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2023

Economic Evaluation Rationalities: How Life Trajectories Shape Beach Commerce as Seen Through the Bourdieusian Framework

Rationalités d’évaluation économique : application du cadre analytique bourdieusien pour comprendre de quelle façon les trajectoires de vie façonnent le commerce à la plage
Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite et Cae Rodrigues

Résumés

Les rationalités d’évaluation économique des propriétaires de bars de plage sont au cœur de la conception de plusieurs modèles de plages commerciales. Nous avons mené seize entretiens avec des propriétaires de bars de plage à Aracaju (Brésil), puis conduit une analyse de correspondance multiple sur la base de ces données en fonction de leur âge, leur sexe, leur niveau d’éducation, leur pays d’origine, la longévité de leur entreprise, leur utilisation des réseaux sociaux et de TripAdvisor, et leur façon de mesurer la satisfaction des clients. Les résultats ont montré trois types de rationalités : le bouche-à-oreille, la recommandation experte et l’évaluation indépendante en ligne. Nous avons également constaté que la distribution de ces trois types de rationalités au sein du sous-champ des bars de plage dépend des capitaux social, technologique, générationnel et culturel de leurs propriétaires. Nous avançons enfin que le cadre analytique ici présenté peut être appliqué à différentes plages commerciales pour permettre des comparaisons en termes d’utilisations gratuites et/ou payantes des plages mais également de mesurer le degré auquel les propriétaires de bars de plage se soumettent aux tendances internationales en matière de gestion du tourisme.

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Introduction

  • 1 In 2007, 62% of Aracaju beachgoers bought food from beach bars, 22% brought it from home, and 16% b (...)
  • 2 In this paper, we consider “beach bars” only those that are on the sand level.

1In Aracaju, capital city of the state of Sergipe in the Northeast of Brazil, there are three ways to eat on the beach (Sartore et al., 2019). First, no commerce – people exercise their constitutional right (Brasil, 1988) to freely access the beach and have picnics; second, optional commerce – people freely access the beach and have the option to buy food and beverages from independent vendors; third, commerce – people go to beach bars and pay for meals, beverages, and infrastructure. Looking at this through the spectrum of oppositions, on one side there are picnics, and on the other beach bars1. Beach bars are a global phenomenon. The website “CNN travel” ranks the best 50 beach bars around the world and refers to them as places on the sand level or near the shoreline, having a full view of the ocean (Gerrie, 2013)2. Beach bars are unique touristic places as they offer the possibility to enjoy the sea, drink alcoholic beverages, eat fresh seafood, all with “toes on the sand” (Sartore, 2017).

2In Aracaju, a set of 48 beach bars built along the Inácio Barbosa Highway is a popular touristic attraction. The first Aracaju beach bars were standardised simple shacks built in the eighties as part of a state policy promoting beach infrastructure (França, 2011). Gradually, tourists started to flock and nowadays they can find a variety of beach bars ranging from the surviving traditional beach shacks to renovated European-style beach clubs (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Aracaju beach bars (partial view)

Figure 1. Aracaju beach bars (partial view)

Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.

  • 3 Research project developed by the lead author under the code PVD 5178-2017.Other results from this (...)

3Although the Brazilian Northeast is known for its sun, sea, and sand tourism, Aracaju is far from being a tourist’s first choice. According to the last annual Brazilian tourism statistics (Ministério do Turismo, 2021), Aracaju receives far fewer national and international tourists than Salvador (the capital of Bahia, located 323 kilometers South of Aracaju) and Maceió (the capital of Alagoas, located 250 kilometers North of Aracaju). Thus, Aracaju’s tourism is underdeveloped in comparison to its closest neighbours, and several other sun, sea, and sand tourism hotspots in the Northeast, resembling some of these places as they were decades ago (in relation to tourism). In our talks with beach bar owners from Aracaju they mentioned that groups from Bahia regularly visit them to escape the busy and expensive beach bar experiences back home. As two of this paper’s authors live in Aracaju, regular field visits and informal conversations with beach bar owners were possible and resulted in the research project, “The social construction of Aracaju’s tourism market: The case of beach bars at the South coast”3. The results of this project revealed how Aracaju’s tourism has been able to “survive”, even though it adapts to tourism trends at a slower pace than Salvador and Maceió.

4Beach bars are part of tourism markets. Tourists are their clients (demand-side). Beach bars and their owners are selling food and leisure services (supply-side). Research about tourism markets is normally developed by social geographers, economists, and managers (Guibert and Tauney, 2017; Guibert, 2021). When it comes to the study of beaches, sociologists consider them as important analytical spaces to understand cultural differences between societies (Sartore and Coffey, 2020), social struggles for free or private access to nature (Sartore et al., 2019), processes of social stratification (Bruno and Salle, 2017, 2018), and forms of beach appropriation (Guibert, 2014). Nonetheless, sociological studies about beach bars are scarce.

