Research On Tour Guide Groups’ Professional Image

The development of the tourism industry is significant for the country’s economy and the rising of employment. With the development of the tourism industry, tour guide as a vocation that communicates tourism products and tourists, is becoming more and more important, and has an growing group. But recent years, guide group suffered a crisis about their professional image because of the negative news of tour guide group in the media. However, the issue on the negative image of the tour guide group did not draw much attention, there are even less paper about this by sociologists. In this sense, the paper try to offers both new method to investigate image of the tour guide group and the research on this field in sociology.The mean thread of this paper is image analysis,while the mean method is content analysis and in-depth interviews. With content analysis to analyze the news reports and the comments on the social status, professional skills and professional attitude about the tour guide in 2011-2015, we have the professional image of the tour guide in the media presentation. With in-depth interview to tourists and guides, we get the assessment about the professional image of tour guide respectively by them. Then through the trinity comparison of three image, we found the tour guide groups professional image in media is relatively radical, for the negative image of social status and professional attitude, and for the non-inductive image of professional skills;while the image on tour guide by tourists is moderate and positive; the tour guide groups’ self-evaluation professional image in the aspect of professional skills and professional attitude is partly positive, but in terms of social status, they are belittles themselves. According to the contrast result, this paper uses the framing theory to explain the causes of the formation of the tour guides’professional image and we found that the choosing theme and the special telling method play a role in making radical media image. Through Role-interaction theory we found that the tourists evaluation professional image of tour guide is based on the interaction with the tour guides., and the "role expectations-met expectations "mode forms a moderate image. While, the humbled social status image is due to inside role conflict by tour guide themselves.Make a conclusion, there are some different in tour guide group professional image.We evaluate the media image relatively radical even if it based on facts, the professional attitude image is a key part in the hole image system, and straighten out the labor relations about the tour guide group is very crucial for the establishing of a good professional image. Meanwhile, we put forward the proposal of breaking negative media frame, making good professional attitude image and straighten out the labor relations about the tour guide group.