Global Organization and Local Experts: Boundary Production in National Destination Marketing

• In Event: 288 - Regular Session. Globalization

Abstract

: This paper analyzes how global organizations of national tourism destination marketing produce comparatively similar, but distinct localities of cultural production. As nation-states compete in distant places to attract tourists, they install global marketing organizations, the National Tourist Offices (NTOs), to manage their global production of cultural images as assets in economic competition. The German NTO for example has established marketing offices in New Delhi for the Indian source-market, and in New York for the US-source-market. This multi-sited, qualitative study shows through a boundary-centered approach how these global marketing organizations and processes produce two such source-markets (India and USA) as distinct, bounded localities of global competition. This research contributes to the sociology of globalization by analyzing global cultural production through organizational and economic sociology. As I argue, this bounded distinction emerges not despite, but because of the global organization of national destination marketing. Local boundaries here are constructed threefold and interactive through: 1.) the organizational structures; 2.) shared practices and goals of organizational competition; 3.) local professionals’ claims to knowledge and expertise. This paper therefore contests that processes of cultural and economic globalization produce unbounded homogenization. It expands current arguments of cultural globalization by theorizing the role of global organizations and local experts within the standardization processes of global cultural production. It presents destination marketing as process of cultural globalization that is standardized in organization and principles, but also locally bounded and distinct. At stake in this process are the possibilities and limits of local control under global organizational structures.

Author

• Tim Rosenkranz, New School for Social Research