NS34 Session 29

 

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Title: Towards Decent Work? Dynamics of Employment in Arctic Tourism Sector

Organisers: Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson (corresponding), Outi Rantala, Jarkko Saarinen, Linda Lundmark, Cenk Demiroglu, Bente Heimtun, Patrick Maher and Suzanne de la Barre

Affiliation: University of Iceland

 

Description

Tourism has often been promoted as pivotal for sustainable development by generating local employment and economic growth. However, it is not without significant challenges, particularly concerning employment and decent work. Tourism is intrinsically linked to a global process of neoliberalisation, which has driven decentralisation and deregulation of markets, including labour markets, thus raising questions of how susceptible it is for building up decent work.

Despite a growing interest in labour market research, there is still a lack of knowledge about how tourism employment is positioned in and affects local and regional labour markets. This gap is evident in the Nordic, and more general, Arctic countries where tourism has increased in recent years. Tourism in the Arctic and sub-arctic region is characterised by strong seasonality, distance and weak infrastructure and limited labour pools. Hence, tourism companies in those areas, often struggle to provide full time year-round jobs, decent housing, and rely on temporary workforce to considerable extent. This poses challenges for sustainable tourism development.

This session proposal is related to the ongoing project Tourism Employment in the Arctic: Towards Decent Work conducted by seven universities within the UArctic Thematic Network on Northern Tourism and funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers Arctic Co-operation Programme, the Canadian Global Arctic Leadership Initiative (GALI) and Nordplus and Erasmus mobility schemes.

We invite both conceptually and empirically focused papers. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Precarity and precarious tourism work
• Social dumping and modern slavery in tourism work
• Sustainable development and tourism employment
• Internationalisation of tourism labour
• Community dimensions of tourism employment
• Employment satisfaction in tourism
• Gender dimension and youth in tourism employment
• Career development in tourism and hospitality

 

Abstracts

Title: The Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction and Performance in Hotels
Author: Magnús Ásgeirsson, University of Iceland

Employee satisfaction remains a central theme in management, with substantial evidence linking it to organizational performance. This study examines the nature and strength of that relationship and investigates whether its magnitude varies across different performance indicators. Using data from 9 hotels where organization culture was assessed through the Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCs). Organizational performance was evaluated across six dimensions: growth, profitability, quality of products and services, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, new service development, and overall performance. Bivariate regression analyses reveal positive and statistically significant relationships between employee satisfaction and all other performance indicators. The strongest associations were observed for overall performance and customer satisfaction, while moderate relationships emerged for profitability, growth, and quality of products and services. Employee satisfaction accounted for approximately 53% of the variance in overall performance. The findings support the view that employee satisfaction functions both as a driver and as an outcome of organizational performance. They further indicate that the strength of this relationship is greater for human-centered outcomes than for financial indicators. Practically, the results underscore the importance of cultivating intrinsic motivation, trust, and employee participation to enhance both satisfaction and perceived performance. Future research should investigate the causal direction between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and explore how organizational culture moderates this relationship across different sectors.

Keywords: employee satisfaction; job satisfaction; performance; customer satisfaction; organizational culture

 

Title: Bridging the Temporal Gap: Meaningful Work in Precarious Arctic Tourism
Author: Mari Angeria, Lapland University of Applied Sciences & University of Oulu

Tourism work in Finnish Lapland is often characterized by low wages, job insecurity, seasonality, high performance demands (Baum et al., 2016; Ladkin et al., 2023), and exposure to abusive customer behavior (Mitsakis et al., 2024). It is commonly viewed as a “transit industry” rather than offering meaningful career paths. These precarious structures pose challenges to social sustainability and decent work (Santos, 2023; Winchenbach, 2019).

This study examines how the temporal gap between managers’ long-term horizon and employees’ fragmented seasonal experiences of meaningful work shapes the conditions for decent work in precarious Arctic tourism.

The data comprises two qualitative datasets. The first dataset includes written reflections from Finnish tourism students (early-career employees) (n=31, 68 pages) who held roles ranging from housekeeping and guiding to roles as elves or Santa Claus. The second dataset comprises semi-structured interviews with tourism managers (n=31), conducted in Finnish. The datasets were collected as part of EU-funded development projects, providing long-term access to the field.

