Nationspeak as a tool in nature tourism work

Sample and procedure

The research material consists of 19 thematic interviews with nature tourism guides working in the Finnish Lapland. The interviews were performed in autumn 2006 and 2009. The material was collected for the ‘Wilderness Guiding as Work’ study, which is part of the larger ‘Tourism as Work’ project funded by the Academy of Finland (www.ulapland.fi/taw). The participants had worked in the all biggest tourist sites in Finnish Lapland: Rovaniemi, Ylläs, Levi, Saariselkä, Pyhä-Luosto and Muonio. They represent all of the key actors in the nature tourism business: entrepreneurs, organizational management, nature tourism guide trainers and guides. Each of them also had worked as a guide. The participants had a diverse background: eight were women and 12 were men. Twelve of them were 20–30 years of age at the time of interview, and five were 30–40. Two participants were in their fifties. Seven of the participants had a permanent job, six were freelance and six were in part-time employment. All of the participants had done more than one task during their careers in the nature tourism business.

In the interviews the same questions were posed to each participant, but in a fashion that enabled them to speak freely and emphasize on the issues that they felt were important. The thematic areas concerned were guiding work and the skills required, education and work orientation, and the nature tourism service with its challenges and potentials. The aim of the study was to examine nature tourism guiding as work from the employees’ perspective.

In the interviews the use of national categories and stereotypes was a central theme brought up by the participants: we refer to this ensemble with a concept called ‘nationspeak’. As the guides spoke of their orientation towards work, methods of handling customer encounters and the challenges that these encounters present, they all brought up national categories. In this article, we will focus on analysing this specific phenomenon, which is common practice in the tourism business (e.g. Gmelch, 2003; Palmer, 1998; Pizam and Sussmann, 1995) and ask how and why it exists.

The study has a multidisciplinary character. Theoretically, the study is based on sociology and cultural studies examinations and theoretical perspectives about cultural categories, stereotypes and nationalities (e.g. Allport, 1998[1954]; Billig, 1995; Brubaker, 2002; Hall, 1997). The cultural studies of tourism and the study of service work offer viewpoints from which to analyse tourism work and its character (e.g. Leidner, 1993; Urry, 1990; Veijola, 2009). This body of literature enables us to render visible the complex ways in which national categories and stereotypes are used in their well-defined context. Methodologically, the research is a qualitative study. The data is read through the interpretive frame to be discussed in more detail in the next sections. Thus the analytic strategy leans towards an idea that the conceptual frame and attendant background assumptions guide the way in which the data is read. The analysis focuses on nationspeak, from the ways in which nature tourism guides speak about their customers to the demands of service work ‘through nations’.

Talking through nations

The world as the world of nations is a frequently and widely used interpretation of the social world, and yet it is only one possible interpretation among many others. Nationspeak as a concept is meant to catch the diverse ways that people or institutions refer to nations in different contexts and as a research device, nationspeak is tuned to detect those moments when we invoke nation or its kindred categories in our action (see Gorski, 2000; Ruuska, 2007). It stresses this special kind of framing of things in the world without either assuming the ‘nationality’ of things beforehand (see Brubaker, 2002) or unintentionally mixing it up with other kind of framings. In general, nationspeak points to a special kind of understanding that works through national categories and stereotypes by connecting these to the social world.

In this study guides use national categories and stereotypes a lot, and the task is to find out why and how they do it. The research method consisted of close reading of moments where national categories or stereotypes pop up: to what other things nations are connected, and what it is that participants try to accomplish by articulating this special group of categories with those other things in the world.

Of all the possible alternatives, why do the nature tourism guides in these interviews select the category of nation as their instrument? One of the reasons is the fact that talking through nations is a historically long and widely shared way of perceiving the world. Although there is much controversy on the historical age of nations (see Smith, 1998), perceiving the world through the concept of nations is a fairly old phenomenon and easily available. Historically it has developed in several locations and thus is fundamentally transnational. Due to historical continuity and the concept’s border-crossing character, we tend to explain the characteristics of many situations or things in everyday life by attaching them to a nation. For our contemporaries it is something very ordinary; from the perspective of everyday life the nation is a taken-for-granted category and, for many of us, part of our common stock of knowledge (Edensor, 2002; Thompson, 2001). As Frost (2006) argues, nationalism creates shared frameworks among large groups of people and hence maintains communication and trust. Because the national order of things is a deeply ordinary way of perceiving and understanding the world, therefore it is fairly safe to assume that in interaction people share this ‘national’ view of the world, at least to some extent. One of the key elements in the order – and the one that guides heavily build on – is that it is based on the recognition of cultural differences (Grossberg, 1996; Hall, 1997). In its contexts, every nation is peculiar in its own way: peculiarity is, in a sense, appropriate.

