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Small Tourism Firms as Agents of Critical Knowledge

This article sets out to examine the potential of the distinctive practical knowledge inherent in small tourism firms in developing theorization of tourism. Whereas previous literature has commonly featured small tourism firms in terms of ‘lack of knowledge’, this paper suggests that particular structural epistemic conditions of small tourism firms enable them to gain a rich and varied repertoire of practical knowledge. This, in turn, opens up a way to rework the existing conceptual frameworks of tourism research. Based on various empirical data collected in Finnish Lapland, the study illustrates the way practical knowledge related to working outdoors in different weather conditions, with a range of groups of tourists and with tourists’ sleeping, invites a development of the existing conceptualizations of affordance, encounter, and agency in tourism. A more general goal of the study is to draw attention to the transmission and circulation of knowledge between and within the academy and the industry, and various spheres of life, and to promote a ‘from practice to theory’ viewpoint in theorizing tourism.