Focus on the existing diversity in tourism production

While degrowth research has an interest in community-led and bottom-up grassroots organizing aside the institutional changes in realizing degrowth societies, degrowth scholarship and practice have much in common with poststructural perspectives to political economic change (see Schmid, 2019). However, as degrowth scholarship identifies the cunent capitalist economic system as the root cause for social and environmental unsustainabilities, it seems evident that change that has to happen is large-scale and touches the whole economic system. This may seem like a contradiction: how can a structural change be realized through place-based incremental changes?

The ongoing discussions in feminist economic geography and elsewhere study economic transitions and transformations in poststructural terms. One of their intentions has been to break down the coherent image of the capitalist economy and show that economies are more diverse than they are usually portrayed. One of the methods used by Gibson-Graham (2008, p. 623) is “reading for difference rather than dominance", which indicates an ethical rather than structural perspective on economy. Their approach moves the search focus from the general development paths and structural explanations to the coexisting particularities, and to the possibility of new’ economic futures. Drawing for instance on economic anthropology, such poststructural political economy literature asks readers to recognize that even if capitalist processes are currently hegemonic, these have not erased all economic diversity that exist and have existed across the world. Gibson-Graham (2006) bring to the fore that despite the hegemonic ‘capitalocentric’ representation and reproduction of the economy, there still exist diverse forms of economic organization, relations and agency that go unnoticed if attention is paid only to the structural forces. In other words, the poststructural perspective to political economy asks to recognize that not ‘the whole system’ has to change - only the reproduction of those currently hegemonic economic processes that aim at capital growth as well as the practices that reproduce their^- hegemonic position.

Therefore, poststructural takes help to clarify there is not a clear-cut divide between capitalism and degrow’th economy (w'hich refers to the other to capitalism). Social and economic transformation starts and coexists with the current forms of capitalist economic processes. By drawing attention to existing, unorthodox views that typically remain marginal or unseen, it becomes possible to increase their potential as possible objects of policy and politics (Gibson-Graham. 2008). As Gibson-Graham (1996. pp. xi-xii) argue:

while there exists a substantial understanding of the extent and nature of economic difference, what does not exist is a way of convening this knowledge to destabilize the received wisdom of capitalist dominance and unleash the creative forces and subjects of economic experimentation.

Using feminism as an example, they argue there are as many chances for economic transformation as there are places of capitalism (e.g. occupations, workplaces, localities, or regions).

Joutsenvirta (2016), for example, draws on the practice approach to study the role of grassroots initiatives in structural degrowth transitions. She calls for recognizing that while institutions are reproduced in human agency, grassroots initiatives and institutional acts are interrelated. It is vital to pay attention to the ways in which agents can disrupt the status quo that is institutionally maintained. Joutsenvirta (2016, pp. 24-25) writes that

non-capitalist grassroots initiatives cany the potential to rapture the unity of growth-oriented institutions and their dominance in society. But there is a need to investigate and respond to institutions that enable or constrain the functioning of alternative practices in the current economic environment.

This perspective also asks to pay attention to the currently hegemonic institutional agency, not only to the alternative agency outside it.

Although the work of Gibson-Graham focused on fostering non-capitalist forms of economic organization, their research approach of seeking economic diversity is applicable in the context of enterprises. In a commentary on Gibson-Graham (1996), Lee, Leyshon, and Gibson-Graham (2010, p. 118) highlight that “even within capitalist practice, a wide variety of notions of value are always simultaneously at work, always informing economic action”. Gibson-Graham (2014, p. 151) also argues that an economic subject can possess other motivations for economic agency and value creation than “individual self-interest, competition, efficiency, freedom, innovative entrepreneurship, exploitation, and the pursuit of private gam”. Thus, entrepreneruship, especially in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), should be regarded as a social force and not strictly as an ‘economic’ action (North, 2016).