In the nature tourism guide interviews, thinking through differences of nations appears to be a complete frame through which action is described to the interviewer and which the participants perceive to have a significant meaning to the actual guiding. It is by no means the only way of understanding the world, which is also shown in the guides’ way of shifting the category of nation, for example, to age or gender categories.

Of course, the guides’ categorization of the customers is nothing out of the ordinary, since the human way of thinking is essentially based on categorization. We categorize people and, without this operation, people either would be classified as a unified group or perceived as individuals. Even though the thought might be tempting, Krueger (2001) writes, both alternatives are impractical: they do not provide exact conclusions on the individual. People have a tendency to try to estimate what others possibly are and what they will do next. In nature tourism guiding work, practicality means that customers’ varying needs must be anticipated without falling under the burden of over-individualized product-tailoring. When it comes to providing the service, the question is what customers presumably want: in this case, categorization is a more practical tool than a wild guess.

In his classical study, The Nature of Prejudice (1998[1954]), Allport opens up the question of practicality of categorization. He defines category as an accessible cluster of associated ideas which, as a whole, has the property of guiding daily adjustments. The process of categorization has five traits.

Categorization is connected to thought and action, although not in a simple manner. Categories are monopolistic or separate, often on top of one another and do not always necessarily have to be ‘true’. According to Allport, a rational category should be based on essential attributes, but ‘nature unfortunately has given us no sure means of making certain that our categories are composed exclusively or even primarily, of the defining attributes’ (Allport, 1998[1954]: 171) Due to all this, category-based thought and action can vary from everything between stiff and flexible to wise and stupid. Therefore, the message is that categorization itself does not project anything of the quality of thought and action (cf. McCarthy and Crichlow, 1993).

The necessity of categorization in the human way of reasoning does not raise the subject at hand in the above critique. Billig (1985) criticizes theories such as Allport’s which emphasize the necessity of categories, for according to him in fact unprejudiced thinking is not possible and prejudices are seen as normal and inevitable. In order to emphasize flexibility of thought, Billig raises the process of particularization alongside the process of categorization. In particularization a certain issue is separated from a readily constructed category into a case of its own. According to Billig, there is no reason to attach categorization directly to prejudices or particularization to open-mindedness. Instead, it is possible to see them as argumentation resources: what kind of a worldview is produced through them? (see also Palmer, 1998; Thompson, 2001).

Starting at least from Allport, there is no way to speak about categories without taking into account its kindred concept stereotype which is often associated with categorization of groups of people (see e.g. Dyer, 2002a; Hall, 1997). Walter Lippman, the creator of the expression ‘stereotype’, understood the multidimensionality of the term as early as the 1920s (as told by Dyer, 2002b), by viewing it as the creator of order, as a shortcut, as a reference to the outside world, as well as an expression of the stereotyper’s own values and beliefs. Dyer refers to two problems concerning the perspective of order. On the one hand order may be perceived as absolutely accurate without alternatives and, on the other hand, stereotypes inevitably are constructed through societal exercise of power (e.g. Hall, 1997; McCarthy and Crichlow, 1993; Rastas, 2005). However, rather than connecting stereotypes to the plain exercise of power or somebody’s values and beliefs, it is possible to observe them in a particular situation, which then makes the absoluteness of accuracy questionable and complicates the question of power.