The findings reveal a tension between how meaningful work is experienced and how it is managed. While managers emphasize holistic, long-term responsibility, employees describe fragmentation and a focus on short-term survival. Managers’ visions extend over several years, but employees’ experiences are limited to the high-pressure season. Recognizing this temporal gap opens concrete possibilities: managers who become aware of this asymmetry are better equipped to create conditions that promote meaningful work and decent employment, even within the constraints of a precarious, seasonal industry.

 

Title: From Sustainable Tourism Knowledge to Workplace Practice: The Role of Virtual Exchange (COIL)
Author: Steve Harbert, Robert Gordon University, Scotland

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is an established form of Virtual Exchange, which brings together students from institutions in different countries/cultures to work on an assessed project. Facilitating internationalisation at home and fostering intercultural awareness are two benefits commonly associated with COIL, that make it a “natural fit” for the tourism curriculum. Additionally, COIL pedagogy is identified as supporting students in developing key workplace skills including communication, teamwork and the use of technology.

The current study builds upon two recent research studies that applied a qualitative thematic analysis to reflective accounts written by tourism students about COIL projects with a sustainable tourism theme. In 2023, phase 1 identified students’ COIL experience and development of transferrable employment skills. In early 2026, phase 2 established COIL participation to have resulted in students’ co-creation of new knowledge and understanding of responsible tourism practices and the global relevance of Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water. The next phase of data collection will return to the 2023 cohort of students, who are now working in the tourism industry, to elicit their perceptions of COIL’s role in their workplace skills development. This paper will draw upon previous findings and ongoing research, to consider how the application and development of COIL pedagogy can equip tourism graduates with the skills and attributes the industry needs now and in the future.

 

Title: Keeping the Spirit Alive: Intergenerational Transition and Renewal in Family Tourism SMEs
Author: Verena Karlsdóttir, University of Akureyri

Family-owned tourism SMEs play an important role in Nordic and European destination development by sustaining local employment, service cultures, community relationships, and the distinctive identity of places. Yet intergenerational transition remains challenging, especially in peripheral and seasonal tourism contexts where labour shortages, digital visibility, guest expectations, and community legitimacy shape everyday business continuity.

This study examines intergenerational transition in family-owned tourism SMEs as more than a legal, financial, or managerial handover. It argues that tourism businesses transfer not only ownership and operational responsibility but also tacit place-based knowledge, destination relationships, service quality, founder-linked identity, and the distinctive “personality” of the business. Drawing on multi-stakeholder focus groups conducted in Iceland, Austria, and Slovenia as part of the Erasmus+ Next GEN Tourism project, the study explores how family tourism firms navigate continuity and renewal across generations.

Preliminary findings point to seven interconnected competence areas that shape successful transition: leadership and staff transition, ownership transfer, financial planning and risk management, strategic planning and ESG, tourism dynamics, relational-emotional dynamics, and marketing and branding. Across the three contexts, participants emphasised the need for practical, modular, mentoring-based support that fits the realities of small and seasonal tourism firms.

The study contributes to Nordic tourism research by framing intergenerational transition as a destination-embedded process in which preserving local identity must be balanced with professionalisation, changing market conditions, and future-oriented entrepreneurship.

 

Title: Beyond Resource Extraction: Exploring the Scope, Structure and Dynamics of the Emerging International Tourism Labour Market in the Swedish Arctic Peripheries
Author: Ekaterina Kovbas, Umeå University

Arctic tourism has been in high demand in recent decades amid growing appreciation of northern destinations. This does not go unnoticed for the local small- and medium sized tourist firms, who struggle to sustain sufficient workforce to meet the customer needs and service quality standards. In northern Sweden, this need is exacerbated by tourism market’s exposure to competition with the resource extractive industries that remain the region’s biggest employer. An alternative strategy increasingly adopted by tourism business is to recruit staff from abroad. Yet, little is known about actual scale of international tourism labour market, partly due to the lack of approaches to define the output of tourism employment. To resolve this ambiguity, this paper frames tourism labour as a form of human capital attributed to migrant workers, who, in the labour process, both contribute to the workplace, applying their knowledge and skills, and gain from it through learning and training. Based on labour regime analysis framework, we contextualise the reproduction and mobilisation of international workforce in tourism to measure the size of tourism-associated labour market, identify the distinguishing characteristics of tourism employees in terms of gender, age and country of origin, and trace their spatial, temporal and institutional mobilities. Empirically, the study combines population register data analysis with GIS to map tourist employment hotspots in northern Sweden and examine how they coexist and evolve alongside extractive industries, capturing overall implications of diversifying tourism employment on regional labour market dynamics.

