This study examines policies which provide support to rural bus services and the extent to which these policies meet the accessibility needs of rural communities in Scotland. In recent years, accessibility opportunities have improved for the vast majority of rural people because of increased ownership of the private car.  However, the minority of people who do not have access to a car can face considerable difficulties in accessing all opportunities and may consequently be socially excluded.  The Government wishes to promote modal shift from the car to public transport wherever possible in rural areas.  Policies which provide support to bus services represent a mobility approach to tackling rural accessibility needs. In this study, the methodology used is the ‘Accessibility Policy Assessment Tool’ (APAT), which is used to systematically assess the accessibility impact of policies through a mixed methods approach.  This approach is used to ascertain the ways in which bus support policies could delivery more effective accessibility impacts to rural communities, and is critiqued as part of the study.  The main results of the study were that there are particular characteristics of some policies which enabled them to be more effective at delivering accessibility benefits to some rural communities.  Specifically, those policies which were delivered in a bottom-up fashion allowed local accessibility needs to be better understood and the services put in place could be more responsive to these needs.  In conclusion, it is suggested that bus support policies delivered in a top-down fashion may not effectively be meeting accessibility needs, and thus tackling social exclusion, and that it appeared difficult for urban-delivered policies to meet the accessibility challenges present within rural communities.

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This study aims to study how individuals' attitudes to the new travel trend fitness journeys, with basis in gender and society's expectations. The study is about how Apollo and Ving’smarket looks for the segment fitness trips, but also how these two agencies can broaden it’s audience and attract the younger crowd who are individuals aged 30 years and younger. The study has a gender perspective, and therefore it is of interest to write about how women's and men's perception of fitness trips are different. The study is based on two methods, qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative approach is an interview form that was sent out through e-mail to Jenny Tägtström at Apollo who works as a sales-and marketing Co-ordinator and Magdalena Öhrn at Ving with the position as a communication manager. The quantitative method was designed as a questionnaire sent out through Facebook in different training groups, a total of 301 responses were submitted. The responses have been analyzed and reconnected with the theories that was further on used in the study. The theories that the study related to is stereotypes theory,escape seeking dichotomy, gender theoryabout the different gender rolesandidentity building theory. The study presents that it ́s manly the gender women who contribute in this kind of trips in a greater extent then men. The gender plays a big role when it comes to choose a fitness trip or not but also in the everyday society. The result also shows that there is room for Apollo and Ving to review their marketing as they currently do to them self-market themselves to a larger target group then they actually do but they miss the younger potential consumers which is individuals aged 30 years and younger

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between an organization's identity and its corporate reputation. The organization in focus is a Swedish travel agency. Although identity and reputation has been studied separately before, they are closely connected and have synergistic effects, in that they affect each other. Connecting the two fields can benefit both the profession and research. Not only that, it is also expected to occur as a result of the development of technology, where the internet has made it possible for organizations to communicate through their own channels and describe how they think about themselves, and thus affect the way they want to be perceived. To analyze the organization's identity and corporate reputation, and the relationship between them, the study uses a model developed by Huang-Horowitz and Freberg. To achieve the purpose, data is collected by two methods, qualitative text analysis and semi-structured interviews. The result shows that the organization's identity and reputation interact in a succesful way in two of three categories. A challenge for the object of study is to distinguish itself from its competitors, as the results shows.

This thesis explores how a group of Caribbean and African American activist-intellectuals became global race women in the early to mid twentieth century. Global race women, is the term I use to describe middle-class, public women of African ancestry who were committed to aiding the progress of the darker races, especially, but not exclusively, blacks. They frequently travelled, both literally and imaginatively, which allowed them to develop a cosmopolitan sensibility, forge multiracial coalitions with Africans, Asians, Caribbeans, and Europeans, and practice transnational activism. Their globalism saw them identify, think, and act on a global basis that was tied to the global African diaspora. But it did not distract them from the local considerations that shaped their politics. For global race women, the global and the local were intertwined. This study centres on three protagonists including the Jamaican writer and broadcaster Una Marson (1905-1965), the Martiniquan journalist Paulette Nardal (1896-1985), and the American anthropologist and writer Eslanda Robeson (1895-1965). While the three women did not call themselves global race women, they embodied its characteristics. Their identities as global race women saw them grapple with the race and gender problem as a global phenomenon. They participated in race-based civil rights organisations, anti-fascist campaigns, the League of Nations, United Nations, feminist, and women’s groups. By embracing a range of strategies, they forged networks that crossed ideological, religious, racial, and gendered divisions. The original contribution this thesis makes is the argument that physical or imagined travel and overlapping global social and professional networks were critical to the practice of becoming a global race woman. The significance of this work lays in its placing of black women at the centre of globally connected conversations about cosmopolitanism, anti-fascism, transnational activism, feminism, the end of empires, and the long global freedom struggle between the 1920s and 1960s.