According to Brubaker (2002), categories such as ethnicity, ‘race’, gender or nationality need to be seen as open and practical categories rather than things that humans have by definition. This does not imply that, for example, national stereotypes could not be discriminating, racist or by some other means abusive of ‘others’ (cf. Brah, 2001): the ‘naturalness’ of the national order of things in its banality can be a truly harmful worldview (Billig, 1995; Malkki, 1996). However, the stereotypes or national categories used do not always carry negative or positive associations, and they can be equally true (e.g. ‘the British exist’) or exaggerate divisions (e.g. ‘the British are always more punctual than the Spanish’). What is essential, according to Brubaker, is to understand the practicality and dynamics of categorizations as well as how they are constructed and applied. This interpretation is different to those conceptualizations of national differences that are used in tourism research. For example, Pizam and Sussmann (1995) have pointed out that in tourism work, differences between nationalities are an integral part of the business. However, they presume national differences to be permanent and therefore find it necessary to examine how well people working in the tourism business recognize those differences. Our task, conversely, is to examine the ways that differences are made and the ends for which they are made, rather than to judge ‘correct’ use in one way or another.

Business as safe pleasure

Nature tourism is one the most significant and fastest growing tourism business fields both in Finland and internationally. The Finnish Tourist Board has estimated that nature tourism’s share is 25 percent of the country’s tourism business. Nature tourism has a central significance especially to Northern and Eastern Finland’s economy. In Finnish Lapland, the area of this study, tourism is the most powerful branch of the economy and employment. In particular, nature tourism services are a central and growing part of Lapland’s tourism business activities. The increase in the tourism industry has been strongest in the programme services of nature tourism in the winter season: according to the most up-to-date available figures, in 2006 there were 265 tourism companies in Lapland offering commercial tourism activities (Ministry of Employment and the Economy, 2008). The high season of winter tourism is four to five months maximum, lasting from the beginning of December until the end of April.

The most popular services are guided safaris by sledge dogs, reindeer and snowmobile which take place in natural environments. The duration of the safaris vary from a few hours to days or even a week. More than 80 percent of the customers in the field of nature tourism are international tourists, thus the growth of the business makes it necessary to deal with potential or assumed differences (Regional Council of Lapland, 2009).

On guided safaris the role of the guide is essential. The guide is responsible for the whole event, its functionality, purpose, customer satisfaction and, most of all, safety. Therefore, the guide is a frontline employee who represents both the company that offers the services, and the area with its local inhabitants and culture where the service takes place (Geva and Goldman, 1991; Holloway, 1981; Valkonen, 2009). In their work, the guide is required to handle several tasks simultaneously and to take up various roles demanded by the employer as well as customers. The guide is the beginning and end of a locally very important chain where the means of living are made (Rantala and Valkonen, 2011).

Customers expect safety, enjoyment and rewarding experiences from the service they have purchased. Some of them may have specific needs and expectations due to, for example, their backgrounds, physical and mental abilities and passions and interests on different things. Therefore, it has been claimed,

a good guide must have a psychological eye and an ability to vary their rounds in a way that enables customers from different countries working in various branches to acquire information that appeals to them, if such information is available. (Aarnipuu, 2003: 4)

In this article, we try to ask what exactly is done when ‘different countries’ are taken up.

In order to succeed in their line of work, the employee needs to recognize, at least to some extent, what it is that the customer finds desirable, fitting and pleasurable. In this process, a presumably helpful guideline could be the customer’s social background, age or gender. The categorization or stereotyping of customers forms a central means for guides to manage the challenges brought on by customers’ varying backgrounds. Crang (1994) argues that workers place customers into different cultural categories and modify their own performance accordingly. In other words, the guides strive to control encounters by making various fine distinctions, categories or stereotypes in which customers are located and which often are based on nationality and presumptions of cultural backgrounds (Gmelch, 2003; cf. Crick, 1989). When receiving a task, guides categorize their customers according to their nationalities and, in so doing, create more differences than similarities between different nationalities (Pizam and Sussman, 1995). One could ask why the categorization of clients is such an important part of nature tourism guiding and the skills it requires. In our account, the reason for this is that in the tourism business as well as in other service work, the relationship between the employee and the customer is essential and of a very special kind (Adkins, 2005; Leidner, 1993).