Keywords: labour regime analysis, sparsely populated areas, resource peripheries, tourism employment, international labour mobilities

 

Title: Tourism Employment and Precarity in the Arctic
Authors: Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson, University of Iceland, Outi Rantala, and Pat Maher

Tourism, with its capacity to play a pivotal role in sustainable development by generating employment, fostering economic growth, and facilitating the shift towards a greener economy, is not without significant challenges, particularly regarding decent work. Although tourism has long been promoted by national and regional authorities in the high North, limited research exists on how tourism employment is positioned within, and affects, local and regional labour markets. The project Tourism Employment in the Arctic: Towards Decent Work aims to shed light on these issues. Funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and led by the UArctic Thematic Network on Northern Tourism, the project’s first year focused on precarity in tourism employment. In this presentation, we will recount key findings and highlight commonalities and divergences between countries and regions in the Arctic in relation to precarity in tourism labour. Tourism in the Arctic and sub‑Arctic regions is characterised by strong seasonality, long distances, weak infrastructure, and limited labour pools. Tourism companies, particularly in rural areas, often struggle to provide full‑time, year‑round employment and rely to a considerable extent on temporary workers. Our study highlights that precarity is an integral feature of the tourism industry in these regions. It is intersectional in character, as migrants, women, and youth face compounded challenges. At the same time, structural differences between regions persist, and there are notable variations in who becomes part of the precariat.

 

Title: Tourism Employment in Canada and Its Norths - Towards Decent Work
Authors: Suzanne de la Barre, Vancouver Island University, Dylan Soo, Natalya Brown (Nipissing University), and Pat Maher (Nipissing University)

Canada’s north and its Arctic are promoted as having ‘distinct characteristics’ offering ‘unique and unforgettable experiences’ (Government of Canada, 2024). The Government of Canada recognizes tourism growth in its northern and Arctic regions as a way to foster economic advancement and diversification, and a means to support small- and medium-sized businesses (Statistics Canada, 2025). Demand for skilled labour is expected to grow in northern Canada into 2045 (Conference Board of Canada, 2025), and the Canadian labour market has been and remains heavily influenced by immigration and population growth. Despite the evidence on both the demographic and economic necessity for immigration, the sustainability of the immigration system has been challenged, and forms one aspect of the employment issues and challenges faced by tourism in this peripheral context. This presentation offers a Canadian view on the issues, challenges and solutions related to employment in its peripheral regions tourism sector, and aims to complement our Nordic partner perspectives in our ongoing project Tourism Employment in the Arctic: Towards Decent Work.

References

Conference Board of Canada (2025). Learning From One Another: Skill Gaps in Labour Markets in Northern Ontario, Yukon, and Nunavut. Impact Paper: March 26

Government of Canada (2024a). Minister Dan Vandal announces an investment of over $800,000 supporting the growth of the tourism industry across the North (September 27). https://www.canada.ca/en/northern-economic-development/news/2024/09/minister-dan-vandal-announces-an-investment-of-over-800000-supporting-the-growth-of-the-tourism-industry-across-the-north.html

Statistics Canada (2025a). Tourism among the fastest growing sectors in 2024, setting the stage for 2025 (July 28). https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/8355-tourism-among-fastest-growing-sectors-2024-setting-stage-2025

 

Title: Toward Decent Work in Icelandic Tourism: Foreign Labour, Seasonality and Regional Sustainability
Authors: Íris Hrund Halldórsdóttir, University of Iceland, Geography and Tourism, and Magnfríður Birnu Júlísdóttir

Tourism in Iceland has grown rapidly over the past two decades and has become a key economic sector, for rural and peripheral regions. At the same time, tourism employment is shaped by seasonality, creating uneven labour demand in many regions with limited local labour pools and reliance on foreign workers. Using Iceland as a case, this presentation examines how foreign workers have become central to tourism development in the Arctic context, and what this means for decent work and regional sustainability.

