Research On Community Participation In Grassland Tourist Destination Based On Social Characterization Theory

Grassland tourism is a comprehensive social activity and an important engine for pastoral communities to achieve rural revitalization.Conversely,pastoral communities are the social entities on which the development of grassland tourism depends,and community farmers and herders are the main participants in grassland tourism,whose perceptions,attitudes and behaviors toward tourism directly affect the sustainable development of grassland tourism.On the one hand,the participation of pastoral communities in tourism can increase the income of community farmers and herders and improve the living conditions of farmers and herders;on the other hand,the development of grassland tourism can improve the public infrastructure of pastoral areas and realize the comprehensive revitalization of communities.However,in the development of grassland industry in Inner Mongolia,there is a long-standing structural problem that the effective tourism participation of farmers and herders is not high,and the community farmers and herders are often in a disadvantageous position in the distribution of tourism benefits,which makes the issue of how to improve the effective tourism participation of community farmers and herders become one of the important issues in the sustainable development of grassland tourism research.Social representation is a concept and theoretical system originated from social psychology,and since its introduction into tourism-related research in the 1990 s,social representation theory has been most effectively applied in the field of community participation in tourism research.In the new century,domestic scholars(Ying,2004)also began to pay attention to the application of social representation theory in tourism research,and affirmed the theoretical value of social representation theory as a new framework perspective for community public participation in tourism research(Zhang,Chao Zhi and You Wang,2009;Tang,Ling Ping,2012;Ou,Cui et al.,2014),but the systematic empirical research results are still vacant.In this study,an attempt is made to apply social representation theory to study the participation of community residents in grassland tourism sites in tourism.Based on the field survey at the case sites and obtaining first-hand information,and starting from the cognitive logic that the main task of social psychology is to study the origin,characteristics,and influence of representations(Serge Moscovici,1961),firstly,the history and representations of community residents’ participation in the development of grassland tourism in A gacha are conceptualized and combed from the perspective of the origin of the dynamic formation of social representations.Secondly,the characteristics and impacts of social representations of community participation in grassland tourism are mainly analyzed in three dimensions,namely,the sources of social representations,namely,direct experience,social interaction and media information.Finally,combining with the problems found in the field survey,we suggest corrections to the social representations of community participation in grassland tourism.The whole paper is divided into six chapters.The first chapter clarifies the background and significance of the study,reviews relevant research results at home and abroad,and briefly explains the research methodology and fieldwork status;the second chapter elaborates the concepts of grassland tourism,community participation in tourism,and the understanding and knowledge of social representation theory,sustainable development theory,and stakeholder theory as the theoretical basis of this study;the third chapter composes the history and representation of community participation in grassland tourism development in A gacha.Chapter 4 analyzes the characteristics and impacts of social representations of community participation in grassland tourism in three dimensions: direct experience,social interaction and media information;Chapter 5 focuses on some negative representations of community participation in the development of grassland tourism in A gacha.Chapter 5 focuses on some negative representations of community participation in the development of grassland tourism,mainly by coordinating the relationship between enterprises and residents,positively guiding the social representation of community participation in tourism,promoting positive social interaction,optimizing the social representation of relevant groups’ participation in tourism,and guiding media communication to dynamically correct the social representation of community participation in tourism;Chapter 6 is the conclusion and outlook section,summarizing and pointing out the shortcomings of the study.