Jie Wang’s research while affiliated with The University of Queensland and other places

The recent pandemic has restricted global mobility, thus necessitating new technology to be used to enable new forms of travel, e.g. travel live-streaming (TLS). While the prosperity of TLS has fuelled tourism industry economically, little is known about how it can psychologically empower its participants during crises. This research thus, from a processual view, explores the psychological empowerment stages enabled by TLS. By using a netnography approach, audio data derived from 28 travel live streams were collected over two years (2020–2022). Based on the empowerment theory, the findings propose a psychological empowerment process framework and reveal three processive stages of intrapersonal (initialization), interpersonal (participation, influence and control) and relational (interdependence) to develop such empowerment among TLS stakeholders. This study thus contributes to the psychological empowerment theory by identifying its progressive construct and emphasizing the unique role of relational stage, enabled by TLS. It also provides novel insights for TLS stakeholders to seek coping strategies in a powerless situation. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Travel live streaming (TLS) has become prolific on many social media platforms, yet the topic has received limited academic attention. This paper uses an affordance lens to explore travel live streamers and viewers parasocial interactions (PSI) and relationships (PSR). Using a more-than-human netnography method, 42 travel live streams, 36,800 real-time comments, and 36 interviews from travel live streamers were collected through three phases (pre, during and post live streaming). The findings show that TLS affordances provide opportunities to foster PSI through psychological, social, and technological dimensions, and thus develop parasocial acquaintances and conflicts. This study contributes to parasocial investigation and affordance literature by illustrating the relationship between technology affordance and participants’ behaviours in the TLS. It also uses a novel methodological approach known as key frame analysis to capture and analyse live streamed video footage. Practical implications are discussed for live streamers, destinations, and platforms.

Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) programs play an important role in the learning experience of students in higher education and are widely used in many institutions. Within a large public research-intensive university in Australia, WIL approaches are used in many faculties, although this paper is focused on WIL within the tourism discipline. One of the capstone subjects in the undergraduate and postgraduate tourism programs utilise a WIL framework, whereby mentors assist groups of students to conduct projects for industry clients during a 13-week semester. This study aims to explore effective mentoring processes within the WIL program environment by interviewing mentors to identify their guidance and coaching experience, skills and capabilities and their self-development in this mentoring process. This study’s outcome can assist to better understand the role of mentor in WIL for the design of future WIL programs.

Providing targeted support to people who are mostly impacted financially is critical in managing the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, governments face the challenge of pinpointing vulnerable workers. Building upon the multi-regional input-output model and a high-resolution employment profile, this research develops a new analytical model to recognize the vulnerable population in a crisis by identifying who they are, where they work and what sector they work for. The model was applied to Indonesia to assess tourism losses and found four regional hotspots where the employment vulnerability of women, youth and low-education workers was more than five times higher than the national average. Findings demonstrated that this model could assist with rapid and efficient targeted support for crisis management in the short term and continued investment for an equitable disaster recovery in the future.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, safety and hygiene are becoming key criteria for travel decision-making; therefore, understanding tourists’ perception of and response to risk, particularly health risk, becomes more prominent when the tourism industry is one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. After a comprehensive literature review on tourists’ risk perception, this chapter develops a risk perception model in the “tourist-destination relationship” context. Going from a more general discussion on tourists’ risk perception, this chapter reviews the literature on tourists’ health risk perception as a sub-field and illustrates it using a case study. This case study discusses Australian tourists’ risk perception of diseases or illnesses using pre-COVID-19 survey data. Based on the results of the case study, this chapter outlines an interdisciplinary research agenda to understand tourists’ perception of and response to risk in the context of tourist health and safety in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter concludes with urgent research themes and topics, disciplinary insights, methodology and future opportunities.

While internal service quality (ISQ) preconditions organizational service quality management, the tourism and hospitality management literature largely overlooks it. This study developed and tested a comprehensive model to understand the determinants and how they influence ISQ using an exploratory sequential mixed method. In study 1, we conducted 12 focus groups involving 86 hotel employees. ISQ is determined by three primary categories of organizational and personal practice: management systems (i.e., manage process, training and compensation), social systems (i.e., collaborative culture, interdepartmental communication and servant leadership), and personal characteristics (i.e., role stress, empathetic personality and collegial relationships). In study 2, we conducted 332 pairs of employee-supervisor questionnaires and confirmed the effects of these determinants on ISQ through employee's internal service orientation and efficacy. Distinct determinants interrelate to predict employees' internal service orientation and efficacy. This study thus provides hotels with targeted measures to improve their ISQ and competitive advantages.

Implicit psychological contract (PC) represents the dynamic employee–employer relationship, and unlike explicit human resource (HR) practices, PC is an underexplored topic in the crisis management literature. By capturing the dual perspective of hotel employers and employees through interviews, this study investigates the content of PCs and breaches of PCs during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The study identifies salient dimensions of employer obligations such as safety assurance and of employee obligations such as personal protection. While employees emphasized the transactional contracts to protect their individual interests, the employers tried to balance the transactional and relational contracts. The study proposes a dynamic PC breach model that indicates contract breaches lead to varied responses through a complex interpretation process. In general, the study suggests that ensuring mutual consideration is the best way for hotel employees and employers to pull through a crisis.

This study draws on tourism literature and current examples to propose that the emergence of Travel Live Streaming (TLS) provides new affordances for live streamers, viewers, and sponsors. Despite its increasing popularity and the new opportunities for communication and marketing in tourism, TLS has received limited attention in the academic literature. The aim of this paper is to use affordances theory to understand some of the key features and benefits of TLS. It is argued that TLS affordances include temporal, spatial, interactive, and media affordances. These affordances support new opportunities and actions for travel live streamers, viewers, and sponsors. The paper proposes an affordance-based TLS framework and concludes with three propositions to guide future research directions.