Shaping the Future in a Cultural Tourism Market

Aron JINARU Center for Complexity Studies - aPISC Perspectives Innovation Science Creativity Bucharest, 153 Calea Dorobantilor ROMANIA aron.jinaru@gmail.com Alexandru CARAGEA Center for Complexity Studies - aPISC Perspectives Innovation Science Creativity Bucharest, 153 Calea Dorobantilor ROMANIA andi.caragea@gmail.com George NICULESCU Economic Sciences and Business Management Faculty Constanting Brancusi University Str.Victoriei, Nr.24, Targu-Jiu, Gorj ROMANIA gniculesco@hahoo.com
Abstract: - The paper is a theoretical result of the research project Oltcultour, having the aim to support the catalysis of a cultural tourism market in Northern Oltenia Region of Romania. The paper vision and orientation are based on the fundamental theoretical challenges of the paradigm of complexity, of the constructal theory and of the action-research concept. Its basic methodological challenges are the new creative economy and experience economy and how do they influence the cultural tourism experience in a new market. The paper focuses on the new pragmatic oriented strategies of shaping the future for generating a cultural tourism market, on how is conceived this shaping the future intellectual complex instrument, which are the new main complementary strategies developed with the help of this instrument, and how they can be applied to the process of generating and/or developing the cultural tourism market, exemplified by the two complementary strategies, back to the future - cultural turn and forward in the past - technological turn, to be used with shaping the future for generating the above mentioned market. (The research project Oltcultour is financed by the Romanian Government from the NP2 / National Plan 2 for RDI research, development and innovation, contract nr. 92118/2008) Key-Words: - complexity paradigm, shaping the future, cultural tourism, cultural turn, technological turn, creative economy, constructal theory, innovation in tourism

1 Introduction
It is a fact that science and socio-economic practices are now in a double major crisis. There is, on the one hand, a paradigmatic crisis of economics (social sciences), and, on the other hand, we are witnessing the deployment of the first major crisis of the globalized economy. Problems facing the economics are not only methodological and epistemological and / or pragmatic, but also about ontological issues that have long been neglected. Ontological assumptions used about the concept of "homo economicus" are too reductionist, and

they are becoming, with the complexifing of economic life, and with the "new globalization", inadequate and practically irrelevant. Basically, the current human civilization shows signs of having reached its limits within a development that is unsustainable. In this context, we conclude that the imperative of the leap to a sustainable civilization can not be overlooked. Mankind faces a crucial choice: to continue using the same paradigm, trying to overcome global economic crisis similar to the

overcoming of the Great Depression of 1929 to 1933 years, then continuing with "business as usual", risking that in a few decades, to have a civilization collapse, or acting differently, based on a new science and economic practices, which, in turn are based on a new epistemopragmatic paradigm and consciously assuming the imperative of taking the leap to a new civilization, a sustainable type civilization. In this context it is obvious the need for rethinking and reorientation of innovation (rdi research, development, innovation) especially for the creation and development of a new socio-economic civilization, characterized by a technological system based on renewable resources and by what was called a sustainable, knowledge-based economy (society). A sustainable development of the biggest global economic branch, i.e., the tourism industry, supposes taking as the starting-point a nonidealised perception (contrary to the homo economicus of the classical economics) of reality in which the rationality of the agents is bounded and the social structures are not necessarily efficient, and also supposes taking into account the complexity of the socioeconomic phenomena with their cultural, technological aspects and the paradigmatic changes to be implemented by purposeful innovation.
(This articles is based on the results obtained in the research project Oltcultour)

