Question
This report is a critical assessment of two selected journal articles, namely – “Cuba in transition: Tourism industry perceptions of entrepreneurial change” (Hingtgen et al., 2015) and “Impacts and implications of an annual major sport event: A host community perspective” (Yao and Schwarz, 2018) in terms of their theoretical, philosophical and methodological adoption of approaches for the studies conducted. Both of these journals are centric to hospitality and tourism sector and present perspectives of stakeholders both direct and indirect in the tourism industry owing to private entrepreneurship initiations, a sports events in one case and rising privatization to engage a boost in sector in another. In the upcoming sections, each of the article would be analysed from all three stated perspectives to critically examine the effectiveness of the study.
This study conducted by a group of scholars (Hingtgen et al., 2015) is focussed towards establishing a firm connection between Entrepreneurial Climate or EC and the perceived barriers to creation of Private Enterprises or PE. According to the scholars, for any developing economy, it is very important to give a conducive environment to small businesses in any economy (Gnyawali and Fogel, 1994; Porter and Kramer, 2011) to enrol them as partakers to building a strong economy. Cuban economy is on a recovery path and there is still a lot to achieve (Kolodko, 2000). However, owing to certain changes in trade horizons such as allowing joint ventures with foreign investments up to 49% in sectors such as mining, hotel industry and so on gave a boost to economy (Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, 2005). As a result, the number of visitor footfalls increased and tourism got a boost. The scholars ventured into this study to seek answers to two specific research questions. First – the perceived barriers to people who planned to engage in PE activities involving tourism and secondly, the most perceived factors which facilitated the engagement from residents in such types of tourism related PEs.
For this, the scholars first delved into examination of what an actual Entrepreneurial Environment or Climate could be. Entrepreneurial Climate is a conducive business environment where business can thrive. Often, it could consist of trade norms, governmental policies, competition and such other factors. Following cue from various scholars, some of whom who supported that mostly it is the culture of people, the nation and the commerce environment provided which largely helps build entrepreneurial traits in any entrepreneur. Alongside, the government backed policies, trade norms also form the macro elements of this climate to function appropriately but largely they agreed that it was the culture that contributed a lion’s share to building a proper entrepreneurial environment. The study thereafter explores the history of Cuban tourism and economic downfalls, rise of dual currencies (Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, 2005), trade restrictions by US to showcase the tumultuous challenges faced by this small nation which valued family connections and networking and held it close to heart. It also showcases the devotion of Cuban administration to making tourism its strong economic pillar and support it has lent to the robust establishment of the tourism sector. The Cuban Entrepreneurial Climate was a major amalgamation of Cuban culture, administrative strategies, natural resources, historical movements and the infrastructure in the nation (Staten, 2015) which have all in all assisted the small time entrepreneurs to take creative steps to fulfil the gaps still present in a smooth operative flow. The study is significant according to the scholars, as it helped outline the present barriers and the favourable conditions encouraging or even discouraging the nationals from engaging in Private Enterprise activities in the tourism sector.
Task
As far as the theoretical approach goes, it looks like the scholars took the functionalism approach where their level of analysis was macro. They tried to study the relationship among different participants in the sector to draw inferences that could assist them to reach a conclusion to point out the facilitators and the barriers to creation of the proper EC for the private enterprises. The thought of this approach seems right it as it helps draw out the inner workings of the industry that give a glimpse of its functioning to the reader. This is evident through the varied job descriptions of the participants in the study which ranges from a university faculty, employed in State, a taxi driver in State to a Paladar owner as a private ownership, a café waiter in state employment, a Casa Particular owner, again in private. The scholars had attempted to present a large picture. Here, the problem lied in the fact that the participants were not equally distributed. Among the 14 participants, just 3 of them were in Private ownership. The study is about getting perspectives from residents that influenced or blocked them from entering PE activities in tourism sector and hence, they should have engaged more private ownership people or even students, unemployed but willing to mark themselves in the sectors to get a larger picture. Also, the age group ranged from 30s to 55. Only 2 participants, with some confusion (an age bracket was denoted against age) belonged to early twenties. When looked at the location, the participants are not spread equally. Majorly, participants belonged to Havana, there were 3 people from other two locations – Vinales Valley and Varadero. How could a single person represent a picture of an entire populous region. To present a solid perspective, more participants should have been seeked. Thereafter, among 14 participants, only 4 of them are female. In Cuba, the matriarchy has a lot of respect and involvement in the society, the scholars should have seeked further participation from more female members for this study. This looked like a drawback of this study where a macro level study has been attempted but the array has not been kept large.