5According to Bourdieu (1997), sociological analysis must overcome the scholastic fallacy that considers markets as a-historical entities with rational individuals aiming to maximise their profits. Following Bourdieu’s works on the economic field (1997) and on the social structure of the economy (2005), we consider markets as economic fields which structure and power distribution result from the relational distribution of the volume and the structure of particular forms of capital (financial, technological, cultural, juridical, organisational, commercial, and symbolic) incorporated by companies, their owners, and managers. These forms of capital are objective expressions of life trajectories uniting and separating individuals in the economic field. The economic field, as any social field, is determined by two intersecting axes opposing different forms of capital (Bourdieu,1984, 1986; Thomson, 2010).

6Markets analysed as economic fields are the result of a “twofold social construction” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 16). The construction of demand, which comes from the production of individual dispositions and preferences; and the construction of supply, which defines the conditions of access to the market and of the decisions made by each company regarding production and advertising. For example, the work of Réau (2007) explained the social construction of the French clubs de vacances market by focusing on the life trajectories of their inventors. In this paper, we also explore the supply side of the social construction of the Aracaju beach bar market by analysing the life trajectory of beach bar owners (BBOs).

  • 4 For a discussion about the “tourism field” as a scientific object see Darbellay and Stock (2012). F (...)

7The economic field can have sub-fields characterised by their own structure and volume of capitals (Bourdieu, 1997). In this paper, we consider the Aracaju beach bar market as a sub-field of the Aracaju tourism field4 composed of tourism companies such as travel agencies, clubs de vacances, hotels, restaurants, beach bars, etc.

8After informal conversations with Aracaju’s BBOs we noticed that their life trajectories strongly shaped the way they evaluated their own bars, and how they accessed evaluations from their customers. Basically, this process involved either “word of mouth”, “expert recommendation”, or “independent online reviews”. The practices of business evaluation, as a topic of study, came to our radar in 2017 when we noticed evaluation score certificates such as the Michelin Stars and TripAdvisor covering a restaurant’s door in Paris, France. These certificates were sharing the same door space, but they represented two different Economic Evaluation Rationalities (EER): Michelin is related to expert evaluations, and TripAdvisor to independent online evaluations.

9For Bourdieu (1997, p. 52), economic rationality is present “when individual socially constituted dispositions in a field meets the field’s objective structures”. For example, when the objective structures of French capitalism (the idea of savings, monthly income, etc.) arrived in Kabyle society, its people didn’t have the cultural and economic socially constituted dispositions needed to quickly act as “economically rational individuals” (Bourdieu, 1997, 2005) due to the field effect of hysteresis – a “lag in adaptation and counter-adaptative mismatch” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 214).

  • 5 In Godechot’s words (2016, p. 4): “[…] the Baazar offers an image of financial rationality that dif (...)

10The tourism market is one of the largest industries in the world. Online evaluation platforms such as TripAdvisor, as well as Booking, Airbnb, etc., have been changing tourism markets by bringing new forms to rate and evaluate businesses. This affects both the demand and the supply side, as the example of a hotel owner in England who changed his business strategies based on TripAdvisor reviews (Cardon, 2015). In this paper we follow Godechot’s concept of “bazaar of rationalities5” (2016) to argue that the tourism market is a bazaar of rationalities where different forms of economic rationalities coexist in a relational constellation. Godechot (2016) considers the trading room as a field where there is a correspondence between the trader’s life trajectories and the choice on which mathematical arbitrage, economic analysis, or chartist calculative formulas they’ll normally apply to their investment portfolio. Thus, the trader’s economic rationality is the result of the correspondence of his life trajectory and the objective conditions (the calculative formulas) of the financial field. In the case of the Aracaju Beach Bar sub-field, we argue that the BBOs’ EER is the correspondence between their life trajectories and the objective conditions related to evaluation practices in the tourism market field such as the Word of Mouth, the Expert Recommendation, and the Independent Online Review, leading to the question of how these three evaluation strategies are distributed in the Aracaju Beach Bar sub-field. In other words, what are the two intersecting axes opposing different forms of capitals that drive the EER on the Aracaju commercial beaches?

11This paper is structured as follows: First, we discuss the three forms of EER (Word of Mouth; Expert Recommendation; Independent Online Review). Second, we connect Bourdieu’s field theory with Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of cités to explain our data presentation in the following section. Third, we bring the results by drawing the Aracaju Beach Bar sub-field diagram that shows that social and technological capitals and generational and cultural capitals are active in creating social distancing among BBOs. Then, we emphasize three representative individuals of each EER (BBO#6, BBO#11, and BBO#13). Finally, we present our final remarks.

