Insecure positions, heteronomous autonomy and tourism-cultural capital: A Bourdieusian reading of tour guides on BBC Worldwide’s Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour

Abstract

This article contributes towards debates concerning media tourism and tour guiding by using Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) arguments regarding field and capital to analyse performed tour guide identities on BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who Experience Walking Tour in Cardiff Bay. The article pursues three core arguments: firstly, that a Bourdieusian framework provides an enhanced understanding of the insecure positions that tour guides occupy in what is referred to throughout as the tourism field. Secondly, that the divergent pulls between heteronomous and autonomous poles which position tour guides are magnified in officially-located media tours because of the presence of branding and theming discourses. Thirdly, drawing upon empirical data from the Doctor Who tour, that the symbolic capital of official guides involves demonstrations of what is named tourism-cultural capital but such displays do not result in an increase in individualised status as any accrued capital transfers to the institutional level.

Changing roles of tour guides: From “agent to serve” to “agent of change”

“…A fundamental difference between a serving role and a changing role is about the underlying innate objective. The former is to please the tourists and provide comfort and convenience for an ultimate goal of securing guides’ sheer survival (Garner, 2017; Ong et al, 2014) while the changing role would not rely on a rule of thumb that “the customer is always right,” but ventures into “educating” and influencing the tourists. Of course, this change would become feasible because it is induced by the heightened travel needs and experience sought by the contemporary tourists.…”

“…By the same token, it is not surprising to see why guides need to please and satisfy tourists. The fact that guides take the role as “agents to serve” and work under a “quasi-slavery mode” has become a tradition in the guiding structure in order to generate a favorable guiding outcome and to avoid difficulties and complaints (Dahles, 2002; Garner, 2017; Wong, 2013).…”

Funko Hannibal in Florence: Fan Tourism, Participatory Culture, and Paratextual Play

“…Autoethnography has often been rejected in tourism studies due to a ''scientific realist' style' that 'holds that in order to be authoritative it is necessary to adopt the passive, third-person voice, which distances the writer physically, psychologically and ideologically from his or her subject' (Morgan and Pritchard 2005, 35). It has, however, proven useful in studies of fan-tourism (see Hills 2002, Booth 2015, Garner 2017. This is arguably due to the methodological difficulty in accessing large numbers of fan-tourists to research outside of official tours (see Lee 2013) or travelling as a participant to a fan 'meet-up' with others (see Phillips 2011).…”

Performativities, pandemic pressures and ‘patchwork’ tourism places: Editor-in-Chief notes

“…A high degree of docility of both the tourism worker and the tourists is required in such encampments, which further parallels the challenges and struggles of two forms of tourism work and workers in our two papers in this issue -Di Matteo and Daminelli's refugee camp and Ren's country under strict pandemic controls. Ren et al's study also adds to our nascent set of critical studies on tour guides and tour guiding (Garner, 2017;Ren, 2022).…”