Critical Issues in Tourism Co-creation (Special issue of Tourism Recreation Research)

Guest Editors of Special Issue - Tourism Recreation Research journal

Critical Issues in Tourism Co-creation

Co-creation is the contemporary term used to describe a shift in thinking from top-down solution building to joint and collaborative processes whereby people and organisations generate solutions, build capacity, and create value together. In this Special Issue, we conceive co-creation as a metaphor or framing for a wide-range of well-established research practices and approaches that seek to address the gap between science and society. These approaches and
practices seek to debunk the idea that useful knowledge is only produced by scientific communities; they challenge the efficacy one-way communication from researchers to communities; and they encourage greater tolerance, freedom, proximity, communication, learning and sharing. As a concept, co-creation has gone through various waves of theoretical, conceptual and empirical development. Through this call for papers, we seek to look beyond dominant
business/management/marketing perspectives that focus on co-creating market value and innovation, and to excavate alternative motivations, values, logics, and purposes of co-creation in tourism. Theoretical excavations of co-creation
within the interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, and intercultural settings that characterise tourism are of interest in this special issue, as are critical interrogations of the light and dark of co-creation practices.

Papers that render collaborative communities in interesting ways, and that excavate co-creation in diverse geographical, developmental, scalar, temporal, virtual and mobile contexts are especially encouraged. Additionally, in
the interests of getting hands dirty in the co-creation process, we strongly encourage prospective authors to co-create their manuscripts with stakeholders beyond the academy.