The bazaar of Economic Evaluation Rationalities in tourism markets

12Mainstream economics generally presupposes that businesspeople behave, or should behave, as Homo Economicus, i.e., as people that are self-interested, rational, unchanging, unreflective, and untouchable by cultural particularities (Tomer, 2001). However, economic sociologists and anthropologists have been showing that the Homo Economicus is only a model that guides people’s economic behaviour. The assumed Homo Economicus behaviour is, in fact, the result of a well succeeded social and cultural construction that started centuries ago (Douglas and Ney, 1998) and, nowadays, represents the dominant economic habitus that one should adjust to, or acquire, to succeed in the economic field (Bourdieu, 2005). However, even in the financial market, where one might think to find the personification of the Homo Economicus, people are far from behaving only through what could be conceptualized as the Homo Economicus (Godechot, 2000, 2016; Abolafia, 2001; Garcia-Parpet, 2003; Müller, 2002; Preda, 2006). Theories that are grounded in empirical data show that we live in a world with multiple forms of rationalities (Lamont, 2012; Cefaï et al., 2015). In this paper, we argue that the Aracaju beach bar sub-field is a bazaar of rationalities that are important to the tourism market: Word of Mouth, Expert Recommendation, and Independent Online Review.

13Word of mouth (WOM) can be defined as an “informal, person to person communication which is considered to be non-commercial in nature” (Harris, 2014). The tourism literature has been formally studying the WOM communication process for 33 years and recognises its importance in shaping tourism markets (Confente, 2014). Evaluations from experts (Expert Recommendation) are also important to tourism markets. Michelin stars, for example, created in 1926, is the most acclaimed restaurant evaluation system in France in which experts rate restaurants up to three stars (Karpick, 2000). In 2020, Michelin Guide experts recommended 3,439 French restaurants and star-rated 628 of them (Pénavaire, 2020). Independent Online Evaluations are part of the Web 2.0 applications and tools that are transforming the travel industry (Christou and Sigala, 2012). TripAdvisor is one of these applications that shows how evaluation practices have grown in number. Created in the United States in 2000, TripAdvisor is the most popular independent online evaluation system worldwide, available in 49 markets and 28 languages (TripAdvisor, 2020) where independent reviewers, normally customers, write online consumer reviews rating restaurants up to five stars, currently listing and rating more than 16,000 restaurants in Paris alone, with daily updates.

14Online Consumer Reviews, also called Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM), has been getting attention from researchers such as Zhang et al. (2010), who have discussed the idea that independently written eWOMs have more impact on a restaurant’s reputation when compared to eWOMs written by experts. Even though Meuter et al. (2013) have argued that interpersonal WOMs is still more efficient than eWOMs, the reach and volume of the bigdata produced by eWOMs is no doubt far greater than interpersonal WOMs. Cheung and Lee (2012) have shown that writing Online Consumer Reviews is motivated not only by the possibility of the consumer building a reputation (online), but also by a sense of belonging and enjoyment.

15TripAdvisor has increasingly become a topic of interest among researchers who study tourism through the lens of sociology. Cousin et al. (2014) discussed the role of TripAdvisor in producing new social science research data, specifically on the tourism market. Other authors have focused on TripAdvisor as a tool that changes trust mechanisms in modern society (Jeacle and Carter, 2011), or that reveals normative moral patterns (Vasquez, 2010; Sartore, 2017). Our focus in this paper coincides with the works of Beuscart, Mellet and Trespeuch (2016) and Cardon (2015) that explore TripAdvisor’s performative role in changing the way owners manage their restaurants and hotels.

16The way life trajectory shapes the distribution of WOM, Expert Recommendation, and Independent Online Reviews helps to explain how and to what extent each commercial beach is immersed in tourism technological trends. In other words, life trajectory of BBOs can help to explain the tourism market technological delay or the effect of hysteresis in a particular Beach Bar sub-field, such as in Aracaju, or other popular beaches with beach bars, e.g. Ibiza, in Spain, Rimini, in Italy, or Pukhet, in Thailand.

Connecting the economic field to the concept of cités

17Each beach bar owner’s economic evaluation rationality belongs to a cité (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). Each cité reveals a set of conventions and agreements that guide people in case of disagreement. Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) have identified six cités: civic, inspired, domestic, fame, market, and industrial. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) later added the cité by project. Although each cité differs from each other, they are not exclusive and can coexist in a social field. Three cités guide the justification grammars of BBOs: domestic, industrial, and project. In the domestic cité, the collective behaviour is guided and justified by tradition and personal ties, including the WOM. In the industrial cité, values such as scientific premises and efficacy drive collective behaviours, opening space to the Expert Recommendation. In the cité by project, networks, fluidity, and autonomy are the most important civic values, opening space to Independent Online Review.

18Inspired by the arguments of Vandenberghe (2006), Labie and Vanroose (2013), and Susen (2015), we connect the Bourdieusian field theory to the theory of cités developed by Boltanski and Thevenot (1991).

  • 6 During a field visit in March 2022, we noticed that some beach bars have already started to imitate (...)