In terms of methodological approach, the scholars opted for qualitative research. As per scholars, they thought that such research method aided adding depth to their research of understanding the economic climate of Cuba. This they sought to achieve by studying the factors that acted as a barrier or facilitator to the residents to indulge in PE activities in the tourism sector. It assisted the scholars in analysing and interpreting the meanings people assigned to the social events around them pertaining to their economic climate in the tourism sector (Ellis and Levy, 2009). Or, in their own words, the meanings people assigned to their real-world phenomenon. While qualitative researches do assist in getting a rich and diverse overview of people’s interpretations (Creswell and Miller, 2000), in larger opinion, a quantitative study could have also assisted this study. Hence a more pragmatic or mixed research approach could have added weight to this research by capturing data. It is not that the qualitative research conducted by them was in any way less than a quantitative study. This is because with qualitative study, there is a degree of flexibility and since interviews are more time and labour intensive, they do aid if the sample is small as the researchers already had. However, since they had a small sample size of willing participants which could have also been utilized to capture data related to their income, feasibility of financial aid, time period they seeked to venture in the PE activity, rank their barriers or even facilitators. Such data analysis could have assisted in presenting a clear all round, holistic view backed with personal perspectives achieved through interviews of all the 14 participants. The scholars collected data for twelve days in July of 2012. They conducted in depth interviews with professionals belonging to Cuban tourism sector. The interviews were of semi-structured nature. This was particularly opted for as they had only a single opportunity to capture data from the participant. As per the scholars, the interviewers did exercise certain flexibility in terms of order of questions and probing, but more or less, mostly the participants answered similar set of queries.
Article 1
As far as the philosophical approach goes, the scholars went with the constructivist approach. As per the research, this approach has functioned very well for the research. A constructivist approach drives recognition of understanding from understanding of phenomenon around in the environment (Mills, Bonner and Francis, 2006) and in this study, the subjectiveness of the participants matter as the study was about gaining perspectives to identify the facilitators and barriers to engage themselves in tourism related PE activities. The only problem in keeping such type of approach in this study could have been the fact that how a person with lesser or no knowledge or interest in the activities in surrounding yet, give a perspective to the context. The scholars did defend by stating that in this case of the study of EC of Cuba, it was how people perceived the EC which created its perceptions or feelings around it, constructivist approach was right.
This study was conducted by a group of scholars (Yao and Schwarz, 2018). It is an empirical study of Shanghai residents who have been hosting the World Golf Championships HSBC Champions Tournament over 10 years now. The study was to examine the impacts of this tournament on the host residents and how was their attitude towards further future hosting of the event. For the study, over 1200 Shanghai residents were enrolled as participants. This study was similar to the first study on some accounts. Just like the first study, this study also takes into the account the perspective of the residents towards a major event in their nation which generates a lot of tourism around it. China, as part of its 13t Five-year plans from 2016-2020 has planned for its largest city Shanghai (Chan, 2014) to not only sustain its position as an economic livewire but to also transform itself as a leading financial and commercial focal place and a top tourism spot (Zhao et al., 2019). As a result, the administrative policies to make this happen has taken place and there has been major transformation in pursuance of this goal for Shanghai, specially for hosting mega events like the World Golf Championships. There is also, the Shanghai World-Expo which brings in close to 73 million visitors from across the globe (LUSCOMBE, 2013). The city has been consistently hosting a lot of high profile sports events and has been regularly playing host to six major sports events such as F1 Grand Prix, The Association of Tennis Professionals World Tour Master 1000, The World Golf Championships, HSBC Champions, The World Snooker Masters, The Shanghai International Marathon and The International Association of Athletics Federation World Diamond League. China has invested hugely in these events and they have been continuing for almost over a decade now. The study is significant as per scholars as most of the available literature focused around the World Expo, not much is found on the impacts of the major sports events which are being held annually over so many years. The scholars rightly point out though that such events have impacts on the larger socio-economic and the political aspects within the economy and positively also to its residents (Larsen, 2014). Hence, gaining a perspective of the residents themselves is important. The study calls for a need for a more comprehensive approached study instead of studies just looking at such events from an economic impact level. The golf related events on a national scale has surged in their numbers, the WGC-HSBC Champions itself, which has a prize money worth USD 8.5 million needs further study which is currently lacking s per scholars conducting this study is the premise of the study. It addresses the research questions – of what may be the awareness level of localites to such a large scale mega-event in their city? If the residents hold any opinion of the impacts of this event on them? What may be the attitude of the residents towards hosting of this event in future? And the possible factors influencing local residents’ perception of the event and their support towards it.
