Philipp Wassler

Purpose: Digital merchandise has recently transformed the consumption of sports. Existing research has focused on individual adoption behaviors or broader cultural implications, overlooking how fans collectively construct meanings around these digital innovations. As authenticity and belonging are central to fan identity, however, examining how digital merchandise is socially represented offers deeper insights into its integration within fandom than individual adoption metrics alone. To address this gap, this research aims to examine how football fans collectively represent the meanings of fan tokens as a form of digital merchandise. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on Social Representation Theory, this study involved 20 focus groups and 84 in-depth interviews with a total of 166 participants to investigate how digital merchandizing has transformed sports consumption and fan engagement. Findings: The study reveals two hegemonic social representations of fan tokens: as fundraising instruments for clubs and as mechanisms for fan engagement and base expansion. Each hegemonic representation generates opposing polemical representations, with supporters framing fan tokens as investments in their passion and tools for expanding the fan base, while detractors perceive them as exploitative mechanisms that threaten authentic fandom values. Unlike traditional merchandise, digital merchandise disrupts established anchoring mechanisms and generates strong polarizing ideological divisions. Originality/value: This research contributes to the literature on sport merchandizing by demonstrating that digital merchandise elicits more divisive social representations than traditional merchandise, which may further jeopardize fan community cohesion. The study offers deeper insights into digital merchandise integration within fandom by examining collective meaning construction rather than focusing solely on individual adoption metrics.

This study explores the transformative potential of travel writing, positioning it as a sustainable, dynamic, and adaptable tool crafted through written dialogue. It shows how travel stories, social media, new tech, and digital platforms work together and how they provide valuable data for research and potentially aid sustainability in tourism through a novel method. Introducing a Dialogue Journaling Process Model, we demonstrate the capacity of travel writing to raise awareness about sustainable practices, analyze the environment, and champion pro-environmental initiatives. Drawing from our pilot study in Slovenia, the findings provide a formal platform for dialogue and refinement. In advocating for the pivotal role of travel writing in advancing sustainable tourism, this research presents a method for this proposition.

Tourism and aesthetic experiences are intertwined. This study explores the essence of negative and borderline aesthetic experiences in the context of tourism. To achieve this, Husserl's descriptive phenomenology and detailed descriptions of aesthetic experiences from 28 first-time tourists in Hong Kong are employed. Findings identify and define two types of borderline aesthetic experiences, namely the "beaugly" and the "ugbeaful," as well as the experience of ugliness itself. Borderline experiences involve intricate interplays of pleasure and displeasure, challenging the traditional notion of aesthetics. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that ugliness does not necessarily equate to a wholly negative experience. This study thus contributes to the expansion of knowledge regarding aesthetic experiences in tourism and offers valuable insights for destination experience design.

War tourism is a scarcely researched topic, although the presence of spectators in war zones is attested throughout history. In addition to visiting sites of past conflict, “hot” war tourism in active war zones is on the rise. This study looks at how “war tourism” is represented within an online community of (aspiring) war tourists, taking the case of the recent conflict in Ukraine. Social Representations Theory is applied through a Topic Modeling Approach for this purpose. Findings show that war tourism is represented through “hot war travel,” “combat volunteering,” “non-combat volunteering,” and “virtual war travel.” This suggests a complicated relationship between war tourism, volunteering, and voyeurism in a new form of “hybrid war tourism” in online and offline realms. Future research should aim at a deeper understanding of these concepts and the complex links between them.