19Following the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we argue that the beach bar sub-field is influenced by the tourism field evaluation objective structures such as WOM, Expert Recommendation, and Online Independent Reviews. Following Boltanski and Thevenot (1991), our research considers actors in the course of their everyday activities (BBOs) and their justification grammars during moments of disputes (Boltanski, 2011). In 2017, when we interviewed BBOs from Aracaju, we realized that they were trying to legitimate their presence on the beach. At that moment, they were responding to a lawsuit filed by the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry to demolish their beach bars based on environmental claims (Sartore et al., 2019). Meanwhile, the inauguration of a European-style beach bar in 2014 increased competition among BBOs6. However, justification grammars aren’t equally distributed and are conditioned by the acquisition of different forms of capitals (Ramaux, 1996).

  • 7 Translated by the authors
  • 8 Translated by the authors

20We also agree with Susen (2015, p. 185) when she connects the social field with the cité by arguing that “the social field is a space for action that requires a process of justification. By the same token, each cité is a relational regimen marked by structural divisions7”. She also argues that “the normativity of each cité […] is determined by the construction of the field legitimacy which comes from the social actors’ symbolic power8” (Susen, p. 186). In this paper, we connect these two perspectives by bringing together the top-bottom perspective of the beach bar as a sub-field to the bottom-up perspective of the daily evaluation practices of BBOs, which is part of their justification grammars.

21In the next section, we present our results. First, we formally draw the Aracaju beach bar sub-field by using the multiple correspondence analysis. Then, we present the discourse and justifications of BBOs related to their EER, giving emphasis to three BBOs who are representative of each cité. Then, we present our final remarks.

The Aracaju BBO EER sub-field

  • 9 We acknowledge that an analysis of all 48 BBOs would produce a more accurate result of the proposed (...)
  • 10 Access to the full research data base and the data analysis tables are available at https://ufsbr-m (...)

22We interviewed 16 BBOs9 with a questionnaire containing 17 questions10. Bourdieu (1997) presents the financial, technological, cultural, juridical, organisational, commercial, and symbolic capitals as important for the economic field. In the Aracaju’s beach bar sub-field the five types of capital proved to be important are: 1. Generational capital (age); 2. Social capital (being a local or not); 3. Organisational capital (time in business and style of management [family run or managed by a manager); 4. Cultural capital (secondary or undergraduate degree); 5. Technological capital (the use of social media, particularly, TripAdvisor).

23Frequency analysis showed that the 16 BBOs in Aracaju are mainly experienced adults (older than 40 years of age), male, locals (Brazilians), with long lasting businesses (ownership of more than 10 years), and with completed secondary education (high school diplomas).

24Regarding BBO’s age, 4 of them are younger than 35 years of age, 8 are older than 50 years of age, and 4 are between 35-50 years of age. Women run 4 beach bars and the other 12 are run by men. Two owners are immigrants (one was born in Suriname, the other in Italy), 14 are Brazilians, 9 of them born in Aracaju. Most of them have run their businesses for, at least, 5 years (with the exception of 3), 7 for more than 20 years. With long lasting ownerships, some beach bars were already passed down to the next generation – 11 out of the 16 are the first generation in charge, while the other 5 are second generation owners. In the time the interviews were conducted, all were family-run beach bars, apart from 1 that had hired a manager. Of the 16 owners, 9 had completed secondary education (high school degree), and 5 completed higher education (undergraduate degree).

25Inspired by the works of Bourdieu and Godechot, we ran multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) on SPSS (version 26) to draw the Aracaju beach bar sub-field diagram. The MCA is a statistical tool used to draw any Bourdieusian social field, as it produces a correspondence analysis of different forms of capital (Rouanet, 2005). The method can be used to “display the positions of agents within a field, in keeping with the field being researched (according to sociological understandings of the kinds of factors relevant)” (Lebaron, 2008, p. 125).

26We asked the BBOs if they used social media to understand their technological capital: 12 out of 16 had access to a smartphone and used social media, mainly Facebook. Beach bars run by the second generation, who are in charge or being prepared to be in charge, are using social media such as Facebook and Instagram to promote their business. For example, BBO#7 was 26 years old at the time of the interview and had inherited the bar from his father. He said that he maintained his focus on WOM, but he was also using WhatsApp to improve his communication with customers:

Yes, we have Instagram that is [mention the link], we have Facebook too, the bar also has a webpage and WhatsApp, I added the WhatsApp number on the menu and, if the customer wants to order, he can use WhatsApp, then the order is delivered to the table, it’s pretty cool (BBO#7).

27As the second generation of millennials take charge of the businesses, beach bars will definitely enter the world of social media. However, when BBOs were asked if they knew about the existence of TripAdvisor, 9 simply answered ‘no’; 4 had heard about it but did not know how to use it; and only 3 were using it to promote the bar. The question about TripAdvisor was added based on Scott and Orlikowski’s study (2012) showing how an English rural hotel manager modified his way of managing and, thus, his hotel’s reputation after the arrival of TripAdvisor. From this example we can understand how TripAdvisor can be performative, as it changed a reality (the manager’s EER and the hotel’s reputation) it was, a priori, made only to measure and describe (Merton, 1948; Espealand and Sauder, 2007).