Article 2
The theoretical approach or framework for this study has been set around the SET or the Social Exchange Theory as well as the SRT or the Social Representation Theory. The scholars have defended this selection as a necessity as it assists in explanation of local communities’ reactions and feelings to mega events of such scale in tourism. SET assumes that only when the relationship seems favourable, with people seeing benefits from their association, they would be willing to participate in future and if their benefits were outweighed by the costs, they would not be willing to venture into a partnership for such events (Fiske, 192AD). They were hence able to segregate the benefits and costs of the WGC-HSBC Champions for all the residents participating to be able to clearly define the positives and the negatives facilitating or acting as barriers to the impacts. SRT acknowledged the fact that since golf was not a quite known sport to the local residents, they may not be much aware of the event itself. In this case, they derived from their experiences or what they heard and saw to form an opinion. Both SET and SRT (Puddifoot, 1997) can infer experiences but not collect data. the scholars hence fulfilled the gap using a model for regression analysis to report their findings. This was a fruitful approach taken by the scholars as without this theoretical approach, it would have been challenging to measure the experiences of the people in an empirical study. This model of regression analysis was utilized by the scholars to test the correlation between the local residents’ attitude as well as support (Andereck and Vogt, 2000). Their model did show a trend of relationship between both. Their theoretical approach was an extension of the extensive literature review conducted by the scholars. They studied available literature on the awareness and perception of residents. Awareness was the recollection of the name of the event that showed that the residents knew about such a thing, perceptions or feelings was when residents picked up information related to the event owing to some stimulation. They also studied the perceived benefits and costs of mega sports events to showcase that it was largely economic impacts that are studied and not the social and cultural repercussions. They also further studied and discussed available literature that they studied pertaining to effect of such sports events on branding process of tourist spots.
As far as the methodological approach went, the scholars worked towards an empirical study or quantitative research. The empirical study also ways is useful on such large scale data gathering. Besides, with assistance of the collected data, deductive conclusions can always be reached easily. For the study, the scholars created a questionnaire for the survey participants. The best part of this survey questionnaire was this that they filtered the respondents in a smart way. Only those who were aware of the WGC-HSBC Champions could participate. For the next section of their survey they had taken help of the impact-item scale from the research of researchers they covered in their literature review. This turned out to be their research instrument. This is significant as the study referred to in Literature review (Fredline and Faulkner, 2000) explored the impact on residents post a mega sports event from the perception point of the residents. Not only this, so that the instrument remained valid to this study, the scholars went an extra mile and got it validated by three sports field experts which helped in further tweaking of the impact-item scale, some more elements were also added on their recommendation and approval. Additionally, the data collection was also done appropriately. Statistical analysis using SPSS was conducted which is a very reliable tool to make sense of data and get conclusions.
Analysis 1 – Cuba in transition: Tourism industry insights of commercial change
The philosophical approach taken for conducting the study was positivism. This is the right approach taken up for this sort of study where numerical data is analysed and there are certain pre-determined approaches to be tested (Alexander, 2014). It tested the research instrument and was able to correctly identify the variables of interest which was further able to be correlated to the research questions. By using standards of reliability and validity, the approach assists in measuring the information acquired through the survey questionnaires. Also, since it utilizes statistical approaches, the results are unbiased.
Conclusion
After going through both reports, it is evident that the second report – “Impacts and implications of an annual major sport event: A host community perspective” (Yao and Schwarz, 2018) has been planned, executed in a more thorough manner than the research work of the study – “Cuba in transition: Tourism industry perceptions of entrepreneurial change” (Hingtgen et al., 2015). While the first report is an empirical study, the second study is a qualitative analysis. The second study was intended to be a macro analysis however there were quite a few shortcomings which became a barrier to making the research much more resourceful. Firstly, the sample size taken is not well balanced, in terms of gender distribution, location distribution, sector distribution and age as well. The scholars intended to present a large picture however their selection could have been much better. Also, for the results intended by them, they ought to have conducted a mixed analysis to add more weight to their research. In comparison, the second analysis was well thought out. In this study, the theoretical approach adopted by the scholars was well compensated for with usage of appropriate statistical tools. The best part of the study was this that their research instrument was validated by expert sports field professionals who gave them their own inputs and recommendations which was applied by the scholars to reach conclusions. Their philosophical approach of positivism assisted them in making sense of information gained from the surveys.
All in all, both the reports presented the intention of different sets of scholars who intended to study the impact of tourism related events or actions in the nation on set of people, residents who intended to participate in PE activities and others on whom impact of mega sports event at national level needed to be studied. The intention of the studies was significant as contribution could enrich the knowledge of students and administrative units equally.
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