Traditionally, the service has been studied by separating the service provider and the customer: those who perform services and those who purchase them. However, according to Urry (1990), this does not apply when describing the service economy. Since service production and its quality are part of the actual service and the service is produced and consumed simultaneously, it is difficult to separate the consumption of services from their production. Service consists of a relationship where service providers act in immediate interaction with service consumers. Since the service situation itself is also simultaneously the actual end product, the dividing line between the product, the work process and the worker is unclear or non-existent in service employment (Leidner, 1996). Furthermore, customers participate in producing the service and therefore are part of service production. They are not merely observers or recipients, but actors in an interaction process where successful completion of the service is dependent on their willingness and cooperation (Leidner, 1999). Cooperation becomes complicated in cases where customers do not wish to attach themselves to service production, do not understand or wish to apply the rules, or are not satisfied with the routines. For example, this may happen when a customer wishes to drive faster than the other members of the group on a snowmobile safari, or if they seek to challenge the guide’s authority by breaking the rules. This places the guide in a difficult position, since they are not only providing services for customers, but also responsible for their safety throughout the safari (Valkonen, 2009). One means of anticipating challenges brought on by customer encounters is to classify customers. This helps the guide to plan and predict the safari in advance.

As illustrated above, the customer has a significant role in the materialization of the safari. Their role in service production is more difficult and fragile than in other tourism products, since the technical equipment handled and used are often unfamiliar to many. Most customers become acquainted with a snowmobile and northern nature for the first time when participating in a safari. As a result, customers’ capacities, skills and motives play an essential role and affect the nature tourism guide’s work decisively (Valkonen, 2009). Hence it is no wonder that guides often speak of their customers, interaction situations and the challenges that these bring.

In the interviews, the nature tourism guides preferred to emphasize the variability of their work. In guide work, every day is different due to constantly varying customers and conditions. Yet despite this, when asked the guides describe their typical day at work quite similarly. In short, a typical day begins from receiving a safari list: a work order where the type of safari, division of work between guides and the customer group size and form are described. After this, the guide makes sure that the dressing rooms have all the necessary clothing and equipment for the customers and that other equipment such as snowmobiles is in order. Then they assemble or bring the customers to the office, welcome them and help the group members to get acquainted with one another. They organize clothing for the customers and give instructions on driving and general safety. After this, lead by the guide, the group drives together to the predetermined destination where the guide may provide them with coffee or a meal. The guide strives to attend to their enjoyment and needs. Finally, the group returns to their departure location, returns the equipment and gives feedback on the safari. The guide’s responsibility for the group’s safety and enjoyment ends there (Rantala, 2010; Valkonen, 2009).

Talking about nations in nature tourism guide work

Regarding the guide’s preparation, the safari list plays a significant role since from the list both basic details and information on the customers’ backgrounds, possible restrictions, age and gender are found. According to the guides, the safari list is the most important ‘instruction manual’ at the first stage, because more accurate information is lacking. It gives an idea as to what is to be expected and what kinds of activities are possible:

When you go on a safari in the morning, they’ll say ‘Here’s your list and this is what you’ll do’, and nobody speaks after that. After that you have to use your own head and dig out everything from there, and look at the list that okay, these sorts of nationalities and these sorts of specialities and so many small children and so on … There you need to figure out yourself that okay, if I’ve got both Spaniards and Japanese then I can’t do everything because of the Japanese, but then again maybe I could do some extra because of the Spaniards. (Nature tourism guide, female, thirties)

The crucial information on the safari list is the nationality of the customers. Relying on their own knowledge, the guides make their preliminary presumptions on the customers’ capacities and needs according to their nationality in a similar fashion that they would according to age, for example. Combining information and conclusions resulting from this reasoning gives material for deciding what kind of a safari is to be expected and for what sorts of activities it calls. This is based on the presumption that the customers’ national backgrounds implicate their cultures and mentalities:

Different nations do have different mentalities. With Southern Europeans you always know that there is going to be endless talk and explaining and children are liked, bambinos, since they are from Italy. They are sort of careless with their schedules, rules and such. With Russians you usually know that there will be some trouble. Then there are them Western Europeans, that is Belgians and Dutch people, living on the western side of Western Europe; they are sort of typically easy customers, as are Germans. These are usually easy customer groups. (Nature tourism guide, male, thirties)

Categories are used for grouping people due to practical needs, which is illustrated by how the guides utilize the categories. Hence, above, the customers’ differences in abilities, capacities and inclinations are nationalized, which is directly connected to foreseeing what is coming. Foreseeing focuses on the issues essential to the guide, such as how the customer is likely to handle the use of technical equipment, abide by service guidelines and what kind of social activity is to be expected. As a means of foreseeing, nationality leans on the presumption of correspondence between the individuals and the cultures that they supposedly represent.