28In the Aracaju BBO sub-field, the forms of capitals that distance the individuals in the horizontal axis (dimension 1) opposes mainly those who are locals (Brazilians) and do not use TripAdvisor to those who are immigrants (foreigners) and use TripAdvisor. Thus, social capital and technological capital are active in creating social distance in the Aracaju BBO sub-field (dimension 1). The vertical axis (dimension 2) opposes younger people (younger than 30 years of age) with higher education to older people (older than 50 years of age) without higher education. Educational and generational capitals also create social distance in the Aracaju BBO sub-field, to a lesser degree. Table 1 shows the diagram of categories, as a picture of the Aracaju BBO sub-field, based on our sample. Table 2 shows the distribution of individuals (BBOs) and how far the two immigrants are from the majority of BBOs.

Table 1. Aracaju BBO social field (categories)

Table 1. Aracaju BBO social field (categories)

Source: Created by Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite and Cae Rodrigues using SPSS.

Table 2. Aracaju BBO EER social field individuals

Table 2. Aracaju BBO EER social field individuals

Source: Created by Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite and Cae Rodrigues using SPSS.

29The horizontal axis (dimension 1) of the cloud shows that locals who do not use TripAdvisor are closer to the WOM. Foreign BBOs are the only cases associated with the Expert Recommendation and the Online Independent Review, as can be seen on the horizontal axis.

30The vertical axis (dimension 2) of the cloud opposes younger people with higher education and older people with secondary education. As the time goes by, and if new generations with a higher education degree take charge, the WOM cloud of individuals will probably start to spread from the bottom to the top and individuals numbered 1, 3, 4, 7, and 16 (younger people with a bachelor’s degree who know and use TripAdvisor) will gradually distance themselves from the WOM cloud of individuals, not only in the vertical axis, but also from the left to the right side of the horizontal axis. To sum up, as young people with a higher educational status take charge, the Aracaju BBO sub-field, and the commercial modus operandi of Aracaju beaches, might change quite drastically in the coming years.

31BBO#6 (beach bar owner number 06 in our sample) is the ideal type (Weber, 2011 [1949]) representing the WOM EER. The only representative of the Expert Recommendation is BBO#11, and the Online Independent Evaluation Economic Rationality is represented by BBO#13.

BBO#6 – the WOM EER

32BBO#6 is the most accurate ideal type representation of the WOM in the Aracaju Beach Bar sub-field. He was born in Aracaju, completed high school, and, at the time of the interview, he was 61 years old and had been running his bar, with his wife, for 27 years. The interview took place on a weekday, at eight-thirty in the morning. He was wearing an old T-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. He offered us coconut water and opened a beer bottle for himself. He was very welcoming and kept chatting about his friends (his customers) who live in the gated community right across the Highway. Quite spontaneously and jokingly, he told us the story about the whisky bottles his customers from the “whisky club” left open in his bar, so they could drink whenever they came, but that were emptied out by a ghost that lived in the bar (the joke was, of course, that BBO#6 himself drank the whisky). He also told us the story that, for many years, during the Brazilian carnival festivities, his friends (again, his customers) used to carry him from his bar to the neighbour’s bar in a ritual called “carrying BBO#6”. When we asked about the way he gets feedback from customers, he said: “It’s the word-of-mouth…customers who come here spread the word to others by saying that they liked the bar, I’m always happy with everyone, I have great friendships with people” (BBO#6).

33WOM proved to be the more widespread EER, indicated by 14 BBOs in the present study, as illustrated by the following statements: “I chat with customers directly. I’m always trying to find out if everything is okay, if customers are enjoying themselves. Personally, I don’t use any other means to measure my customers satisfaction” (BBO#1). “We go from table to table asking if everything is okay, if they have already been served, if there are any complaints, [any] suggestions. Certainly, the word-of-mouth is the most important” (BBO#5). “I use word-of-mouth. Most weekends I approach the people sitting at the tables, ask for their reviews, how is the food, lunch, I do this a lot” (BBO#12). For BBOs it is also common to associate the WOM with the idea of friendship:

It’s like I say every day: I have no customers, I have friends. Everyone who comes here becomes my friend, everyone is like a companion, everyone is a mate, then it’s over, so, when they leave, I say: if you do not come back, the party won’t go on, you have to always be here, so the party can go on (BBO#2).

34The WOM is linked to the domestic cité (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991), where economic actions are justified based on personal relationships. The fact that the WOM is the most common in Aracaju BB should not come as a surprise, since the majority of the beach bars are small, family-owned, and family-run businesses. The lines between the monetary economy and personal issues are fine, if any (see Zelizer, 2009). The entanglement of professional and personal life is not questioned, being an important aspect of how they orient and justify their management skills. It is this entanglement that shapes the WOM EER.

