The Tipping-Point of Radicalization

Why would anyone put a tattoo in their face? If you get a tattoo to identify with a certain subculture, the surprise or shock-effect that the picture inspires is part of the motivation. The image will remain but the surprise will gradually fade, unless you keep drawing attention by the amount, nature and placement of new tattoos.

The growth of fascist movements is fed by the mobilization of social frustrations insufficiently covered by mainstream political parties. Their success – putting these frustrations on the political agenda – will therefore lead to a further radicalization. If there are no further frustrations to be uncovered, the fascist movement can only dissolve and become part of mainstream politics. The Dutch ‘Freedom Party’ PVV initially voiced anti-islamist sentiments invoking liberal principles; now that these thoughts have become part of parliamentary debate, the movement abandons these same principles and launches a website to incite overt anti-immigration anger (“Have you lost your job to a Pole, a Romanian or a Bulgarian?”).

There is no turning back. Once you have written hatred on your face, you can no longer approach a nice girl in the park and ask her out.

A 10 against fascism

A Bachelor dissertation read at Tilburg University, identifying right-wing PVV as a contemporary fascist party, was awarded the highest grade (10). This unusual qualification made national press and has sparked controversy.

The debate about the underlying hypothesis has become a political one. Unlike others, I do not object to linking PVV to fascism, and I believe it is extremely relevant to study how the far right will evolve in the next decade. I am hesitant though about the academic perfection attributed to the paper and about the publicity that was sought. The grade seems to be a statement. It means no favour to the student, nor to science, nor to a political cause.

It reminds me of a curious judgement I received when I was a student. I wrote a small paper about a movement inside Italian fascism. I analysed its ideological origins, and I could use the findings in later work on the effects of censorship. My supervisor (at the Dept. of Contemporary History) looked puzzled and asked: "But where does it say that you are against fascism?"

I still wonder whether medical students are also required to state that they are against cancer.

Future Scenarios for Spanish Tourism: Discussion and Wild Cards

At a recent conference on scenario planning for the tourist sector in Spain, I presented the following Key Uncertainties and Wild Cards:

	1. Empty stores are hardly an uncertainty anymore in cities in Northern Europe. Changing comsumer behaviour, combined with the current crisis, will undoubtedly have an impact on inner cities in Southern Europe and on their attractiveness to visitors.
	2. Climate changes may affect tourism to Southern Spain, especially water-intensive tourism (such as golf tourism). Water distribution may even become a source of increasing regional and violent conflict.
	3. A Euro-crisis will have an enormous impact on price sensitive mass tourism, as we find thoughout the Mediterranean. If a country were to abandon the Euro-zone, and would (re-) introduce its own currency, beach tourism would immediately start to flow to the lowest point. (Image: Post in German Bild Zeitung, TUI is already calculating in Drachmae).
	4. The Arab Spring was a protest generated by rising food prices, at least as much as an expression of the desire for freedom and civil rights. It is therefore not hard to imagine that the 'Arab Spring' may spread to (European) countries with a population facing similar problems. Greece? (Image: Fast Company, Let Them Eat … What? High Food Commodity Prices Could Cause A Global Revolution).
	5. Population Decline apparently has ceased to be just a steady (albeit dramatic) change in birth rates, and may be turning into a desastrous, crisis-driven exodus. Ironically, some superficial populism welcomes emigration as an answer to mass unemployment, whereas in fact mass emigration is a phenomenon indicating a steeper crisis curve. (Image: El País, 580.000 People are leaving Spain. Note: This is the size of the entire population of Málaga).
	6. Youth depending on Parents: this is actually a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. In the poorer south of Europe people have traditionally been obliged to live with their parents during their studies and early professional career, for economic reasons. The paradoxical consequence of this tradition is that young adults in the North learn to cope with adverse financial conditions, whereas their southern counterparts may postpone their autonomy until they are able to live under the same standards as before. Thus, they may have developed weaker defense mechanisms for times of crisis. (Image: blogpost Mummies’ boys – the number 1 variable for predicting Eurozone sovereign stress?!, M and G Investments).
	7. Gastronomy becomes unfashionable: This is a more specific, profession-related wild card. In recent decades, many businesses but also many educational institutes have focused heavily on high-end gastronomy, not necessarily a traditional phenomenon in Spain. It may well be that this "Gastronomy as Art" has been closely related to the years of (EU- and speculation-fed) opulence, and that it may therefore again be on the decline. Not that people will stop enjoying food; but they may no longer be interested in self-actualization through cooking.

