Author Identifier
Date of Award
2026
Keywords
food tourism, foodscape, symbolic interactionism, structuration theory, social practices, meaning-making processes
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Business and Law
First Supervisor
Eerang Park
Second Supervisor
Sangkyun Kim
Abstract
Foodscapes are central to food tourism as they provide the social, cultural, and spatial contexts through which food experiences are produced and encountered. However, existing food tourism research has frequently conceptualised foodscapes as static, physical or deliberately staged settings, often reducing them to experiential backdrops or cultural assets, and overlooking their negotiated, interactional and symbolic dimensions. As a result, food tourism has not been fully captured as a socially embedded and meaning-driven phenomenon. Addressing this gap, this research aims to conceptually develop and empirically examine the underlying mechanisms and structures through which tourists and locals co-construct the destination foodscape within a food tourism context.
Grounded in symbolic interactionism and informed by structuration Theory, the study adopts an interpretivist qualitative research design guided by analytic principles drawn from constructivist grounded theory. Empirical data were generated through multi-site qualitative fieldwork in Vietnam, focusing on everyday street-food environments in Hanoi and Hoi An. Data collection involved participant observation and semi-structured interviews with international tourists and a range of local stakeholders engaged in everyday food practices and food tourism governance. Analysis focused on how meanings take shape through interaction, are interpreted and co-constructed as shared symbolic meanings, and become stabilised across interrelated food–people, place–people, and food–place relationships.
The findings demonstrate that the destination foodscape is not a static backdrop for consumption but a socially produced and structurally sustained cultural system. Through repeated tourist–local interactions in everyday food settings, symbolic meanings—such as hospitality, everyday ordinariness, shared belonging, cultural identity and authenticity—are generated, interpreted and embedded within routine practices. Over time, these meanings shape tourists’ psychological and behavioural responses and become routinised as shared expectations, giving rise to enduring structural outcomes, including a co-constructed sense of place, embedded cultural identity, and an authenticity–commodification nexus. Rather than positioning authenticity and commodification as opposing forces, the study shows how they operate as mutually reinforcing outcomes of repeated meaning-making practices within contemporary food tourism.
The thesis makes a theoretical and conceptual contribution by reframing destination foodscapes as dynamic, relational and self-reproducing phenomena that both affect and are affected by tourists, local communities, and institutional actors. By extending symbolic interactionism beyond isolated micro-level encounters and empirically operationalising structuration theory, the study explicates how interactionally produced meanings become socially consequential and structurally sustained. The articulation of a six-step symbolic meaning-making mechanism and a triadic relational framework provides a transferable analytical lens for examining food tourism as a holistic socio-cultural process across diverse destination contexts.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 2nd July 2031
Recommended Citation
Nguyen, T. (2026). Reframing the foodscape in a food-tourism destination: From an integrated perspective of symbolic social interaction and structuration theory. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/qmvw-hj59