توضیح پدیده شناسی گوانشی در مدیریت گردشگری روستایی: مطالعه موردی یک روستا در چین A phenomenological explication of guanxi in rural tourism management: A case study of a village in China

1. Introduction Many scholars have called for a foregrounding of “Non-Western” knowledge and theory to equip tourism studies to better understand and interpret the new era we are entering, one characterized by the rapidly growing Asian, and particularly Chinese, tourist market (Chambers & Buzinde, 2015). Their aim is to confront the continuing dominance of “Anglo-Western centrism” because it has “provided the basis for misguided claims of universality” in tourism studies (Tucker, 2016, p. 250). One example of this “de-linking from Western epistemologies” (Tucker, 2016) in tourism studies is that researchers have sought to contextualize their discussions of tourism in China by using the terms and conceptual frameworks from Chinese culture. Guanxi, in particular, a unique Chinese concept, has been employed to understand Chinese society and gained its status as a legitimate socio-cultural construct in Western mainstream literatures of cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and business and management research (e.g., Vogel, 1965; Weber, 1968; Yang, 1994). Yet it has been underexplored as a framework for comprehending the lived experience of tourism in China. Even those studies that address the concept of guanxi exhibit a notable blind spot. Generally, in these few studies, guanxi has been interpreted reductively as an instance of more familiar phenomena and universal forms of social relations. In particular, this Chinese-specific phenomenon has been described as a political ideal or a pragmatic tool exerting influence on tourism developing processes. However, the indigenous participants’ localized “way of seeing” (Yeoh & Kong, 1997, p. 56) the roles of guanxi in their own tourism-related experiences is absent or at least muted in the extant literature.