Soft power, which includes culture, political principles, and diplomatic strategies, aims to influence people's opinions around the world. An honest example of the usefulness of soft power is tourism. This bibliometric research investigates the function of soft power in the growth of tourism over the last 10 years. In addition to examining common terms and topics associated with tourism and soft power, the study identifies prominent writers, works, governments, and affiliations in this field. The study uses a dataset comprising 124 documents written by 266 researchers from 34 nations, highlighting China's pioneering role in this field. The interconnection of soft power, tourism, and associated elements is illustrated using thematic and co-occurrence analysis. The study offers managerial and theoretical ramifications, giving scholars, decision-makers, and practitioners useful information about how to use soft power in the context of tourism.
Top1. Introduction
According to Nye (2021), soft power is the capacity to influence the preferences of others by appealing to those being influenced. A fundamental component of soft power is attractiveness, albeit this idea is not new. Influence over opinion—which includes both military and economic types of force—represents a significant expression of power in international politics, according to Carr’s theory of power (Carr, 2016). In order to promote economic growth and development on their territory, powerful nations have increasingly adopted the soft power strategy (Elmassah, 2015). Winning over people's hearts and minds and succeeding in international politics would have remained elusive without the use of soft power. The soft power strategy places a strong emphasis on spreading foreign policies, political ideals, cultural norms, ideologies, and agendas with the main goal of winning over the hearts and minds of audiences within a particular nation or around the world (Hussin, 2018).
One of the key means of implementing the soft power concept is tourism. Researchers and decision-makers have been researching the nation's image promotion, tourism promotion, and international impressions of the destination nation. Geopolitically, tourism is essential for promoting international empathy and understanding (Saberi, Paris and Marochi, 2018). From a soft power perspective, tourists are both the subject and the object of geopolitics. Important resources that play a crucial role in promoting ideals and influencing global audiences (tourists) include international media, developmental aid, national organizations for promotion, and global pop cultures. Utilizing these resources internally and unintentionally, tourism works as an efficient route for utilizing soft power (Ooi, 2016).
Four interrelated viewpoints can be used to examine tourism and soft power. Tourists, in the first place, help people have a better grasp of their destination and develop more empathy. Second, it is the duty of tourist officials to promote a positive image of their nation worldwide. Thirdly, by bringing in tourists, showcasing the destination, and promoting its capabilities, events like the Olympics and international expos play a significant part in generating geopolitical influence. Finally, visitors who travel overseas serve as ambassadors for their nation (Ozkan & Boylu, 2021).
The use of tourism as a covert platform to advance public and national interests on the world stage is a smart and influential use of soft power. In contemporary diplomacy, tourism serves as a tool that allows a country to effectively present itself to the globe, allowing it to share its values, culture, and strengths with a large audience (Bunakov et al., 2018). In this context, the study employs bibliometric analysis to focus on “soft power” and “tourism.”
The widespread use of bibliometric analysis in business research is a sign that it is a useful tool for managing vast amounts of scientific data and generating highly influential research, not just a temporary fad (Donthu et al., 2021). Bibliometric analysis is utilized by scholars for various purposes, including uncovering emerging trends in article and journal performance, patterns of collaboration, and research components (Verma & Gustafsson, 2020). Initially, bibliometric analysis mostly consisted of selections of highly cited articles or bibliographic overviews of scientific productions. These summaries were further divided into author productions lists, country bibliographies, and subject bibliographies (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). In order to analyze historical data and identify trends, descriptive analytics is used (Riahi et al., 2021), while to draw reliable conclusions about important theme areas relating to a topic, content analysis, whether manual or automated, entails a text-driven assessment of publications (Mody, Hanks and Cheng, 2021).