The importance of investigating the role of gender in tourism’s resilience to an economic crisis

• Autor(a) principal: Bakas, Fiona
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/38753
• topic: Gender; Resilience; Tourism; Entrepreneurship; Economic crisis; Greece

Resilience, defined as the ability of a system to recover from a shock or disturbance (Martin, 2012), is a subject receiving increased attention within tourism (Cochrane, 2010). This paper, focuses on how tourism is resilient to major negative economic events such as the Greek economic crisis. More specifically, the role gender plays in creating this resilience is investigated, by examining how female tourism entrepreneurs are resilient to a macroeconomic crisis. During research carried out in Greece over the period June to December 2012 during a macroeconomic crisis, semistructured interviewing and participant observation were used to explore twenty handicraft tourism entrepreneurs from a gender and economic perspective. Thematic analysis was then employed to analyse the information arising from these interactions. Social reproduction,which is the activitiescompleted on a daily and intergenerational basis to maintain human life, provides a nuanced lens on the political and economic elements influencing female tourism entrepreneurship. Using feminist economics to critically review current entrepreneurship theorising, this paper reveals how women’s dual roles as carers and entrepreneurs provide them with an inherent resilience to systemic shocks as they are more used to dealing with ‘crisis’ both within the family and when juggling family and work commitments. It is also observed that feminine caring positions and non-adherence to ‘classical’ entrepreneurial characteristics such as risk-taking, increase resilience in times of economic crisis. This suggests that feminine tourism entrepreneurship practices may produce an ‘antidote’ to some of the negative effects of the economic crisis.