**1. Introduction: problem statement, focus, and research questions**

#### **1.1. An introduction on discourse and place branding**

Tourism is strongly impacted by the use of the Internet, and the Travel 2.0 phenomenon is boosting. The new opportunities the web gives tourists consist of easy accessibility to online tools dedicated to travel and leisure [1, 2]. Tourists can autonomously organize their travel,

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vacation, and leisure time, and also share opinions on destinations and experiences by texting online comments and reviews. These texts are "online conversations" being also a large deposit of information on both the supply and demand sides of tourism [3, 4].

The role of online conversation analysis on "tourism and sustainability" and the emerging problems regarding text analysis are today underrated, especially in policymaking and in managing destinations and their sustainability, image, and reputation.

One emerging problem is that "sustainable tourism" is contemporarily a common language expression, a practical issue, and a research topic largely studied by diverse academic disciplines. Policymakers very often privilege common sense instead of rigorous scientific analyses, so that popular superficial perception is seemingly able to condition any public choice. The risk is to have rhetorical declarations and high ethical statements before a poor practical implementation of effective sustainability policies [5].

Environment is a "common good" essential for tourism practices, and both firms and users should understand the worth of co-creating a sustainable tourism management. Growth and value creation are becoming a "company/client" shared goal also in the tourism sector, as the meaning of value and the process of value creation are increasingly shifting from a product-firm centric view to personalized consumer experiences [6, 7].

In postmodern societies, informed, networked, empowered, and active consumers are increasingly co-creating value together with firms, and rapidly changing the business environment. In this regard, information communication technologies (ICTs) can help the triangular interaction firm-consumer-policymakers in creating value and social wellbeing also using pieces of information retrievable online. Diffusion of ICTs helps the market in becoming a forum for conversations and feasible interactions between individual consumers, consumer communities, public institutions, and firms [8].

As conversations are shaped by spaces in which they are made and spaces are made by conversations, place is the result of space/society relation [9, 10], and the perceived image of the sustainability of a singular place is the result, also of online conversations, narratives, and discourses that are inevitably made by words.

Words and languages are per se metonyms and metaphors of real things, as "firstly stated by Nietzsche about language, in 1873" [11, p. 138]. Yet the distance between real and symbol is originally a linguistic issue *a là* Saussure [12] still having also a geographic nature because: "A society is a space and an architecture of concepts, forms, and laws, whose abstract reality is imposed to reality of senses, bodies, aims and desires" [11, p. 139]. Then, the discourse approach, as a system of statements constructing an object, can clearly be attributed even to places and even more to place branding. Thus, media in general, and within the focus of this paper, the ICTs are powerful means of abstraction in creating sense of place and identity, through the creation of specific media messages [13]. Further, they deal with communications and territorial marketing. Messages running on the web include necessarily the whole user-generated content, mimicking once again the nature of a conversation, and the sense of "sustainable tourism" is originated within the narratives made by suppliers and consumers of the travel and tourism industry.

All this does matter for policymakers and communities interested in designing and "governancing" a credible model of sustainable tourism. In general terms, governance is the process, institutions and ways the govern function is practiced aiming at being effective [14]. Its main features are transparency, efficacy, legality, lack of corruption, respect for rights and social participation. These features are immersed in the story, traditions, and polity of a region (locality), and economics can give some feasible analytical means to lawmakers, even not yet having a holistic approach, and necessitating of critical policy analysis before any intervention.

vacation, and leisure time, and also share opinions on destinations and experiences by texting online comments and reviews. These texts are "online conversations" being also a large

The role of online conversation analysis on "tourism and sustainability" and the emerging problems regarding text analysis are today underrated, especially in policymaking

One emerging problem is that "sustainable tourism" is contemporarily a common language expression, a practical issue, and a research topic largely studied by diverse academic disciplines. Policymakers very often privilege common sense instead of rigorous scientific analyses, so that popular superficial perception is seemingly able to condition any public choice. The risk is to have rhetorical declarations and high ethical statements before a poor practical

Environment is a "common good" essential for tourism practices, and both firms and users should understand the worth of co-creating a sustainable tourism management. Growth and value creation are becoming a "company/client" shared goal also in the tourism sector, as the meaning of value and the process of value creation are increasingly shifting

In postmodern societies, informed, networked, empowered, and active consumers are increasingly co-creating value together with firms, and rapidly changing the business environment. In this regard, information communication technologies (ICTs) can help the triangular interaction firm-consumer-policymakers in creating value and social wellbeing also using pieces of information retrievable online. Diffusion of ICTs helps the market in becoming a forum for conversations and feasible interactions between individual consumers, consumer com-

As conversations are shaped by spaces in which they are made and spaces are made by conversations, place is the result of space/society relation [9, 10], and the perceived image of the sustainability of a singular place is the result, also of online conversations, narratives,