35The EER shapes the BBO’s expectations about the beach bars’ future and its aesthetics. When we asked BBO#6 about his expectations about the future, his answer was a lot like the others: he said he “hadn’t thought about the future of his business”. He had a more passive view of his business as, for him, the future of his bar was highly dependent on the city’s public policies. The overall aesthetics of his bar resembles the first urban design of what the BB should look like in Aracaju’s coast: rounded rustic kiosks and plastic chairs and tables on the sand given by their sponsors, typically popular beer companies (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Beach bar#6

Figure 2. Beach bar#6

Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.

Figure 3. Government advertisement from the 1980’s announcing the inauguration of the “Jose Sarney Highway” with the projection of the construction of beach bars

Figure 3. Government advertisement from the 1980’s announcing the inauguration of the “Jose Sarney Highway” with the projection of the construction of beach bars

The Jose Sarney Highway gives access to current beach bars in the South Coast of Aracaju.
The text in the upper-right corner of the image says: JOÃO ALVES FILHO, a government that works.

Source: http://aracajuantigga.blogspot.com/​2011/​05/​aracaju-e-propaganda-do-seu-crescimento.html (accessed 26 June 2018).

BBO#11 – the Expert Recommendation EER

36BB#11 is one of the most popular in Aracaju, largely because it receives the major share of tourists guided by travel agents/agencies. BBO#11 is the only one from our sample representing the Expert Recommendation. He was born in Suriname, and, at the time of the interview, he was 57 years old and had been running the bar for 10 years, along with his Brazilian wife. Before moving to Brazil, he had previously received his business master’s degree from a European University and had worked as a supermarket warehouse manager. He said that this business background taught him how to run a business properly. At the time of the interview, he was the host at the Beach Bar Association meetings, as well as the president of the Gastronomic Pole of the state of Sergipe, launched in 2017, showing a high degree of social capital.

37BBO#11 was interviewed on a weekday, during the morning. He was wearing a polo shirt, social shorts, and sport sandals. It was quite clear how he rationalized his answers, always bringing up current tendencies, showing he was up to date with the latest trends in beach bars/clubs. When asked about the way he gets feedback from customers, he said that:

Bar#11 is a company, having a human resources department, finances, with the production from the kitchen, with the purchase of meat, with everything right? It is a small business [...] Bar#11 is not a beach bar, Bar#11 is a company. First, it’s a company, then it’s a beach bar. Do you understand? (BBO#11).

38BBO#11 has business partnerships with CVC, the most popular Brazilian travel agency. Created in the seventies, CVC became the most profitable tourism agency in Brazil by bringing popular and middle-class citizens to the tourism market by selling vacation packages to metallurgical workers (Marques, 2012). It popularly carries a pejorative reputation of being “The ‘Casas Bahia’ of tourism” (Pacheco, 2010). “Casas Bahia” (which literally translates to “House of Bahia”) is a furniture department store with an aggressive price policy that attracts mostly people from low to middle classes. CVC, as well as other travel agencies, is a place of certificated experts such as tourism guides and agents who recommend places to visit and who also take tourists to beach bars, as an included stop on the way back from a daytrip. BBOs who do not participate in the expert recommendation network told us that they are “invisible” in the mass tourism market and must rely on local customers to survive. The focus on strategy, efficiency, and the mass tourism market guided by experts, puts BBO#11 in the realm of the industrial cité (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). BBO#11 portrayed himself by focusing on his professional life, separating his business from his private life. The Expert Recommendation EER is legitimized by the BB#11’s relationship with companies such as CVC and hotels, consolidated by a dynamic of trust, which is certified through guides and certifications known by the public.

39When we asked BBO#11 about his expectations about the future of his bar, he developed a market analysis based on customer expectations, such as the growth of vegetarianism and veganism, and how Brazilians are changing their expectations regarding beach bars due to an increase in international travel. His speech revealed a more active way to do business based on his knowledge of market tendencies. The overall aesthetics of the bar is different from the others: there are still plastic tables and chairs on the sand with umbrellas sponsored by beer companies, but there is also a wooden deck, with wooden chairs, tables and couches sponsored by a French champagne brand for those wanting to leave the beach space and have lunch inside. In the European beach bar culture, it is common to separate the outside sand beach space, where people enjoy the beach wearing swimming suits, from the inside dining space, where people have their meals wearing social beach clothes (see Sartore and Coffey, 2020). In beach bar #11, the tables are laid out in a pattern that resembles a factory’s conveyor belt, in a way to facilitate the efficient work of the waiters/waitresses, who all wear uniforms (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Beach bar#11

Figure 4. Beach bar#11

Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.

BBO#13 – the Independent Online EER

40BBO#13 is an Italian immigrant who was 44 years old at the time of the interview. He runs the bar with the help of a general manager, a local young man who we also interviewed. BBO#13 was interviewed on a weekday, during the morning, and was wearing a branded T-shirt, social shorts, and casual shoes. He told us about his previous experiences working in fancy Italian beach bars in Rimini. During our interview with the general manager, the ideas of TripAdvisor and innovation were constantly brought up.