action-research concept What are the new vision and how to orientate the cultural tourism research and which paradigm to choose for adequately framing the research within an action-research type of approach? Taking into account the complexity of tourisms social and economic relationship with biodiversity and multiculturality and the uncertainty and turbulence of these times, it is necessary to integrate a pre-harmonizing type foresight oriented approach to explore various possible futures, with an action-research approach, more namely participatory actionresearch and network action-research, regarding the process specific to innovative entrepreneurship, technologies and increasingly knowledge-based friendly society (web2 technology for networks of communities of practice, interests, etc..), and with an ethno methodological post-approach specific to cultural traditions. 2.2 The basic methodological challenges of the new creative economy and experience economy What are the main characteristics of the new creative economy and experience economy and how do they influence the cultural tourism experience? The concepts of the creative industries/ economy and/or the experience economy have emerged in recent years to describe those industries and economy which mobilise talent, creativity and entrepreneurship to produce a range of creative goods and services. They are a dynamic sector of the economy, contributing significantly to growth in value added for the producers and to the development of new exciting experiences for the consumers. 2.3 The new pragmatic oriented strategies of shaping the future for generating a cultural tourism market What is and how is conceived the shaping the

2 Problem Formulation
In a global economy of standardization in which the culture becomes more and more homogeneous (a western type of culture) and the biodiversity is rapidly declining, we need qualitative researches to make sense of the complexities of tourism (the worlds biggest industry) in the 21st century, and/or (participatory) action-researches to adequately deal with these challenges and problems. 2.1 The fundamental theoretical challenge of the paradigm of complexity and of the

future intellectual complex instrument? What are the new main complementary strategies developed with the help of this instrument and how they can be applied to the process of generating and/or developing the cultural tourism market? Generating a market is a strongly non-linear process and it means an institution process. Any strictly determinist (formal) model can only surprise at most the emergence (apparition by self-organization) and not the institution (apparition by architectural creation). In fact, the market cannot generate itself, only develop, as it is preexistent. When referring to the market generation, we actually refer to the generation of a new market, as a market niche previously inexistent, generated through an entrepreneurial pioneering by which the germs of a new disruptive industry is implanted.

well as at the paradigmatic level. Paradigmatic level of complexity is a level that is aware of the existence of a universe of logical construction and related psychological and brain functioning of the human spirit, but without losing the data type of a priori sensibility, a universe in which knowledge is both translation and reconstruction and complexity makes us to reach a metalevel. In other words, complex thinking is a thinking that tries to think about thinking, a knowledge that attempts to include the one who knows, the observer-conceptor, in the knowledge, and which requires a continuous iteration between analytic phase- formal and non formal-reflexive phase. The complex thinking take into consideration many things at once, such as multidimensional phenomena, the uncertainty in which may be located the observers / actors, the connection of what (apparently) is separated, the need to confront the contradictions, etc. The paradigm of complexity shows that the order is not entirely accidental nor totally deterministic, so there are areas of spontaneous order 3.2 Cultural turn and technological turn as the two faces of the macroscop to understand the new creative economy and experience economy The macroscope, as was defined by Jol de Rosnay, is a symbolic instrument made of a number of methods and techniques borrowed from very different disciplines to extract hidden truths, trends, and relationships from complex data of variable quality Cultural tourism experience, authenticity and attention denote complex evolving phenomena, hard to define and capture in clear, unique definitions and/or concepts. They are not only glimpses of realities specific to one of the other realm of economy or culture, but they also denote complex responsive processes at the interaction between these two broad realms. In the last years, the cultural tourism market studies developed within the attention

3 Problem Solution
Synthetically formulated the solution is cultural turn and technological turn, within the complexity paradigm and a participative actionresearch approach, using the complex intellectual instrument of shaping the future.

3.1 An orientation global frame for the fundamental theoretical challenge of the paradigm of complexity and of the actionresearch concept The real world is complex, and the tools and the approaches of science, specifically, the mechanical paradigm are inadequate. But to see and perceive the world in a new way, it is needed to exist from the traditional frame and the transition to another frame. The relatively new frame that it is forming it is the paradigm of complexity. Beyond the use of complex thinking from time to time in an intuitive manner, not systematic, it is necessary that it be assumed and become a paradigmatic and epistemic concern. It is the time that the very difficult and complicated problems to be addressed by reflecting on knowledge and on rationality, as