Conference: Escenarios de futuro para el turismo, Centro Superior de Hostelería de Galicia, November 12, 2011.

Where is the trip going? (Wohin geht die Reise?)

"On May 17th 2011 Jeroen Oskam and Gaby Seemann were invited by the project group 'Netzwerk Toekomst' to take a glimpse into the future. Oskam not just highlighted the importance of being prepared for the future but elaborated why the ETFI rather works with uncertain factors and scenario planning than with common forecasts. Ongoing developments such as a decline in out of home expenditure and increase in investments in energy and living rather than food and tourism shape tomorrow's tourism. A decrease in income and increasing costs for tourism due to higher energy costs will change the tourism pattern. Moreover, in house gaming and online communities such as Facebook and Twitter make the current and future generation of children rather stay inside and not meet or play outside which will drastically change their way of travelling and leisure behaviour in the future."

From the Ems-Dollard Regio Magazine:

Open publication - Free publishing - More etfi

International Tourism Futures Conference

Panel discussion: the Future of Tourism and the Future of Tourism Education

From November 2-5, 2011, the European Tourism Futures Institute organized the 'Tourism Futures' conference at Stenden University, as a meeting for international futurologists, tourism researchers and professionals with the objective to find and discuss answers to the situations tourism will face in the next decades. Conference topics were the hotel of the future, creative cities/city-sumers, slow marketing and the global shift of political power. As keynotes the programme featured Márcio Favilla, as Director of Competitiveness at UNWTO and dr. Katharina Grünberg, from the scenario team at Shell, about their organisations’ tourism future study and scenario studies in general, respectively. Ari Björkqvist presented Haaga-Helia’s project on the future of hotels and conference centers, while Ian Yeoman looked at the hotel of the future from the perspective of the future of sleep.

The international conference was combined with the regionally oriented Fryske Toerisme Kongresdei.

Conference website: http://www.etfi.eu/conference.
Conference presentations can be downloaded from http://www.etfi.eu/conference/programme .

Stenden university claims a leading role in Tourism Research

Article in Science Guide, November 16, 2011:

16 november 2011 - Stenden Hogeschool wil een leidende rol in het Europees toerisme onderzoek. Op het Future Tourism Congres (FTG) is besloten een grote samenwerking aan te gaan met verschillende grote Europese universiteiten. Belangrijkste doel is het gelijktrekken van de dataverzameling in Europa.

Nuns

Conservatives refer to a ‘moral crisis’ when they see how changes in our social order affect human behaviour. This crisis would include phenomena as diverse as abortion or the London riots.

I see different signs of a moral crisis. This is the crisis of generations no longer capable of formulating collective answers to the current appearance of social contradictions; unable to imagine an alternative to the situations they question. Turning to guidelines which do not address contemporary questions – but escapist questions – is a sign of moral desolation. Clueless protests, young women becoming nuns and massive Catholic manifestations are all symptoms of such desolation.

We should be careful when drawing conclusions though. Is the number of nuns really growing, or is it just that we have become more interested in the phenomenon? Is the Catholic movement growing, or has it become more aggressive? We need data, not propaganda.

(Update, April 2012: Here are your data. Researchers at the University of Chicago find that the belief in God is in decline).

BBC News: 'The growing number of young women becoming nuns', October 24, 2011.

Don’t give them fish – rent them fishing rods. The ethics of private education

Cardinal Rouco Varela and Archbishop Manuel Ureña preside the Opening of the Academic Year at a private university (2011)

Spain’s development of parallel public and private university systems is not similar to trends in higher education elsewhere. The ownership, motivation and goals of private universities determine their approach:

• A strict regulation imposes on all universities a strict design for their study plans, with elements considered obsolete elsewhere. Universities cannot differentiate themselves in content.
• Private universities do not distinguish themselves through their faculty, on the contrary: due to differences in salary and other conditions (job security), there is a constant leakage of experienced teaching staff to public universities.
• A year’s tuition in public universities will add up to € 1.000 as opposed to close to € 10.000 in private universities. Now, what is the incentive for a candidate student for choosing a private rather than a public university, if the product is similar? In many cases, the motivation will be the minimum entry grades.
• Despite the quality of their student intake, private universities aim for a maximum drop-out rate of 2%, for obvious reasons. The percentage of students abandoning their studies may be closer to 25 elsewhere.

Private universities in general offer similar programmes, with less qualified faculty, to wealthy students that have hardly been selected on academic criteria – and will be allowed to complete their studies without exams becoming effectively selective. The degrees awarded by these universities constitute a certification of upper class origin, rather than an academic qualification.

