A part or Apart: The Effects of Tourism Ethnocentrism and Tourism Disidentification on Tourist and Resident Behavior: An Empirical Investigation in Hong Kong

Abstrakt

This study presents the two important concepts, tourism ethnocentrism (TE) and tourism disidentification (TDI), which relate to the predispositions of tourists/residents towards the attitudinal and behavioral tendencies in supporting domestic tourism. Despite the prevalence of ethnocentric motive in the consumer marketing and political ideology under the influence of globalization in the recent decades, limited studies have explored the notion of ethnocentrism in tourism realm. Inspired by the findings and research gaps in the literature on Tourism ethnocentrism (TE) (Kock, Josiassen, Assaf, Karpen, & Farrelly, 2019) and consumer disidentification (CDI) (Josiassen, 2011), this study provides an initial test on the TDI construct represents residents/tourists who disidentified themselves from the average residents/tourists resulting in an active avoidance and/or rejection behavior of supporting domestic tourism development. Based on the findings on the extant CDI research, this study further puts forward the antecedents of TDI model, ethnic identification and acculturation, applying to all residents, not only limited to immigrants or ethnic minorities. TDI exerts an independent effect on the tourists/residents’ predisposition from a negative domestic bias, as well as complements the existing research on TE representing a positive domestic bias, which ultimately contributes to developing an integrative framework of domestic bias in tourism domain. The TE and TDI model is tested using survey data from 156 residents who are currently living in Hong Kong for more than three years. The results support that the TE and TDI model are important means to investigate tourists/residents’ behaviour in supporting domestic tourism in a subnational level with complex ethnic identity backgrounds. The results further reveal that TE and TDI have significant but contrasting effects on tourist domain outcomes e.g. “willingness to recommend”, “willingness to visit” and “identity signaling”; and resident domain outcomes e.g. “residents’ support for tourism development” and “resident hospitality”. However, no significant results are found on both TE and TDI toward the outcome of “residents’ support for cultural heritage conservation”, which needs further investigation in future research. Last but not least, this empirical research has made significant theoretical contributions to fill the identified research gaps and practical marketing implications to the domain of tourism, which shed light on the development of domestic tourism policies and strategies by understanding the levels of TE and TDI of local inhabitants as the role of tourists and residents.