involvement tourist shoppers were significantly more likely to have saved for shopping on their trip. However, involvement was not found to be a predictor of time or money spent on shopping while on a trip.
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on “time” and with “pressure.” Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city's infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers' efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state's neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.
In recent months, masses of Hong Kong citizens have taken part in a remarkable wave of protests, known as the Water Revolution. Ignited by the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, and later in response to police brutality and rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of protestors abruptly gathered in various parts of the city to rise up against the encroachment of the incumbent regime. Through novel uses of social media and mobile technology, they acted in concert to confront riot police in wildcat actions. In effect, they exhibit a contemporary type of smart mob, as digitally savvy citizens engage with each other in largely ad hoc and networked forms of pop-up protest. This article illustrates both the continuity and changes in the recent development of a nascent smart mob in Hong Kong. It fleshes out how its protest repertoires and movement objectives have emerged and evolved vis-à-vis state suppression in the global city of East Asia. With a focus on changing contours, this article brings to the fore the pragmatic and temporally emergent properties of the smart mob to consider the widespread and protracted movement in Hong Kong.
This article shifts attention from elite actors’ Internet uses to self-joining citizens’ everyday networked activism at the grassroots. Stepping beyond conventional technocentric accounts, it expands on contemporary practice theory to examine the role of digital media in recent movement protests, focusing on their embeddedness and (re)productiveness in everyday practices. Based on the case of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, this article investigates the ways in which activist digital media usages were enacted and retained as part of people’s daily routines, work patterns, and habitual activists. It presents qualitative findings to explicate how, through the reworking of mundane routines with digital media, the ordinary engaged in everyday networked activism traversing quotidian activities and movement participation. By situating activist media in the increasingly mediated mundane, this article offers insights into the emergence and expansion of contemporary networked activism and reveals the nuanced interplay between contentious politics and everyday life therein.
New middle class tourists, especially those consumption-driven, urban dwellers from emerging economies, have acquired a taste for shopping tourism and quickly become the majority of the inbound visitors who bring business niches to the post-industrial, host societies. In this trend, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the corresponding reactions, confusions, and concerns in the host societies. This article offers a critical reflection on the manifestation of ‘unwelcome shopping tourism’ as well as its local resistance and conflict in the context of changing consumption milieu contributed by the growth of shopping tourism. In this article, we discuss and challenge the neoliberal presupposition guiding much of today’s shopping tourism agenda that tends to maximize short-term business interests at the expense of local consumers’ mundane lifestyles and native cultural identities. We propose a typology of conflicts pertaining to the growing tensions between local residents and shopping tourists, which should inform issues regarding local residents’ political consumptions and sustainable tourism development in global cities.
In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today.
Recent protest movements worldwide have painted a picture of youth striving in times of crisis to secure self-determination and justice for more democratic futures. While traditional theory of collective behaviour has viewed youth activism as the result of structural strains or collapse of order, recent studies have focused attention upon the role of future orientations merely as movement strategies. What is missing from these accounts and what this article seeks to address is the initiatives of youth to carry out their future-oriented agendas and struggles at the grassroots. Drawing upon interview data with young citizens, who took part in recent political activism in response to a democratic crisis in Hong Kong, this article illustrates how young people involved in political struggles as they enacted life goals and identities. Rather than static political ideals, these visions of future were constantly reconstituted in the activist practices alongside unfolding crises. This article thus re-theorizes youth activism simultaneously as the manifestation as well as the constitution of alternative futures in practice. Moving beyond the notion of youth activism as passive reaction to repression or abstract political anticipation, it leverages for youth agency and everyday experience to understand youth’s political imagination and commitment to social transformation.
This essay explores how contemporary political life is framed through engagements with material forms. Extending work that has demonstrated that politics is best understood not as a discursive or institutional sphere but as the effect of material engagements, the essay asks, just how is it that materials become the grounds for politics? Focusing on the history of a road construction project in the Peruvian Amazon, the essay illustrates how politics becomes realized through engagements that entail the affective force of emergent materialities that break through or rupture a normalized understanding of sociomaterial relations. This rupture cracks open a space for material diagnostics, wherein both familiar and unfamiliar political forms are able to take shape. Thus in material diagnostics are found both the potential for ontological difference and considerable repair work wherein the grounds for a future politics is remade.
The popularity of social networking sites bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy social movement organisations as political curators that employ social media platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.
A major limitation of most political economy studies of globalisation is that they view globalisation almost exclusively in terms of deterritorialisation. This essay, in contrast, emphasises how increases in the transnational mobility of people, capital and information can also result in reterritorialisation, which is the increased relevance of location and characteristics of place for global economic activity. In contrast to the erosion of the territorially based powers of nation-states often associated with deterritorialisation, the reterritorialisation of economic activity can increase the power and regulatory influence of state, societal and transnational agents who are able to exert control over territorial assets and the reterritorialisation process. The essay uses the concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation to develop a framework to analyse the changing political economy of one of the most understudied aspects of globalisation, the international tourism economy. With a focus on the development strategies of states in the Middle East and North Africa, the essay explores efforts to generate ‘experiences of place’ for tourists and territorial-based economic rewards for firms and their political consequences.
Attention has been paid to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? This book examines key characteristics of Web activism, and investigates their impacts on organization and participation. It argues that the Web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: Sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; ... More
Attention has been paid to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? This book examines key characteristics of Web activism, and investigates their impacts on organization and participation. It argues that the Web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: Sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. A rally can be organized and demonstrators recruited entirely online, without the cost of printing and mailing; an activist can create an online petition in minutes and gather e-signatures from coast to coast using only his or her laptop. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, the authors show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest; the less these affordances are leveraged, the more superficial the changes. The rally organizers, for example, can save money on communication and coordination, but the project of staging the rally remains essentially the same. Tools that allow a single activist to create and circulate a petition entirely online, however, enable more radical changes in the process. The transformative nature of these changes demonstrates the need to revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions about social movements.
In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
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