Humanistic Tourism: Values, Norms and Dignity

Human dignity has experienced limited attention in tourism studies. The interlinked dimensions of dignity in tourism urgently ask for broad avenues of future research, as tourism is both an information-intensive industry and an ＂experience good＂ resulting from the relationship and co-creation processes involving hosts and guests in different political, socio-economic, cultural, and environmental contexts. These contexts play a role in how an individual’s values, norms, and experiences may be experienced in tourism.

This edited book is one of the first attempts to apply to tourism a humanistic management approach entailing a re-discovery of the value of human life, dignity, and awareness of the ethical dimensions of work. The book develops awareness of the contemporary relevance of the human dignity concept to interpret and manage the weaknesses of traditional approaches to tourism and cope with the challenges and new scenarios, including the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It presents ethical values and norms as both foundations and vehicles to dignify tourism stakeholders’ vision and mission (policy, strategies, and practices) as well as people/tourist beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. It grounds humanistic education as a pervasive mechanism to innovate tourism management contents and practices by offering to different targets new educational and training formats or framing differently traditional ones. Presenting both a critical and a positive approach to tourism management, the diversity of disciplinary approaches, case studies, and examples makes the book attractive to a variety of readers including tourism scholars, researchers, practitioners, and postgraduate students of management and organization disciplines.

Maria Della Lucia is Associate Professor of Tourism and Business Management at the University of Trento, Italy. Her main areas of research, teaching, and training include local development and sustainability, destination management and governance, culture-led regeneration, creative cities and creative tourism, digital and social media marketing, and economic impact analysis as investment decision-making tools. She has published her research in prominent journals.

Ernestina Giudici is a retired Full Professor of Management and Business Communication at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Her main areas of research include business communication, storytelling and digital storytelling, humanistic management and integrity, corruption, ethical sustainable development, sustainability, and neurotourism. She is part of the managing team of the International Humanistic Management Association and has published widely in various prestigious journals.