How Māori cultural tourism businesses create authentic and sustainable well-being

Abstract

This research shows how Māori cultural tourism businesses create authentic and sustainable well-being. Understanding this is important for these and other businesses that want to succeed economically and realise their potential to contribute to all their stakeholders. Addressing this question involved critiquing the reifying tendencies in the tourism marketing and production system and exploring ways in which authenticity and sustainability, two of the most prominent themes in academic tourism discourse yet rarely engaged with together in academic literature, might conjointly contribute to creating well-being through cultural tourism within explicitly Māori terms. This supply-side perspective has not previously been explicitly explored. Informed by Māori research principles and sharing features with the grounded theory approach, four holistic, in-depth case studies of Māori cultural tourism businesses generated a relational Five Well-beings map and twenty-five practices to demonstrate how Māori cultural tourism businesses create authentic and sustainable spiritual, cultural, social, environmental, and economic well-being. The Well-beings map offers an explicit, cosmological, and holistic analysis that describes how mauri ora, meaning conscious well-being, is achieved through reciprocal relationships of respect that are informed by Māori values, and applied through praxis that transforms tourism contexts into sites of multi-dimensional well-being. The key facets of this approach are that: authenticity and sustainability are reflexively constructed in relationship; a spiritual outlook is central; wealth is an outcome of well-being; a Māori mode of exchange is operational; a relational approach militates against the forces of reification; and value is embodied in relationships which create added value for the firm. The Well-beings approach is illuminated further using the wider literature, bringing an ethic of care and respect framework together with a stakeholder theory of the firm ii focussed on the intrinsic value of stakeholders, and drawing on Heidegger’s concepts of being-in-the-world and care. Māramatanga, meaning enlightenment, is depicted as the realisation of ever-present potential and is the tupu, the unfolding of each person’s potential, that can occur through the transformational power of Māori cultural tourism in which customers, employees, suppliers, and other business stakeholders including social, cultural, and environmental communities experience how Māori cultural tourism businesses create authentic and sustainable well-being.