This article investigates possible pathways of habitus change by informal tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is depicted as a person's understanding of the world. Do people adapt their worldview in response to only external stimuli? Through ethnographic fieldwork including participant observations and active semi-structured interviews with 53 participants, this paper identifies a classification of four modes of habitus adaptation: (1) Understanding and appreciating the field and its conditions, (2) Challenging core beliefs systems, (3) Applying a practical sense to ‘objective possibilities’, and, (4) Challenging non-reflective dispositions. We argue that charting the modes of habitus adaptation could help policymakers understand the change processes of informal entrepreneurs in the tourism sector and their willingness to change.
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This paper analyses the ways in which informal mediation channels facilitate service delivery in the Citizen Service Bureaus at the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and give rise to an interplay between formal and informal institutions. In particular, the personal backgrounds of brokers as informal mediators and how they ensure their acceptance amongst service seekers are explored. Further, the motivations of the service seekers to solicit help from these mediators as well as institutional responses from the municipal administration along with other relevant actors like the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi are examined.
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The purpose of the research was the development of a questionnaire that can measure the behaviour of groups of students (for instance departments' cohorts) in Personal Information Management (PIM). Variables for the questionnaire were derived from the international literature on PIM. The questionnaire has been tested out on 79 students (last year before graduation) from four different departments of the Academy of ICT&Media at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. The students' responses were checked on consistency, item non response, desirability bias and information value of the results. All these criteria indicated that the questionnaire is an adequate tool for the assessment of PIM at an institutional level. The results that have been found for the four departments have not yet been discussed with the managers of the Academy and those of the individual departments. [De hier gepubliceerde versie is het 'accepted paper' van het origineel dat is gepubliceerd op www.springerlink.com . De officiële publicatie kan worden gedownload op http://www.springerlink.com/content/n0h3k71u85024xnt/]
A growing part of contemporary arts practices in the Netherlands has reoriented itself from studio and institutional art towards self-organization in self-run initiatives. In this type of contemporary art, self-organization is not only a way of gaining economic independence. Just as importantly, it is a form of expression where the organizational structure becomes the art project: self-organization-as-contemporary-art. Often using informal and underground settings, these initiatives reach audiences who have little or no access to the established system of cultural institutions. Aiming to bring art closer to everyday life, they often are no longer easily recognizable as art projects at all. Instead of individual studio practice with the artist as the central figure, these projects and initiatives are based on participation and non-hierarchical collaboration and rarely produce art objects for the traditional gallery art market. Examples include restaurants run as art projects, experimental schools, radio stations run as art performances, and do-it-yourself publishers. Rotterdam is an ideal case study for this development, since the city has played a role in self-organized artists’ initiatives and activist practices like no other city in the Netherlands. The trend towards self-employed work and flexibilization in the creative sector after 2008 accelerated this development. Self-organization-as-contemporary-art has developed throughout the years into an active, extensive and complex network of more than 80 self-organized initiatives; a fabric of autonomously operating initiatives that covers the entire city which we have mapped in previous research. This leads to the questions: How can the creative industries and cultural institutions adapt to these new forms of artistic practice which are no longer based on (a) individual work and (b) classical artists’ portfolios? How can art school curricula be adapted so that they educate innovative network artists who actively contribute to the fabric of self-organization-as-contemporary-art?
