Commercialization at religious sites: who cares and why?

Abstract

This study aims to understand visitors’ attitudes towards different forms of commercialization at religious sites. With a mixed-method design, the study was carried out at two sacred sites of Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively, located in Nepal. 44 semi-structured interviews were conducted first, followed by a questionnaire survey. Four types of visitors were identified regarding their attitudes towards commercialization. The differences in attitudes can be explained by the social exchange theory with consideration of visit motivation, income and religious background. Findings of this study contribute to understanding of commercialization at religious sites from visitors’ perspective, and have practical implications on service design and management of religious sites.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.