An Everyday Approach to Agritourism Production in Southern Ontario

This dissertation is a nuanced interpretation of the production of space in the context of agritourism in Southern Ontario. It uses everyday life as a theoretical framework to expand conceptualizations of tourism production by enabling a discussion of how cultural practice is central to economic activity. I use agritourism to show how, in addition to being an important economic activity, tourism production is a culturally informed process with intrinsic value concerned with home and family, and contributes to individual utility, self-worth, identity and well-being for the tourism producer. \n \nIn Southern Ontario, Agritourism has grown in popularity in the past thirty years. It is well-known as an economic diversification strategy but needs to be better understood as a cultural practice involving the social relations and everyday interactions of individual life contexts. I argue that the everyday reveals the production logic of well-being that is not necessarily based on an economic mentality but on the day-to-day negotiation of the home as a private place of residence, a place of work, and a tourism attraction open to the public. The question driving this dissertation is: to what extent does the everyday reveal alternative forms of production related to agritourism that are not necessarily driven by profit but by achieving a greater sense of well-being? \n \nAt the heart of the research is an intimate knowledge of the farmers experience. I investigated these experiences by way of participant observation and semi-structured conversational style interviews. In addition to completing 27 interviews with a total of 32 self-employed people involved in operating/managing/running small to medium-large, and relatively large sized agritourism operations/businesses, I visited 16 agritourism attractions as an agritourist. \n \nAn everyday approach shows that emotional well-being is a success factor in the production process, which points to agritourism as more than an economic activity. Adaptation, personal growth, family bonds and legacy, emotional connections, value systems, and protecting the privacy of the home are non-economic characteristics of tourism production that are about the embodied doings of day-to-day tasks that keep the destination running in the long term by preserving the well-being of the farmer and his/her family.

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