Economy, work and tourism: encounters and failed encounters in touristic visits to working factories

Abstract

Economy, work and tourism: encounters and failed encounters in touristic visits to working factories  São João da Madeira is a small town with an economic fabric anchored in industry, which has built, from very early on, its differentiation rhetoric under the banner of work. More recently, some local agents also started to look at the touristic potential of this industrial dimension. In 2012 an industrial tourism project was launched, combining visits to industrial museums, working factories and other industrial institutions. Drawing on ethnographic field notes on the industrial tourism circuits of São João da Madeira, with a focus on the visits to working factories and adopting theoretical perspectives that place tourist subjects in the centre of the reflection, the article analyses the reflexive subjectivities mobilised on the tourist encounter between factory workers and tourists. Such touristic visits reveal the reflexive capability of these social agents, as they allow webs of meaning, tensions and ideas of the future to be mobilised, negotiated and ranked in a society marked by the impact of a global production restructuring and the anxiety caused by the current (re)configurations of work.