Spain’s private universities are normally non-profit organisations promoted by the Catholic Church. An auto-financing socialisation tool.

Future or Futures?

(Opening of the Academic Year 2011-12)



Today I have been asked to give an extremely short presentation about the European Tourism Futures Institute. I believe that time will be sufficient to concentrate only on one single letter in the name of the institute: that will be the S that turns future into a plural futures.
When this name was first launched, we were asked whether this was a mistake: can you speak of multiple futures, while everyone knows there is just one future? This is a deliberate choice of our institute, that is crucial for our research strategy.

Leeuwarden in search of tomorrow's tourist

Newspaper article (Leeuwarder Courant, April 28, 2011) on a workshop organized by Stenden's European Tourism Futures Institute and delivered by dr. Ian Yeoman, at the local City Hall:

Anatomy of a moment

Last summer I received a message from the Dutch translator of Javier Cercas' latest book Anatomía de un momento, on Tejero's failed coup d'état of 1981 (February 23, or 23-F). The book had a reference to my PhD. dissertation, and the translator had questions about the links between the military and civil society; in particular, the "think tank", "discussion club", or however we should call it (this was in fact one of the translator's questions) Club Siglo XXI.

I had not even read the book yet (the usual confusion between urgent and important tasks).In spite of its popularity, it is sometimes hard to find (I had to buy several copies to give it to friends) because bookstores tend to classify this well documented history book as a novel. The reason must be, besides some personal notes, that it is extremely well written. Therefore, it reads like a thriller that perfectly conveys the tension and uncertainty of the moment.

From a historical perspective, documenting this uncertainty may be one of the most important contributions of this study. While it is unknown which political forces backed the military coup, and if these forces involved decided to back out in the evening of the 23d, how and why, no doubt that in a few decades mainstream historiography will claim to know an unquestionable truth, which will also be the most comfortable one: that all democrats were heroic, and that those who were not heroic went to jail.

The coup's failure meant the end of the democratic transition in Spain, which since then is considered to be a mature democratic society. It is, in the sense that there is a peaceful alternation of governing political forces. It is not, though, if we consider the mentality by which this alternation is seen as an usurpation of power claimed by traditional social forces.

Besides those interested in recent Spanish history, this book should be read by history students because of its research approach and style.

La importancia de anticiparse a los hechos

Second article in Hosteltur on Turnaround Management in hotels (see: Turnaround Management o como armarse contra la crisis). The original article was written bij Jean-Pierre van der Rest and Jan Adriaanse, and has been edited by Frans van den Broek and myself.

In memoriam, José Ángel Ezcurra, director of Triunfo magazine

In 1990 or 1991, when I was preparing my dissertation on Indice, press and censorship under the Franco-regime, I interviewed the former director of Triunfo, maybe the most unequivocal exponent of the opposition to the Franco-regime during its last two decades. José Ángel Ezcurra provided me with a wealth of data, not only memories about the history of his own magazine, but also insights into how censorship functioned and into social life in press circles in the 60s and 70s.

The website http://www.triunfodigital.es/ contains a large collection of Triunfo issues, as well as documents of interest for the history of this magazine. Jose Ángel Ezcurra tells his history of Triunfo in "Triunfo en su época" (269 pages, PDF-document).

José Ángel Ezcurra died on October 1, 2010 in Madrid (Obituary: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Jose/Angel/Ezcurra/director/Triunfo/elpepucul/20101001elpepucul_5/Tes).

“Look out for that big ant just north of your foot.”

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? Interesting article by Guy Deutscher in the New York Times (summary of his forthcoming book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages), discussing teories that relate language with ways of thinking.

Deutscher distantiates himself from the Whorf theory giving language absolute supremacy over thinking and quotes Roman Jakobson stating that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” Gender difference is an example: while French and German oblige their speakers to explicitly distinguish male and female friends, English doesn't; but on the other hand it does not stop its speakers from making that distinction if they wish to do so. Research even hints at the possibility that linguistic gender distinctions determine emotional connotations: Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.

The most surprising examples relate to how languages refer to space: whereas most languages use both egocentric coordinates (left, right of where I am standing), and geographic directions (north, south, east, west), there are languages that only use the latter type of directions. Speakers of the aboriginal Australian Guugu Yimithirr will therefore say, for instance: “I left it on the southern edge of the western table,” or “Look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Such references are a clear sign of a different awareness of space.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html.