So, yeah, I believe that this question about not knowing these social medias, in the case, TripAdvisor, Instagram...I think it starts there, if you want to maintain your business, if you want to be the best, be bigger, to grow, you have to look for it too […] [there are those owners] there for a long time, thirty years on the beach, worked the same way during these thirty years, didn’t think they had to improve, that they had to look for new things (BB#13 General Manager).

  • 11 The concept of tourism capital can be found in Loloum, 2018.

41BB#13’s general manager said that TripAdvisor was already part of his daily management routine and each day, after work, he looked through the new written reviews. In the case of negative reviews, he tried to find out if the person who wrote “understands about restaurants, [and] travels a lot”, in other words, if they had a high degree of tourism capital11. If the customer has a high degree of tourism capital, he tries to reverse the bad review by providing the reviewer with a suitable explanation.

42TripAdvisor Independent Online Reviews, as well as all other forms of online consumer review platforms, create a new EER based on a faster, more fluid way to do business (Orlikowski and Scott, 2014), framing it in the realm of the cité by project (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). BBO#13 aims to make the technique of the “industrial” model more flexible but does not completely discard it; he also seeks to provide a more personalized service by answering his customers reviews.

43When we asked beach bar #13’s general manager about his expectations about the future of the bar, he focused on the need to always be improving by innovating the menu, presenting new options based on the chef’s experiments, and offering new activities such as the Summer Sunset Lounge Sessions the bar hosts on weekends. The overall aesthetics of the bar is, in many ways, similar to beach bar #11: The plastic tables and chairs are sponsored by a beer company that sells more expensive beers. Some kiosks have curtains and wooden tables and chairs. There is also a deck with wooden chairs and tables for those wanting to leave the beach space and have lunch inside (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Beach bar#13

Figure 5. Beach bar#13

Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.

Final remarks

44Beaches are unique places of social interaction, for they provide tourists the possibility to spend their leisure time with their feet on the sand, right in front of the water. However, as hospitality establishments and restaurants occupy “the waterfront”, access becomes a privilege for some happy few (Nikolli, 2020).

45Beaches are the main attraction in sea, sand, and sun tourism destinations, and many of them face the peril of disappearing due to the rise of sea level caused by climate change (Chow, 2020). They are also controversial moral spaces as beach occupation always involve some form of moral dispute. For example, how much of their bodies people can reveal at a beach (Kaufmann, 1995), and how the access to the beach can be restricted by factors such as social class (Champagne, 1975) or private uses of the beach (Felix, 2015).

46That is why we argue that beaches can be seen as indicators for societies’ moral disputes, and this involves the BBO sub-fields. Recently, beach clubs have been the pivots in moral controversies regarding the privatization and commercialization of beaches. Examples include the attempts to demolish non-regular beach bars in Brazil (Sartore et al., 2019), in France (Bruno and Salle, 2017), and in Thailand (see Thepbamrung, 2015), and the public outrage in Australia with the possibility of a European-style beach club being built on the sand of Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach (see Booth, 2020). The dual dispute between free/public versus paid/private access to beaches is complex, seeing that the “paid” side is not, as mainstream economics would see it, a homogeneous group composed of greedy businesspersons. Instead, we show that the “paid” embraces a bazaar of different rationalities, showing different sets of commercial uses of the beach.

47The Aracaju BBO sub-field has WOM as its dominant EER, followed by the Expert Recommendation EER, and the Independent Online Review. The different forms of EER correspond to different cités: domestic, industrial, and by project. Even though the pendulum currently weighs on the side of WOM, as different life trajectories are added to the field, it looks like Expert Recommendation and Independent Online Review might have an increasing influence on the Aracaju BBO EER in the coming years.

48By analysing BBOs life trajectory we found that social capital and technological capital are main factors that distribute individuals along the horizontal axis (dimension 1), and generational and cultural capitals are active in distributing individuals along the vertical axis (dimension 2). The two axes explain the distribution of the three kinds of EER in the Aracaju BBO social field.

49This framework can be replicated in different sets of beach bars in Brazil and abroad. In the Aracaju BBO sub-field there were no ERR connected to the market cité (Boltanski and Thévenot,1991), in which individuals think primarily about their ability to sell and earn money. There are well known examples, however, where this might be the case. In the South of Brazil, there is a beach club managed by a group of investors, and their Chief Executive Officer (CEO) openly declares that European-style beach clubs are models for their beach club (Litoral, 2019). In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a limited liability company (Orla Rio) has been managing all beach bars from the most popular beaches in Rio since the nineties (see Orla Rio, 2020). In Ibiza, Spain, a luxury destination for people who visit beach clubs, the “O beach” beach club, is owned by two business partners who also invest in other restaurant venues (see Shetty, 2020). The structure of ownership and the BBO EERs would probably reveal a Florianopolis or Ibiza BBO sub-field highly connected to the market cité, with a higher degree of commercialization.

