Sopiva tila, sopiva mielentila: työnä maaseutumatkailu
Keywords:
commoditised rurality, emotion work, dog sports, late-capitalist working life, self-employmentAbstract
The proper space, the proper state of mind: Rural tourism as work
This article investigates the practices of self-employed people who run firms that provide rural spaces for people who practise various dog sports. These firms’ customers are typically busy urbanites who seek an invigorating leisure experience. People who practise dog sports, in particular, seek functional spaces, adapted to their needs, to train their dogs and spend their leisure time. In addition to providing this physical resource, the entrepreneurs in this study – like any other service-sector workers – must also provide their customers with a certain state of mind. By drawing from rural, tourism, and working life studies, this article demonstrates how the state of mind and the space are produced simultaneously, and how entrepreneurs’ personalities are entirely invested in this labour. The research material consists of interviews and observations of six firms. The article constructs a framework for understanding the concurrent processes of production and consumption in a rural space, and challenges certain theoretical assumptions of rural areas as places of specific types of consumption only; it selectively transfers academic research on new service work to research on rural tourism.
