This article considers the three modes of signification of images (i.e. designative, appraisive, and prescriptive) to understand incongruences between different image formation agents. Quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to compare texts (208,348 words) and pictures (4,990) from four sources (DMO, agencies, guides, and blogs) of images about Barcelona. The results explained incongruences between sources. Blogs and agencies tend to offer more images with appraisive meaning than other sources. Guides and blogs tend to offer more prescriptive images of the destination. This study emphasizes that the designative, appraisive, and prescriptive components are valuable conceptualizations to study tourism destination image.

Lifestyle-oriented motivation (LOM) is the reason that the owners of many small enterprises start and operate businesses in the tourism industry. Using a sample of guesthouses in historic Chinese towns, this study examines how LOM affects these small businesses’ corporate social responsibility (CSR), performance, and owners’ intentions to sustain operations. Applying the structural equation modeling approach to a sample of 154 guesthouses, this study finds that LOM positively influences CSR, performance, and owners’ operational intentions. Specifically, LOM promotes each dimension of CSR activities (product, environment, community, employees, and heritage protection); however, it only increases firms’ subjective performance and has no significant influence on their objective performance. The mediating effects of CSR and performance on the path from LOM to owners’ operational intentions are also demonstrated. Lastly, the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper explores the power of both traditional culture and modernity, their interaction, and ecotourism as defined and developed in China, and suggests a new framework for ecotourism policies. It argues that issues in ecotourism should reflect scientific and empirical evidence, but also integrate traditional Chinese cultural beliefs, and political and social factors, to achieve sustainability. The protected area system, central to ecotourism in China, was introduced by government to bring modernity and globalization. The management model follows western values, tending to separate humans from nature for conservation purposes, using institutionalized western zoning systems. This approach is inconsistent with millennia-old Chinese cultural values about relationships between nature and humans, centred around tian ren he yi – humans and nature as a unified entity. Instead of managing conflicts, attaining harmony (in a subjective experiential way) is the fundamental Chinese approach. The paper explores conflicts between the two value systems, and how Confucian “middle ways” are being crafted to balance the fast-growing special needs of Chinese eco-tourists with the top-down regulation of protected areas. It notes new developments in protected area tourism management in the West, and opportunities to blend Chinese traditional values about harmony with evolving western practice.

A transition in theoretical orientation from migration to mobility in the study of geographical and social movement in contemporary China highlights and resonates with significant political, social and cultural transformations in the past 40 years. Changes in mobility patterns also reveal a shift from production-led peasant worker migration, which has dominated international academic studies on China in the past few decades with a focus on working individuals driven by market forces, to a more individualized and diverse consumption-led mobility. Although the mobilities paradigm has not been an important lens for theoretical investigations of China to date, it provides insights into contemporary social changes that may otherwise be missed. In this paper, we use a focus on lifestyle mobility to investigate changes in mobility systems and new inequalities and dynamics. The analysis shows that the emergence of a new middle class, the arrival of a consumerist society, and traditional Confucian culture have substantially influenced a ‘mobility shift’ in China. However, misalignment still exists between the rapidly growing numbers of lifestyle migrants and the immobile social infrastructures that are not designed to accommodate such lifestyle mobility. A static social and political infrastructure continues to challenge traditional relationships between being at home and away, between individuals, families and communities, and between individuals’ aspirations for life elsewhere and obligations to be fulfilled in their home areas. The examination of middle-class lifestyles can also help in understanding those traditional relationships at a time when consumption-led mobility is becoming increasingly prominent in Chinese society.