50The current study contributes to the upsurge of sociologists developing a sociology of the coast (see Bidet and Devienne, 2017). The results can be useful in thinking about public policies that deal with moral disputes involving forms of beach occupation such as free or private access to the beach, permissions or restrictions for free family picnics and private spaces for parties. Moreover, these results can be useful for better understanding of managerial perspectives regarding current forms of businesses on the beach, such as the degree to which they are embedded in global trends in the tourism field.

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Notes

1 In 2007, 62% of Aracaju beachgoers bought food from beach bars, 22% brought it from home, and 16% bought food from vendors (Provinciali and Campos, 2008). Field observation shows that this relation still holds today, as the majority of beachgoers still clearly choose to buy food from beach bars.

2 In this paper, we consider “beach bars” only those that are on the sand level.

3 Research project developed by the lead author under the code PVD 5178-2017.Other results from this project are published in Sartore, 2017; Sartore et al., 2019; Sartore, 2020.

4 For a discussion about the “tourism field” as a scientific object see Darbellay and Stock (2012). For a discussion about the “tourism field” and “touristic capital” see Clivaz, Nahrath and Stock (2011), Suchet (2013) and Stock et al. (2021).

5 In Godechot’s words (2016, p. 4): “[…] the Baazar offers an image of financial rationality that differs from the one developed by the performativity approach, which often tends to depict financial rationality as technological, consciously calculative, and unique. On the contrary, my paper reintroduces the people, a thinking people indeed, but a people whose thoughts are also governed by non-reflexive social dispositions, a people structured by a system of relationships between its members, from which emerges a diversity – a true bazaar – of financial strategies”. We use the concept similarly, showing the bazaar of EERs in Aracaju BBOs sub-field.

6 During a field visit in March 2022, we noticed that some beach bars have already started to imitate the original European-style beach bar by introducing pasta, wine, and drinks to their menus and by installing curtains around their sun lounges.

7 Translated by the authors

8 Translated by the authors

9 We acknowledge that an analysis of all 48 BBOs would produce a more accurate result of the proposed research. As our field research took place in January 2017, during the high season (Summer), it was hard for all the BBOs to find the time to participate. It was also difficult to find trustable online biographical information about the BBOs who could not participate, as most of them are invisible to the local media. However, the data is representative of the whole market, representing a significant range of different styles regarding size, popularity, and customer profile.

10 Access to the full research data base and the data analysis tables are available at https://ufsbr-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/marinass_office_ufs_br/EuaAQnEZZh5OgV88H_S2MuQBMtJJ2sY9COJLTfvzJAHAjw The software SPSS is required to open the files.

11 The concept of tourism capital can be found in Loloum, 2018.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. Aracaju beach bars (partial view)
Crédits Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 147k
Titre Table 1. Aracaju BBO social field (categories)
Crédits Source: Created by Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite and Cae Rodrigues using SPSS.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 28k
Titre Table 2. Aracaju BBO EER social field individuals
Crédits Source: Created by Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite and Cae Rodrigues using SPSS.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 17k
Titre Figure 2. Beach bar#6
Crédits Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 422k
Titre Figure 3. Government advertisement from the 1980’s announcing the inauguration of the “Jose Sarney Highway” with the projection of the construction of beach bars
Légende The Jose Sarney Highway gives access to current beach bars in the South Coast of Aracaju.The text in the upper-right corner of the image says: JOÃO ALVES FILHO, a government that works.
Crédits Source: http://aracajuantigga.blogspot.com/​2011/​05/​aracaju-e-propaganda-do-seu-crescimento.html (accessed 26 June 2018).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 114k
Titre Figure 4. Beach bar#11
Crédits Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 249k
Titre Figure 5. Beach bar#13
Crédits Source: Cae Rodrigues’ personal archives, December 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/docannexe/image/5298/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 332k
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Marina de Souza Sartore, Elaine da Silveira Leite et Cae Rodrigues, « Economic Evaluation Rationalities: How Life Trajectories Shape Beach Commerce as Seen Through the Bourdieusian Framework »Mondes du Tourisme [En ligne], Articles, mis en ligne le 02 janvier 2023, consulté le 26 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/5298 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/tourisme.5298

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Auteurs

Marina de Souza Sartore

Economic sociology of tourism; Bourdieusian studies; economic sociology of the coast
Tenure-track faculty member in the Social Sciences Department at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), Brazil
Adjunct professor at the Social Sciences Department and permanent professor at the Postgraduate Program in Sociology at UFS, Brazil
marinas[at]academico.ufs.br

Elaine da Silveira Leite

Economic sociology, Bourdieusian studies; moralities and household budgets
Tenure-track faculty member in the Sociology and Politics Department at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), Brazil
Professor at the Postgraduate Program in Sociology at UFPel, Brazil. Researcher on Productivity at CNPq – Level 2
elaineleite10[at]gmail.com

Cae Rodrigues

Leisure activities at the beach; environmental education
Tenure-track faculty member in the Physical Education Department at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), Brazil
Professor at the Postgraduate Program in Development and Environment at UFS, Brazil
caerodrigues[at]academico.ufs.br

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