Search Results (5)

This study examines how social media platforms influence tourism marketing strategies, consumer perceptions, and travel behaviors, addressing their sustainability implications. It aims to evaluate the current state of research on social media in tourism marketing, identify dominant trends, assess empirical evidence of impact, and critically highlight research gaps. The analysis focuses on three core marketing outcomes: destination image, travel intention, and user engagement—and includes a section examining sustainability considerations across environmental, sociocultural, and economic dimensions. The study uses a systematic critical review of 147 peer-reviewed academic articles published between 2015 and 2025, combined with a meta-analysis of 38 quantitative studies that report statistical effect sizes. The meta-analysis uses a random-effects model to compare the influence of different platforms and study contexts. Moderator variables include geographic region, platform type, and methodological design. Findings show that social media marketing has a statistically significant positive effect on destination image (Cohen’s d = 0.61), travel intention (d = 0.54), and user engagement (d = 0.43). The analysis also reveals geographic bias, limited research on emerging platforms, and a lack of longitudinal and ethical inquiry. Findings suggest that tourism researchers and marketers may have to adopt more context-sensitive, interdisciplinary, and ethical approaches. Critical sustainability concerns emerge, including “overtourism”, cultural commodification, digital inequities, and algorithmic biases. Further studies may focus on specific platform-related behaviors, long-term impacts, and integrated online strategies appropriate for global tourism diversity. Lastly, this paper advocates for context-sensitive, interdisciplinary, and ethically grounded approaches to ensure sustainable digital tourism marketing strategies. Full article

Individuals’ understandings of autism vary significantly, with multiple factors influencing their conceptions of autism. Varying conceptions between teachers and students in inclusive school settings may lead to diminished educational experiences for both groups. Our research was focused on exploring the influences on teachers’ and autistic students’ conceptions or misconceptions of autism. We were also interested in whether more implicit influences, including the commodification of autism, influence teachers’ and autistic students’ conceptions of autism. To ensure the research respected the needs of the young autistic participants, the purposes and processes involved in the research design were presented to a group of autistic adults for feedback and recommendations. Therefore, this paper presents two distinct aspects of the research: the outcomes of engagement with autistic adults in the design phase of the research and the outcomes of engaging with the research participants, six teachers, and four autistic adolescents. The qualitative research involved semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation responses. A key starting question encouraged the participants to share a feeling, memory, or image on hearing the word autism, and following an exploration of their responses, they were invited to select a photo from those presented that reminded them of an aspect of autism. The autistic adults contributed to the selection of the final twelve black-and-white images used in the photo-elicitation process. The adults were asked to select those they felt most closely represented their conceptions of autism. Of interest, only one photo was chosen in common by all research participants, but their explanations for choosing the image varied. Responses to other selected photos are also shared to highlight the varied conceptions of autism generated by the teachers and autistic students and the explicit and implicit influences on their conceptions. The influence of lived experiences and the commodification of autism were evident in the participants’ responses. Full article

Victorian artists were remarkably literate; they wrote autobiographies, diaries, and essays and befriended writers and journalists. Writing had become a way to present themselves on the open market and to generate a public image as individuals and collectively within the new professionalism emerging in the century. Letter writing was purposed to solidify and improve artists’ social capital, and their comments were always embedded in social relationships and practices. Thus, artists’ letters reveal much about the artworld structure; its players; and its overlapping spheres of social, economic, and professional identities. Their letters combined frankness with rhetorical pleading and contained their own press releases, studio invitations, and responses to criticism and were often intended for public consumption if used in critics’ reviews. Through letters, artists and critics revealed their reciprocal authority and agency and did not simply reflect the artworld but shaped that world. In their letters, economic gains were sublimated by artists’ desire for fame, Royal Academy acceptance, and a place in art history, then an emerging university discipline, seeking symbolic investments in their reputations and demonstrating that the market is cultural, not just economic. In their letters artists made clear that commodification does not destroy or pollute subjectivity. Full article

Tourism destinations located within rich and complex cultural contexts tend to offer a wide range of different experiences to visitors, spanning from standardized to more alternative ones. The quest for authenticity is central in the construction of tourism image and business, but easily raises questions related to appropriation, commercialization and trivialization. This study focuses on Jewish heritage tourism, a niche segment gradually turning into a mass tourism experience, through a qualitative research made in Krakow, Poland. Jewish-themed tourism in the area has gone through intense growth in spite of its dwindling Jewish population. As a consequence, the representation and consumption of the related heritage mostly occurs independently from the Jewish community itself and shows clear signs of commercial exploitation. The study results show that, in spite of the issues related to simplified narratives and staged practices, commodification, with its partial and functional reconstruction of the past, does not interfere with the religious or secular activities of the Jewish community, which is more pragmatically focused on present-day life. Full article

This paper analyses the multiplicity of image rights in Europe and the classical conflictual relationship between the right to one’s own image and copyright law. First, the paper analyses the main mechanisms of legal protection of a person’s image in selected jurisdictions, in both the civil law and the common law tradition. It is deduced that the civil law approach based on the right of privacy or the right of personality is expressed mainly either via a duality, reflecting the extra-patrimonial and the patrimonial attributes to one’s own image, or via the recognition of a single right with a dual nature. On the other hand, the protection granted to the right to one’s own image in the United Kingdom is piecemeal in nature, since it is based on a broad interpretation of the classic torts of breach of confidence and passing off, which fails to provide a coherent and effective legal framework for protecting the intangible asset of a person’s image, both in terms of its dignitary and its economic identity. After pinpointing the major differences in terms of protecting the right to one’s own image in Europe, the emphasis is placed on the relationship between image rights and copyright law. A classic approach considers image rights as an external limitation of copyright law, and therefore typifies the relationship between image rights and copyright law as being primarily conflictual in nature. Nonetheless, it is also possible to focus on the convergences between the right to one’s own image and copyright law, since both refer to intangible assets that combine both extra-patrimonial and patrimonial interests. In this respect, copyright law could serve as a model for the eventual creation of a European patrimonial right to one’s own image. While the idea of promoting the recognition or establishment of a new intellectual property right for protecting the economic attributes of a person’s image in EU Member States’ domestic jurisdictions, inspired by the US publicity right, is not new, and has been advanced by doctrinal circles both in the civil law and in the common law tradition, the new borderless realities of the dissemination and commodification of image, and the affirmation of strong protection for the dignitary attributes of a person’s image by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights emphasise the need for, and the feasibility of, the construction of a European patrimonial right to one’s own image. The unique prototype of copyright law consisting of a synthesis of extra-patrimonial and patrimonial interests could be used as a model for building such a right. Full article