economy, experience economy and/or cultural/creative industries frameworks. So our approach has as background these recent developments of economics and cultural studies The cultural science approach to creativity explains creativity as a property of complex networks consisting of individuals and artefacts, and a process that is triggered in the human brain. In both respects, traditional economics is transcended. In the first sense, creativity is seen as an irreducible property of a collective, the network. In the second sense, creativity goes beyond the fundamental model of utility maximisation under constraints. Creativity has become a more important element in regional development strategies because : The rise of the symbolic economy privileged creativity over cultural products. Regions and cities have increasingly used culture as a form of enhancement and therefore need to find new cultural products to create distinction in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Destinations which lack a richly built heritage need to find new means of competing with those that do 3.3 The shaping the future procedural way, conceptually developed to be applied for generating a cultural tourism market Foresight (exploration of the future perspective) is part of the research domain of future studies research about the future regarding the evolution of ways to face the future, including in the study more and more aspects of reality, even the future study itself. The foresight is a transdisciplinary research activity, inherently collaborative, which suppose the interaction between persons and organizations with a diverse professions, specialists, ages, resources, cultures, etc. Foresight is participative action-research to generate knowledge regarding the future, and to learn individual skills and group practices

within an organized frame of networked organizations. Foresight put the problem of knowledge management both to an organized frame and to the thematic specialization area. In the conceptual evolution of the future study we mention: forecasting (focused on the methods to predict the future especially with modelling econometric techniques, using mainly data from the past); foresight (enlarged the research domain by incorporating methods that allow networking to collect the data, to assess and to interpret them, and also methods to support decision making); strategic foresight or future analysis. In the practice of using foresight on different temporal and/or spatial scales, in various institutions and/or organizations, in the efforts to understand the anticipated built future, it is missing a middle term: shaping the future. So we now have the whole issue of the economy of the future and of the future of the economy: anticipation shaping/profiling building.
We may say that shaping the future is foresight (strategic foresight) plus deliberated assumed action.

Shaping the future The issue of shaping the future - an issue of architectonic creation In the conceptual language developed in the theoretic research phase, a strategy propose the acceptance of a passage from the actual life situation to future life situation, as a solution to be adopted at the level of social behavior, clamed as being necessary to the creation of a latent benefit (satisfaction of a need / desire non satisfied) by indicating a way to be solved at the behavior level an action plan.

The success of a strategy is favored if it succeeds to bring together the change stakeholders and to transform them into social enterprise shareholders. According to the anterior conceptual fundamentals the above require could be satisfied by passing from a vision of desirable and possible future to the vision of an acceptable and feasible future we define the issue of the above change of vision as: the issue of shaping the future The process of shaping the future How do we make the change of the vision? From what is presented above, we deduce that one of the critical element to do - in order to attain the desideratum for sieving the stakeholders, and, why not, to ally them - is the promotion and acceptance of change at the societal level. This is a performance requirement for the reception of a strategy, that most of the specialists claim it. But how is possible to succeed? The strategic leaders can control the process of promotion, but not the process of acceptance. The team of the Oltcultour project reached the conclusion that in order to maximize the chance of acceptance, it is needed the passage from the vision of desirable future to the vision of acceptable future, and from the vision of possible future to the one of feasible future. Using the conceptual language developed in the theoretic research phase, this means to go through a process for solving an architectonic issue of the following type: [A1]group-strategic design [A2] groupstrategic design economic

means to talk about a shaped world, as though this world is concrete, and not about the future characterized by the terms of strategic calculus. This presume an effort of narrative scenario making, which is to be done to go from technical terms, cold and dry, to live histories stories drama of that world. It must be reminded that always the germs of the future are in the present. We distinguish the following situations for shaping the future world from the actual world: - case of emergent shaping is profiled on the current trends which escape the strategic will, as like these trends have their own will - case of shaping the future by the others strategies - case of shaping the future by own strategies As well, let us see that the shaped world is not unique. A well shaped description should compare worlds that shape themselves, so that to be choose that desired world. Only with such a description the change leaders could launch the strategic proposal to the public (in this moment this is their own strategy which is to be transformed in a common one, in order to increase the chances of strategic success by countering the trends of the system to break into a number of subsystems with divergent and/or contradictory objectives against the strategic objective. On the basis of this well shaped description of the desired world it is possible to pass to the shaped description of the expected changes during the process, in the same way of narrative scenario making which is to be done to pass from technical terms, cold and dry to live histories stories drama. The last step is to shape the bet by shifting from the desirable vision to advantageous vision - description of the strategic offer in terms of advantages - individualized in terms of strategic advantages of the offer, for the changes of the actual situation accordingly to each different category of public,