The need for advice varies according to customers’ capacities. Usually, the worst case scenario is the most practical way to estimate efforts needed, since then surprises are only pleasant ones:

Let’s just say that all that come from – how would you put it nicely? – from ‘exotic’ countries such as China, they create horror when someone hears that Chinese people or people from Hong Kong, Thailand or wherever they’re coming from. (Nature tourism guide, entrepreneur, male, thirties)

Guides expect that customers will pay attention to advice on how to act properly during the safari. If for some reason counselling fails, the guides nationalize the failure:

Anyway these, I don’t get it, nobody in our group gets it. How do people who’ve invented all sorts of gunpowder, paper and such, have invented all that is essential for the world to begin its course. How can these people have such bloody awful motor coordination? I mean, if you give them woollen socks, one out of two will put them on their hands; when you give them shoes with inner shoes, they will put the inner shoes on and throw the outer shoes away. When you give them a helmet, they will put it on wrong so that the visor is on the neck and you can only see a little of the chin, and they will put sled gloves on their feet – not to mention their driving skills. I don’t know what it’s about; is their life just so programmed or controlled that they have no motor coordination? They just don’t. (Nature tourism guide, entrepreneur, male, thirties)

The guide emphasizes in a colourful manner that failure does not imply people’s foolishness – underlined by the use of positive stereotype – but rather something that could be described as cultural upbringing. In this explication, a specific culture is perceived as providing its members with skills that do not apply in a new environment. This, in turn, builds the field of effort required from the guide.

The nature tourism guides presume the national categories and stereotypes to be accurate and functional enough when the aim is to foresee what lies ahead. Furthermore, foreseeing is connected, on the one hand, to the ‘customer promise’ and, on the other hand, to safety. According to the guides, fulfilling the ‘customer promise’ is one of their main tasks (Valkonen, 2009). In order to claim it, every product needs to be tailored if possible according to the customer’s likes and needs. The interactive situation between customer and service provider is crucial to completion of the product, and therefore the guides aim to adapt their action to suit the customer’s background. To be precise, the ‘individual customer’ is at first a nationalized customer, since this particular information is immediately available.

In their work, the guide will entertain customers: for example, by telling stories or giving information on the area, its flora and fauna and conditions. Here, they lean on a type of basic model that is the same for everyone. However, because the aim is towards customer-orientation as well as providing individual services, the guides feel that stories and tales need to be adjusted to please different customers:

With Spaniards, for example, with the family or the person, you take up sort of a different approach and still make them feel like hey, they were there saying that just for me … But then again with the Japanese you have to be more polite and mellow and so on. To them you might explain about reindeers in a really everyday fashion and they’re still really interested, although with Spaniards you can almost play the reindeer yourself. (Nature tourism guide, female, thirties)

The guide is responsible for pleasing, entertaining and taking care of safety. The prerequisite for organizing a successful safari is that the guides are able to control the group’s actions. This is achieved through observing the group’s form: nationality is perceived as giving insight on different capacities, skills and mentalities. By taking customers’ backgrounds into account, the guides feel that they are able to foresee both possibly dangerous situations and opportunities to spice up routine service.

Rationalization of category use

One could conclude that the use of categories and stereotypes work in a very rigid way, where guides use ready-made, fixed group categories and despotically equip them with stable qualities. However, nationally defined culture and the presumed correspondence between it and the individual are regarded with both suspicion and certainty:

The respondent begins by stating that cultures affect all customers. However, in the next sentence he reflects on the foolishness of fixed stereotypical concepts – only to conclude that despite their foolishness the stereotypes are, in fact, accurate. How is this type of conflicting account to be understood?

From the guides’ perspective, the information available in advance together with the categories always relates to the guiding and its practices: in an Allportian sense, through categorizing the guides’ aim to merge as many things as possible into the cluster with the purpose of searching for a sufficient level of action perceived as rational. A ‘complete’ category enables the recognition of the target, and thus appropriate action. However, the guides seem to be aware of the categories’ frailty. One could say, following Allport, that the guides are aware of the categories being based on faith and, therefore, that the rationality of the presumptions has to be expressed separately. This is shown in their continuous and even conflicting way of reflecting on the stories of nations – which just a moment ago they described to be accurate – by spicing them up with characterizations such as ‘even though it sounds silly’ and finally stating that certain national groups are ‘usually’ easy cases.