City Marketing Conference (Eurhodip 2010)

From July 10-14, 2010, we organized the 17th yearly Eurhodip Conference in Zaragoza. Eurhodip is the association of vocational and university level hotel and tourism schools in Europe. At the last two conferences, Casablanca 2008 and Bologna 2009, the social aspects of the congress had outweighed considerations of content, and it was our intention to strengthen the academic perspective of the meeting. The topic of City Marketing was chosen, for two reasons: the current development and relevance of discussions in this field, on the one hand, and our city's recent projects as a perfect justification for the subject choice.



For the conference venue and image we chose the 2008 Expo area with a more contemporary city skyline, as opposed to more traditional landmarks in the city center such as the Pilar Basilique. We therefore used a wonderful picture of the Night Skyline that was made available by Zaragoza Turismo (Daniel Marcos and Félix Bernad), which had also been the inspiration for our new logo.

Bureaucratic / Political deadlock

Initiating an (official) University degree in Spain requires permission at three levels, once all internal barriers (the universities' own committees and boards) have been dealt with: the regional autonomous government which ratifies the economic and educational justification, the University quality board at national level and finally a verification, again by the local government, where compliance with all regulations is checked.

What are the advantages of an official title? You will get a document signed by the King of Spain, normally not earlier than two years after completing your studies because of a centralized process. Holders will have access to State exams to enter into the Civil Service. Besides that, an official title gives prestige, and is frequently displayed on office walls, a custom in other countries only known in barber shops.

Earlier this year we applied for authorization of an official Degree in "Management of Hospitality Businesses". We went past step 1, but at step 2 this denomination was not approved since it was too similar to "Business Management". There are no legal grounds for this objection, for the denomination of university titles has been liberalized with Bologna.

We were obliged to call the degree "Tourist and Hotel Management". It is likely that this new denomination will lead to objections or a veto from the local Government. The reason will be the use of the word "Tourism"; they are reluctant to allow titles that may compete with their own Tourist schools.

Negotiations are currently in progress. The results are unknown, except for one certainty bureaucracies always give: delays.

Daniel Pink on How the the 21st Century Brain Affects Creativity

Harvard Business Review, June 4, 2010.

Research Interests

My research interests in a broad sense are related to understanding the development of social theory in a historical context. In my studies of Spanish history, I have been especially interested in the censorship phenomenon, not only by analyzing censorship criteria and mechanisms, but also its repercussions in the development of political and social theory.

More recently my attention has shifted to Intercultural Communication. I found that the explanation of cultural differences in this new discipline is weak or non-existent (“historically eclectic”, as Hofstede states). I am interested in understanding whether observing and measuring cultural behaviour lead to valid conclusions, and to what extent these observations are determined by cultural perspective.

At the same time, my professional interest in the development of higher education curricula has led me to explore the relation between academic learning and professional performance. I especially seek to understand the development of managerial expertise and to apply these findings in the design of hospitality programs.

Dostoyevski Murals too grim

Pictures of the new Dostoyevski murals in the new Moscow metro station. As many other stations, it looks impressive and somewhat intimidating. I hope we actually get to see the greyscale marbles, in spite of the fear of side-effects.

According to the Moscow Times, the opening of the new Dostoyevskaya station in the Moscow metro was cancelled over fears that the grim murals may lead to suicides. The controversy started after pictures of the construction site (including the murals) were published on a blog at http://d0cent.livejournal.com/124730.html:

I-Shou University

Last May 6 and 7 I visited I-Shou University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. I gave two guest lectures on "Intercultural Communication" and "Learning Management and Becoming a Manager: Two Different Things".

I-Shou University is part of a large complex on the outskirts of Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second city, with the University (15,000 students), an international school, a hospital, a 4 and a 5 star hotel, a mall and a theme park (both to be opened soon), all owned by the same investor. I understand that the "E" in E-Da World (name of the theme park and mall) refers to the owner, "Da" standing for "big". As all (167!) Taiwanese universities, I-Shou faces the problem of adverse demographics and has opted for an active internationalization policy. Our cooperation is the result of this, and I hope this experience will be extended to the international school and ours in Madrid.

My visit was to the International College of the university. Hard to tell, from a short visit, how good a university really is; facilities are hardly an indicator. I was impressed by the I-Shou students, who not only showed up in large numbers on their (lecture-free) Friday, right before the Mothers' Day weekend, but also asked serious questions. The first thing, almost unthinkable in Europe, the latter very rare; one should expect this to be even harder for more introverted students.

We have two students now doing their internship at the Crowne Plaza during its (sometimes chaotic) opening stage. "After this", they confided me, "we can face any challenge in the world".