This dissertation sets out to rethink, contextualise and historicise a commonplace notion in the Scottish Enlightenment which poses nations and societies as either improving or primitive. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were the eighteenth-century pioneers in an intellectual project of improvement pointing the light emerging in Europe, particularly in Britain. The Act of Union with Scotland (1707) and the process of modernisation in the Highlands of Scotland allowed for rhetoric of improvement which called upon Scotland with its Highlands to join the great British modernising project. The Scots literati were aware that joining this project jeopardises older cultural habits and values and also brings corruption into society but the other option was nothing but the dilemma of living in premodern, less commercially advanced age, one which, as they thought, prevailed in Arabian deserts and Islamic societies. Their rhetoric of improvement was one of difference between an improving Britain with technological and commercial progress and a backward Middle East with primitive modes of subsistence. For them, modernity did not cast its light on the eighteenth-century Middle East. They fixed Middle East on a lower stage of a universal grid of progress. In the cross-cultural encounters between Britons and Muslims which took place on the Syrian-Mesopotamia overland routes to India, as this dissertation argues, the polarising rhetoric of the Scottish Enlightenment proves to be one of conviction. It was not necessarily the only way of referring to the modern moment of change taking place in Britain. The four British writers which this dissertation examines were interested in the Enlightenment question of improvement. They were believers in progress but had their own doubts about the dominant notions in the habit of interpreting improvement in their own culture. By writing on material progress, commerce, manners and forms of morality which they encountered in Islamic lands they set out to offer their new understanding of the notion of progress. While doing so, they did not posit Islam and the Middle East as the fixed categories of backwardness the Scots literati had always celebrated in their defence of modern British commercial improvement. Rather they showed how Europeans can learn things and improve themselves by interacting with Muslims: caravan chiefs and merchants, political leaders and servants. All these cross-cultural scenes of interaction in which Britons gained improvement occurred in a period in which Britain was not a colonial power in the Middle East but rather a commercial and political partner with local Arabian and Muslim leaders. And writing about Islamic cultures, as this thesis demonstrates, was a way of rethinking British dominant views of the meaning of improvement in the modern age.

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E-sport is one of the fastest growing sports in the world. Hundreds ofthousands interested people travel every year as spectators to E-sport eventswhen professional E-sport stars compete against each other in the biggestgames in the world. It is an important subject to study because of the lack ofresearch and because of the recent growth of interest for E-sport in theworld. The aim of this thesis is to identify the motives behind travel to E-sport events. To answer the purpose of the thesis a web survey has beenused. The result showed that it is the categories Performance and Excitementthat motivates people to travel to these events and it is the event itself andthe atmosphere on the event that pulls people to the events. Some of themotives to travel as a spectator to E-sports events where affected by earlierexperiences of E-sport events and by how often people travel. The mostnotable motives that showed a significant difference were connected tosocialization, which can depend on spatial circumstances.

Yoshimura’s Ghost: Essays on Rural Japan is a collection of six essays exploring the cultural phenomena and daily life of rural Japan. The collection represents my experiences of living as an educator, wife, and mother living in a post 9/11 world. Although not chronological, the essays flow episodically and illustrate examples of the social and cultural concepts that struck me as elements of otherness. Some of the essays in this collection examine the parallels between the exclusion and isolation I felt in Japan as compared to other marginalized groups. Several of the essays describe the culture of Japanese schooling, perhaps offering a perspective only accessible to a foreigner seeing the ways in which a centuries old culture, which is in many ways the most “modern” of any on the planet, absorbs and makes its own cultures from around the world.

Nowadays many travelers choose to book their trips via online booking sites instead of visiting physical travel agencies. This has changed the way the physical travel agencies operate their businesses and has forced them to adapt to new strategies in order to stay alive in this new reality of the industry. The comfort of the digitization pushes the world toward internet and online services, which implicitly mean that physical shops has become less important even in tourism industry where potential travelers go to digital platforms to reach out for information as well as to plan and choose their destinations. The aim of our study was to investigate how digitization has affected the way passengers book their package holidays and how it affects physical travel agencies and their businesses. With the help of our method, which consist of interviews and a questionnaire, we were able to collect empirical data for compilation and analyses and thus to draw our final conclusions. / Idag väljer många resenärer att boka sina resor via onlinebokningssidor istället för att besöka fysiska resebyråer. Detta har förändrat resebyråernas sätt att vara som verksamhet och även fått de att tänka ut nya tillvägagångssätt och strategier för att kunna hålla sig aktiva inom den turistiska marknaden. Vi lever i en alltmer digitaliserad värld där det mesta skall göras online, detta har lett till att fysiska verksamheter är mindre märkbara inom sina områden eftersom potentiella resenärer tar sig till digitala plattformar för att både nå ut till information samt för att planera och bestämma sina resmål. Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur digitaliseringen har påverkat resenärernas sätt att boka sina paketresor samt hur digitalisering berör fysiska resebyråer och deras verksamheter. Med hjälp av våra två metodval som består av intervjuer och en enkät kunde vi samla vårt empiriska material som sedan sammanställdes och analyserades vilket ledde till våra slutliga slutsatser.