[A1]social

[A2]socio-

This process has maximum chances to strategically succeed, if the messages and actions reach to build in the public mind an image of the future by: a well shaped description, one or many transition scenario / scenarios shaping a common strategic bet To have a well shaped description of the future

- understanding the specific bets of each participant regarding the change of their transaction formula, so that the advantage of their summing to be possible to constitute, after democratic consultation and negotiation, into a common bet Creation of the common bet is a process of social institution, which is not completely controllable by the authors of the strategic proposition. It is a process of social-transactiontype:

cultural turn for bringing into the cultural tourism market the living human treasure of the rural communities, and the approach of forward in the past technological turn for developing the cultural tourism market with software enhanced reality. These two complementary approaches / strategies are in the process of developing in the last phase of our research project Oltcultour

4 Conclusion
The theoretical developments of this paper, and especially the shaping the future symbolic

[A1]social [A2]socio-economic
The process of shaping the future, as was defined here, is an internal one, of the initiators of the strategy a type of process for conceptual creation and for thematic transfer into the [A1]group-strategic design [A2] groupstrategic design

instrument, were very useful in applying them to support the catalysis of a cultural tourism market.
Of course, as always a new instrument needs further testing and development. References: 1] Richards, G. and J. Wilson (2006), Developing Creativity in Tourist Experiences: A Solution to the Serial Reproduction of Culture?, Tourism Management , No. 27, pp. 1209-1223. 2] The Impact of Culture on Tourism (2009) OECD publications, p.10 3] Richards, G. (2001), Cultural Attractions and European Tourism, CABI, Wallingford. 4] Gretzel, U. (2008). Innovation and Collaboration in Tourism: A Case Study of CICtourGUNE. Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism 5] Can-Seng Ooi, (2007) A Theory of Tourism Experiences: The Management of Attention, in Experiencescapes, edited by Tom ODell and Peter Belling, Copenhagen Business School Press DK 6] Throsby, D. 2001. Economics and Culture: Cambridge University Press 7] Jinaru Aron, Niculescu G., Caragea A., Caragea S, coordonator Adrian Gorun (2010) - Recadrri transdisciplinare. Un demers focalizat pe cercetarea antreprenorial n turismul cultural, Editura Academica Brncui, Trgu-Jiu 8] Castellani Brian & Frederic William Hafferty, (2009), Sociology and Complexity Science - A New Field of Inquiry, Springer Pub 9] Bejan Adrian (2006) the Constuctal Law n Nature and Society, n Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics, Springer

[A1]social

As we showed before, during the activities deployed in the Oltcultour project intervened the following question. How is possible to easier go on the route from the spontaneous idea, just popped-up and until the idea is tested in practice, logic and/or experimental, without killing this idea that just grasped in the mind? And how could make that the foresight groups to see more things, and not further, in the future? So how do we organize ourselves the process of shaping the future? The answers is to organize the activities of strategic design of Oltcultour under architecture of minimal thematic processor. 3.4 Back to the future - cultural turn and Forward in the past - technological turn, the two complementary strategies to be used with shaping the future for generating a cultural tourism market
Romania has the greatest biodiversity in EU and still rich traditions, including what UNESCO call living human treasures. It has also various living rural communities and some interesting software virtual communities. So, taking into account these facts, it is adequate to use both the approach of back to the future

Science & Business Media

10] Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New

Capitalism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press 11] Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life: Basic Books 12] Beinhocker, Eric D., (2006), The Origin of Wealth, Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Harvard Business School Press