Words and languages are per se metonyms and metaphors of real things, as "firstly stated by Nietzsche about language, in 1873" [11, p. 138]. Yet the distance between real and symbol is originally a linguistic issue *a là* Saussure [12] still having also a geographic nature because: "A society is a space and an architecture of concepts, forms, and laws, whose abstract reality is imposed to reality of senses, bodies, aims and desires" [11, p. 139]. Then, the discourse approach, as a system of statements constructing an object, can clearly be attributed even to places and even more to place branding. Thus, media in general, and within the focus of this paper, the ICTs are powerful means of abstraction in creating sense of place and identity, through the creation of specific media messages [13]. Further, they deal with communications and territorial marketing. Messages running on the web include necessarily the whole user-generated content, mimicking once again the nature of a conversation, and the sense of "sustainable tourism" is originated within the narratives made by suppliers and consum-

deposit of information on both the supply and demand sides of tourism [3, 4].

and in managing destinations and their sustainability, image, and reputation.

from a product-firm centric view to personalized consumer experiences [6, 7].

implementation of effective sustainability policies [5].

108 Mobilities, Tourism and Travel Behavior - Contexts and Boundaries

munities, public institutions, and firms [8].

ers of the travel and tourism industry.

and discourses that are inevitably made by words.

The positivist paradigm, intending to implement quantitative methods also in social sciences, provides little help in determining public policy, as the complete acquisition of (perfect) knowledge and information is quite impossible due to the complexity of the real world, and not simply because it is expensive [15]. This has a double compliance at different levels of significance: in theory making and in marketing practice. Firstly, complexity cannot be reduced in simple quantitative models for their distance from political reality [15]. Secondly, if the market is a conversation [16], and narratives construct objects and shared ideas, then the meaning of words (in marketing and communication) is worth only within the *social discourse*. Thus, the meaning and sense of words are strictly subjective and the narratives of places are unavoidably the storytelling of relations and values that are not the reality, but something else, being a narrative construction [17, 18].

According to scholar Anholt [19], the functional activity of place branding is the extraction of the intimate spirit, the essence of a place, through a coherent set of truths. Place branding is clearly oriented to enhance the advantage of the local community, reinforcing the place capability of tourist attraction, or the export of goods and services, and locating some productive units and company headquarters. In this line, lessons originating from philosophical work of Derrida [20] about concepts that are imagined as stable and homogenous (including the above *set of truths*) give some caveats against the factuality of concepts, because:

"As a means of challenging the operation of logocentrism, Derrida asserts the irreducible textuality of all concepts and terms. Terms and concepts donot mean anything in and of themselves. All concepts are produced within discursive networks of difference and are therefore dependent upon these networks of difference or infrastructures for their identity" [21, p. 50].

Thus, the place branding/truths relation has validity within a discourse, including the *marketing discourse* [22] and must face the fatiguing job of contrasting (or using) ambiguity of words, especially when the sentiment of socioeconomic agents matters as in online conversations analysis [23, 24].

Conversation is usually considered a sociological topic, even though economists have treated it in theory at least by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who suggested:

"We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function––a function, which of course, it fulfills less perfectly as prices grow more rigid" [25, p. 86].

Price changes communicate to consumers that the world is changed and they have to adapt their own behavior, being prices, as a matter of fact, social mediators and resembling language communication within the social discourse, i.e., within a conversation [26]. In this line of significance, prices and conversations are subjected to the power/knowledge relation *a là* Foucault [27], and then to asymmetry affecting relations between media companies and users. In real markets, as well as in online conversations, asymmetric power and asymmetric information produce speculations and adverse selection behavior [28].

Consequences for practices are many. Policy analysts and researchers must assist policymakers not in a technical way but in a political one, designing robust basic structure able to resist the constant shifting coming from political and social actors and lobbies, acting in the complexity of real life. Nevertheless, concepts used in formal models are useful criteria, beyond their mathematical rigor, for organizing the information found in case studies, and for evaluating policy alternatives and designing a specific governance in a specific place.

In this line, governance is worthy as an instrumental tool, because it provides the society (producers, consumers, and policymakers) with at least clear game regulations. In designing and managing practices of sustainable tourism, the ways the networks of governance do work at the local level are fundamental. Moreover, effective governance of a tourist destination can be self-improving eventually fostering participation and people commitment, and their perception of being immersed in a democratic selection of satisfying decisions. Providing a place with some tools capable of spreading information, discussion and learning, can make social negotiations effective. The functioning local governance is the central point for a serious approach to a credible sustainable tourism [29]. Thus, sustainable tourism is understandable as a procedure of regulations within the discourse of policy making and analysis, following the constructivist postmodern vision [30].

For all of this, meaning, misusing, and misunderstanding of words matter a lot in co-creating the enhancement of sustainable tourism, especially in the still "virtual" Adriatic-Ionian region and the specific area of social media.
