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This article examines informal entrepreneurs’ capital usage and conversion in the Thai tourism sector. On the Bourdieusian assumption that people perpetually transform tangible and intangible forms of capital, this study seeks to answer how informal tourism entrepreneurs transform intangible capital into tangible capital, and vice versa, at different stages of their development process. A visual dataset of 78 filmed interviews and of 426 photographs of informal entrepreneurs in three tourist-island destinations in Thailand was compiled and analysed using thematic qualitative analysis. The results show the importance of diversification of capital mix at informal entrepreneurs’ different development stages. Whereas cultural and symbolic capital are more salient for freelancers and small-size entrepreneurs, economic and social capital are more important for mid-size and large informal entrepreneurs. Furthermore, this study introduces dream capital as a new form of capital. Developing countries are recommended to introduce a policy on profiling informal tourism entrepreneurs so that the appropriate level of regulation can be applied in order to maintain or increase their benefits to society.
About this publication: What is the correlation among the creative industries, creative industry policies, new media paradigms and capitalism as colonial relations of dominance? What is the role of these industries in the prioritization of the interests of capital at the expense of those of society and how can these paradigms be criticized in the context of the actual, neoliberal, flexible regime of reproduction of capital? To what measure is this regime ‘flexible’ and to what measure it is just an extension of rigid, feudal and racial logics that underline (post)modern representational discourses? To what measure do the concepts of creativity, transparency, openness and flexibility conceal the hegemonic nature of modern hierarchies of exploitation?This publication brings together six essays that offer a critique of the relationship between the creative industries and capital. It treats ‘the networked world’ — its democracies, cognitivities, its attention and its paradigmatic cultural discourses — as one of the domains wherein and by which capitalism and its colonial relations of dominance are being reproduced, reorganized, perpetuated and ‘modernized’.The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital (eds. Gordana Nikolić and Šefik Tatlić) consists of works from a diverse range of authors from around the globe: Jonathan Beller, Josephine Berry Slater, Marc James Léger, Ana Vilenica, Sandi Abram & Irmgard Emmelheinz. The book first appeared in Serbian in 2015.
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