To Örebro University

This paper explores the collaborative methodology of conducting working participant observation in a team setting to study the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Sweden. It aims to refine and extend the method of working participant observation by highlighting the benefits of a team approach to intensive ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on critiques of 'traditional' geographical methods that rely heavily on interviews, the researchers immersed themselves in the physical labour of housekeeping alongside housekeepers, engaging their own bodies as research instruments. The research team navigated the complexities of embodied labour, reflecting on how their own identities (gender, age, nationality) influenced interactions and observations. The study emphasises the importance of collective reflection and dialogue between researchers, who debriefed each other daily, transforming individual experiences into shared analytical insights. Taking this approach challenges methodological conservatism by integrating feminist and intersectional perspectives and demonstrates how working participant observation can provide deeper understandings of workplace hierarchies, bodily labour, and power dynamics. By focusing on the bodily presence of both researchers and workers, the study highlights the unique insights gained through participatory, team-based ethnographic research in service work.

This paper examines how restructuring of hotel work affects work identities and attractiveness of work, based on 29 semi-structured interviews with staff at three hotels in Sweden. The external crisis - the COVID-19 pandemic - played a significant role in justifying restructuring, shifting power dynamics in favor of employers and enabling change. The results of this study indicate that restructuring led to vague role descriptions, which affected work identity, job security and attractiveness of work. The study highlights the tension between job security and preservation of work identity, showing that while changes in work roles can provide job security, they also alter the context upon which work identity is built. This duality has created dilemmas for employees, forcing them to accept changes in work identity or jeopardizing job security. The study also emphasizes how restructuring risk affecting career opportunities, work roles, hierarchical levels and turnover intentions.

The aim of this article is to analyse and discuss policies and planning for rural housing, with a special focus on social sustainability. In this endeavour, we review research with such a focus and put this in dialogue with an analysis of the contemporary situation regarding rural housing challenges and policies in Sweden. Countrysides in Europe, including Sweden, are diverse and face different housing-related challenges. The literature illuminates spatial as well as socio-economic inequalities. Both a low demand for housing related to a shrinking labour market and out-migration and a high pressure on the housing market triggering restrictive or conditional measures to avoid speculative developments and rural gentrification affect social sustainability. Our case study on policy and planning measures that deal with rural housing in Sweden shows that there is a need to further investigate and understand the role of housing in rural areas for various groups and people with fewer resources, including further elaboration on the connection between mobilities and housing needs. A narrow focus upon housing provision that does not take into account access to services and communications as well as contemporary mobility flows of different groups challenges equality and well-being in rural areas. In Sweden, housing is primarily a municipal, local responsibility. However, exogenous forces or trends mean that housing issues play out at both the regional and national levels and put the municipalities in a difficult situation.

This paper takes its starting point in a local village in Bergslagen, Sweden and discusses how industrial transitions and external economic and political forces shape the local social relations and the potential for social sustainability over time. The focus in the chapter is on the different waves of visitors to the village, such as tourists, refugee migrants and socially displaced citizens looking for housing, and how these visitors are welcomed, cared for or coped with by local actors. Sustainable visits, we argue, is a concept dependent on how we perceive those who visit and those who get visited in specific places. How do so called hosts and guests interact and relate and how are practices of hospitality and care developed or contested when the well-being of the residents is put under pressure? Through interviews ,observations and analysis of media documents we investigate and unpack the social dynamics in Fredriksberg shaped by materialities and mobilities related to its peripheral location in both economic, social and geographical terms. The results show how local actors reflect on their possibilities and obligations to contribute to a more socially sustainable local community.

In literature on tourism in northern or ‘Arctic’ areas and on regions and places in northern areas, terms such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ are often used to distinguish people and places from each other. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the ‘indigenous’/‘non-indigenous’ categories as well as the geographical categories to which they are linked, using examples from tourism in northern Fennoscandia and northwest Russia, selected as areas with circumstances that vary greatly both locally and regionally. Specific focus is on the construction of labels and restrictions of use, particularly regarding handicrafts/souvenirs as a specific object of indigeneity to separate it from other objects. The study reviews the processes in tourism for constructing, labelling, and valuing – and thereby also exerting power upon – specific conceptions, and thereby also on the contesting of such processes amongst broader, but often unacknowledged, local groups.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the destination image of Uzbekistan presented by the DMO and the destinations images emerging from user generated content in social media posts. In this study, promotional images and user-generated images on the platform Instagram were examined by using content-semiotic analysis. The main findings show that the destination image of Uzbekistan is dominated by heritage and reference to ancient cultural traditions of the region. However, the image represented through user generated content on Instagram is more diverse and to a larger extent depict the destination through natural heritage and experiences in the natural landscape. Furthermore, Uzbekistan is concurrently trying to create a post-Soviet identity through a focus on its history prior to the Soviet past, with focus on heritage of the Great Silk Road which highlight that destination image construction is related to geo-political processes in society which includes contestations of national identity.