Tourism and Collaborative Consumption: Perspectives, politics, policies and prospects

The Springer Series Tourism on the Verge is edgy, it pushes the conceptual envelope, it is future oriented and it addresses deeply complex and challenging issues. This proposed addition to the series will rise to the challenge. Tourism and Collaborative Consumption: Perspectives, Politics, Policies and Prospects takes an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral lens to explore the collaborative dynamics that are disrupting, re-creating and transforming processes of tourism production and consumption. It also explores the way that governments, industry and the new public sphere – global civil society, networks and governance – are dealing with these transcendental changes to create and re-create capacities to innovate, control and manage tourism.
During the first decade of the 21st century, a whole new array of global networked consumer practices arose, bypassing key intermediaries, industrial stakeholder constellations and preferred policy measures entrenched in traditional industrial models of tourism. House swapping, ridesharing, voluntourism, couchsurfing, dinner hosting and similar phenomena epitomize emergent collective innovations in tourism that are shaking the very bedrock of an industrial system that has been traditionally sustained along commercial value chains. A range of social, economic and technological factors has fuelled the collaborative economy. These include a shift away from ownership towards temporary access (or sharing) of goods; lower transaction costs between producers and consumers; direct host-guest relationships that contribute to a higher level of perceived authenticity of tourism experiences; and higher levels of consumer risk-taking. The boundaries between commercial and social aspects of tourism are increasingly blurred, with these new relationships thriving on trust, responsibility, participation and empowerment. There is also evidence that the rise of collaborative consumption has been fueled by values associated with conscious consumption and sustainable citizenship. These developments are explicitly and implicitly disrupting, transforming and re- creating tourism in a myriad of ways creating alternative tourism systems.

To date there has been limited investigation into the character, depth and breadth of these disruptions and the creative opportunities for tourism that are emerging from these shifts. This book provides this platform, and in doing so, provides both theoretical and practical insights into the future of tourism in a world that is, paradoxically, both increasingly collaborative and individualized.
This call for chapters targets theoretical, conceptual and applied chapter manuscripts. Issues that may be explored in chapter submissions may include:
• Theoretical and conceptual explorations of tourism and the collaborative economy
• Characteristics, extent and impacts of the sharing economy, P2P and collaborative consumption
• Collaborative production, value creation mechanisms and constellations
• Technologies in collaborative consumption
• Collaborative economies and sustainable citizenship in tourism
• Sharable cities/destinations
• The role and institutionalization of trust in the tourism sharing economy (peer to peer and
mediated transactions)
• Collaborative economy tourism entrepreneurs
• Industry and peak body responses to the tourism collaborative economy
• Regulatory approaches to tourism collaborative consumption
• The politics of collaborative consumption
• Impacts of the sharing economy on, for example, transport accommodation, hospitality, services
and intermediaries
• Community responses to collaborative consumption
• Trust, responsibility, participation and empowerment
• Future of the collaborative economy

Our focus in this book is to theorize the nature, character and operation of the collaborative economy and its impact on tourism, to explore the perspectives of and relationships among traditional and non-traditional stakeholders. We seek to examine the way that governments, industry and the new public sphere can and are responding to such challenges. The book will investigate what these changes mean for the future of tourism as a set of social, economic, cultural, environmental and political practices.