The guides refer to a type of ‘cultural capital’ or ‘tacit knowledge’ on which they lean while making various interpretations on nationalities (see also Rantala, 2010). Mere reassurance together with ‘tested knowledge’, one’s own and colleagues’ experiences as well as received training, act as a means in construction of the rationality of this knowledge. A significant means in the rationalization of differences refers to experienced practice:

When you’ve done it so long, you are used to looking at people based on the country, Germany, Switzerland, France: they are outdoor people, but then there are these such as Italy. Well, with Italy, it also depends somewhat on whereabouts. If they come from the mountain area where there’s snow, then they are, sort of. Then there are countries such as Belgium, Holland and such, they are more interested in the bar stuff and so on. You can tell this just by looking at the country. (Nature tourism guide, male, forties)

Based on experience, national differences are regarded as having the capacity to explain customers’ different functional abilities up to a certain point. Speaking of experience, the nature tourism guides stress that these interpretations are not only from their personal judgement, but also based on the argument that other guides have had similar experiences:

With them [Russians] you always have to fight, that’s no good. Russians are still difficult; they are difficult in other ways too, always complaining about everything. They are difficult customers, nobody really wants to work with them. (Nature tourism guide, male, thirties)

Alongside enforcement, deconstruction of a category also forms a strong feature in the narratives; in Billig’s (1995) terms, a process of particularization functions alongside categorization. Deconstruction refers to an alternate way of rationalizing which functions alongside the process of enforcement:

Yeah, they [Germans] are easy, but then there is of course some heterogeneity in a way that there have been some German groups that have proved to be the most difficult and nasty people in the safari history. They do exist but … (Nature tourism guide, manager, male, thirties)

In this example, ‘Germans’ belonging to the good customers is a generally recognized category that is often enforced by the stereotype of punctuality. However, it would seem that ‘the Germans’ literally encompasses a surprising amount of diversity. The surprises also can be positive ones:

I too had six young Japanese girls coming to the snowmobile safari according to the paper, I sure was scared we would never be able to keep up with the schedule. It was cold and all the signs indicated that it’s not going to be a nice one. We would be lucky to get back before nightfall. But there was nothing to it; everything went perfectly. The customers drove the snowmobiles well and spoke fluent English. One’s own prejudices were just so strong. I took a wrong stand on it. (Nature tourism guide, male, fifties)

In these examples, the categories are deconstructed on the basis of a diverging experience that has proven the old knowledge wrong. Discovering that a certain nationally marked group has proven to be opposite to expectations is not the only way of deconstructing national categories. Another means of deconstruction is exchanging categories or connecting categories to other explaining factors. Occasionally, national categories overlap with age and gender categories originating from wholly separate sources, as is the case in the above-mentioned excerpt, where a catastrophe was anticipated, or in the following extract:

And then if you have a group of men in their thirties and forties, from whichever country, then … the guide’s role is emphasized in a way that they drive recklessly and want to show themselves and others how things should be handled. And again, these are pretty hard trips sometimes. (Nature tourism guide, male, thirties)

Therefore, national categories are also given boundaries. Besides the group of boisterous men, a small child is a supranational phenomenon that does not seem to belong to any specific culture. A second way that is more related to national explanation is in referring to wider ‘cultural realms’ (East, West, Asia, Europe) and a third means is in dividing national space (e.g. Italy versus the Italian mountain region). Therefore, choosing the proper category is a part of rational actions based on one’s own or the profession’s experiences.

Both enforcing and deconstructing as ways of rationalizing categories arise from the matter accentuated by Allport: that a rational category should be based on the attributes essentially defining the category while at the same time there is no absolute certainty of their accuracy. In such a situation, rationality needs to be constantly reflected upon. On the one hand, as with reassurance on foreseeing a workday, enforcing knowledge concerning a category is usually materialized in the guides’ narratives by referring to general cultural understanding of the diversity of nations (different time conceptions of specific nations, social liveliness, formality or informality, etc.), guide training, one’s own experiences and views and the experiences of colleagues working in the profession (i.e. the technical skills of specific nations). On the other hand, deconstruction is based on situational experience or the experience that certain other qualifications override national categories.