The paper combines analysis of statistical data on people working in various subsectors of tourism, by regions in Iceland, as well as results from qualitative research on the experiences of working conditions of foreign workers. It shows that foreign citizens accounted for 42% of the tourism workforce in Iceland in 2024, compared with 33% in 2019, with particularly high shares in several regions outside the capital area. This rapid growth of migrant labour in tourism raises questions on decent work and living conditions of these workers. Apart from adherence to employment regulation they concern housing, access to information and public services, social inclusion, and the capacity of tourism-dependent communities to retain workers who may wish to stay.

The paper argues that foreign workers should not be understood only as a flexible labour resource for a seasonal industry, but as part of the social and economic fabric of rural destinations. A decent work perspective therefore needs to be extended to include the broader living conditions and regional variations in tourism labour demand that shape workers’ everyday lives.

Keywords: decent work; migrant labour; tourism employment; regional sustainability; seasonality; Iceland.

 

Title: "Floating Around During [the] COVID-19 [Pandemic]": Precarity of Nationality Onboard Cruise Ships
Authors: Alexandra Yingst, University of Iceland, Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson, and Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir

When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared globally, many countries closed their ports and borders to cruise ships, stranding crew at sea for months. This article questions how precarity is experienced outside of national borders, drawing on semi-structured interviews with cruise ship crew members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it existed among crew members before, a precarity of nationality was exposed when crew members were stuck at sea, feeling unprotected by both their countries and companies. While other migrant tourism workers have a host state to support them, cruise ship crew are trapped onboard and must rely on flags of convenience (FOC) states to look out for their wellbeing. Nationality, in addition to larger socio-political-economic factors, intersects every level of precarity and causes precarity to manifest differently in individuals. Additionally, the meaning behind the movement of crew depends on nationality. Therefore, even though all crew members experienced precariousness in employment when cruise operations halted, not all crew members can be called precarious workers. And although all crew experienced precarity of nationality, some nationalities, like Filipinos, experienced it more. This research provides a closer look at a socially unsustainable system of precarity and mobility that was cracked open by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, it highlights the need to address the unique challenges faced by migrant workers in the tourism sector, as their voices are rarely heard.

 

Title: Labour Precarity in Arctic Tourism: A Patchy Anthropocene Perspective
Authors: Albina Pashkevich, Nord University, Norway, and Dorothee Bohn, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Tourism research tends to approach the travel and hospitality workforce either instrumentally, for example, by assessing labour’s contribution to regional and community development, or symbolically, by emphasising the emotional and affective dimensions of service work. This limitation is particularly evident in the European Arctic, where tourism’s rapidly expanding ecological footprint, combined with the growth of platform-mediated work framed as entrepreneurship and the precarious conditions faced by seasonal workers, raises pressing questions about the sector’s current and future sustainability.

To address this gap, the study draws on the notion of the ‘patchy Anthropocene’, a lens for understanding the uneven conditions of more-than-human liveability in landscapes increasingly governed by industrial production and consumption. Applied to tourism labour, this framework highlights how work is differently organised across fragmented socio-ecological contexts, or ‘patches’, thereby revealing patterns of precarity and opportunity. Focusing on Rovaniemi and Tromsø, two booming tourism hubs marketed as part of the Arctic wilderness, the study traces how precariousness and forms of resistance among seasonal, migrant, and platform-mediated workers emerge in relation to broader, more-than-human interlinkages.

Our findings suggest that dominant imaginaries of a pristine Arctic winter landscape render tourism workers part of a consumable and simplified environment. Within these tourism ‘patches’, precarious labour conditions are intertwined with wider patterns of socio-ecological extraction. This study contributes to a more place-sensitive understanding of labour precarity in tourism that considers not only the interplays of structure, agency, and scale within places but also its entanglements with the more-than-human world.