As the illustration above on Germans implies, the exception does not require giving up the old knowledge entirely. This could be understood by stating that quite often we obstinately cleave to our beliefs despite opposing evidence, but it does not explain why we act in such a fashion. Instead, one can assume that from the viewpoint of practical work, both reinforcing and deconstructing are rational actions. It is rational to cleave to categories even after a surprising experience, since they will get you started on tomorrow’s work despite the categories’ haziness. However, it is also rational to give up generalizations if the situation requires it. It would be irrational to presume that each day will be a surprise and planning therefore futile. Equally irrational would be to stubbornly hold on to the planned action with the help of a stereotype when the situation demands something else. Rationalizing as enforcing/deconstructing categories and a readiness to act accordingly is a part of a guide’s professionalism, and is in relation to practical execution of the profession.

Guide work based on categories and stereotypes is a relatively multiform process. The outcome is that stereotypes are essential to our ability to perceive, remember, plan and act (Banaji, 2001). However, these are connected to the dynamics where trusting generalizations as well as evaluating them advance execution of the work. In the guides’ argumentation, different overlapping categories are integrated into anticipation and action and their flexible use is seen as an essential part of the mastery of the work.

Categories and stereotypes as practical tools

In nature tourism, the guide is an employee earning their pay or an entrepreneur, and the customer is a pleasure-seeking tourist. Their relationship is a financial one: the person on holiday pays the person employed for the service. However, since the service is, in the end, provided in association with one another, a particular contradiction is included in the interaction. From the customer’s viewpoint, pleasure is maximally materialized if, for example, they can race by snowmobile together with friends at will, while being drunk. For the provider of the service producing pleasure is a part of the service, but in such terms of reference that the customer is alive and well afterwards and the equipment stays intact. Thus, for the guide the question is about providing pleasure in a safe manner and optimally according to their own workload, for example in the frame of the predetermined schedule. This brings the question of power to the relationship where both customers and guides try to execute their own ‘good’. In the actual customer service situation, the most functional model lies somewhere inbetween.

‘Nationspeak’ is usually connected to this process of managing the conflict between pleasure and control in the form of anticipation, on one hand, and utilizing opportunities to spice up the routine when possible, on the other. National category forms the means for preparing for technical or social challenges. The matters at hand are very concrete and should be prepared for in advance with the help of all available information.

The assumption most readily at hand appears to be that of relating to the national order of things, in which all people from different parts of the world represent distinct but internally similar nations and, therefore, are different by nature, have different skills and a liking for certain things. The wider categories used alongside describe cultural circles connecting nations, such as ‘East’ or ‘Europe’, while the minor categories point to single nations whose population might be divided into smaller regional groups. When planning action, these are the first means with which the guide analyses the forthcoming situation. Thus it is possible to avoid an assumption that is untenable in regard to the attractiveness of the service: the assumption, on the one hand, that all people have a liking for the same things and, on the other hand, the idea of every person’s individual pleasures, which would be a paralysing thought regarding the guide’s work. Alongside the above-mentioned categories, age and gender categories also are used.

The study of contextual categories and stereotypes shows that they have a valuable function when it comes to action. Regarding action it is also sensible to observe continuously the classifications or stereotypes used. This occurs as processes of enforcing and deconstructing. Moreover, the overlapping nature of the categories and the possibility of changing the observation frames resulting from it enable the processing of matters to be fairly flexible.

Especially interesting in the guides’ ways of telling about nations is the continuous fluctuation of certainty and hesitation while speaking about the trustworthiness of the categories and stereotypes. However, the accounts that seem contradictory can be explained by the nature of the work. The guides not only have a need to hold onto these categories in order to get started with their daily work, but they also need to observe the solidity of the category’s characterizations during the actual activity.

When analysing categories and stereotypes, the notion of their relation to action is fundamental: it is essential to ask what it is that these particular persons in this particular situation wish to accomplish by speaking through nations, categorizing, particularizing, making stereotypical characterizations, enforcing and deconstructing them. If the descriptions that guides make are wholly separated from their context and moved to other contexts, they will, so to speak, lose their meaning.