The Study of Tourism

Past Trends and Future Directions

Richard Sharpley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415482172
• eBook ISBN: 9781134016761
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Over the last two decades, tourism has become firmly established as a recognized field of study and the focus of extensive academic research. There has been continual expansion in the provision of taught programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level, dramatic developments in the tourism literature and a growing community of tourism academics. Despite this explosion in the study of tourism, however, it is still struggling to achieve wider academic legitimacy, it remains to some extent divorced from the industry upon which it is focuses and, even within its academic ranks, there remains uncertainty over its role and future direction.

This volume aims to critically explore this paradoxical situation and to consider the future direction of the study of tourism. It charts the development of tourism as an area of study, analyzing approaches taken from an international context; it critiques contemporary epistemologies of tourism framed around the social science vs. management dichotomy and offers alternative approaches to the study of tourism. In doing so, it engages directly with a range of important academic debates: what tourism 'is' in an academic context, the purpose of studying tourism and how it should be studied in the future.

This important and stimulating volume will have global appeal to higher level students, academics and researchers within tourism and related disciplines.

1 So why study tourism?

This book is about the study of tourism. More precisely, it is about a particular field of academic endeavour, the roots of which can be traced back over decades, if not centuries. (According to Baum (2005), formal training in hospitality in Europe dates back to the nineteenth century.) However, over the last twenty to thirty years, it has emerged as one of the fastest-growing subjects of study within higher education around the world. In the UK, for example, tourism higher education – as a distinct subject in its own right, rather than a component of other programmes of study – began in the early 1970s with the commencement of two ‘named’ tourism Masters’ programmes. The first two undergraduate degree programmes were subsequently introduced in the mid-1980s. Yet, by 1991, tourism provision nationally still amounted to just ten undergraduate and twelve postgraduate programmes. Over the following decade, though, there was exponential growth in the number of institutions offering tourism degree programmes, the overall number of programmes, the number of students enrolled on them and the number of academics both teaching and researching the subject. By 2003, some 50 per cent of all the higher education institutions in the UK offered around 100 undergraduate and 50 postgraduate tourism programmes between them, collectively accounting for an estimated total of around 12,000 student enrolments. In addition, over 150 postgraduate research students were estimated to be undertaking tourism-related doctorates at that time (Airey 2005b: 273). Thus, although these figures are estimates (definitional issues making it difficult to compile wholly accurate data), there can be no doubting the remarkable growth in the study of tourism in the UK since the early 1990s.

A similar trend is evident in many other countries, though not necessarily on the same timescale as in the UK. In the US, for example, the first hotel school was established in 1922 at Cornell University, while formal tourism education (for tourism businesses rather than higher education students) started in the late 1940s. One of the first undergraduate tourism programmes was a four-year major that commenced in 1969 at Michigan State University, where the first professor of tourism in the US, Robert McIntosh, had been appointed in 1958. By the early 1970s, there were more than forty four-year tourism programmes available. Although tourism is frequently integrated into hospitality management programmes in the US, masking the development of tourism studies in particular, evidence for the increasing popularity of the subject lies in the fact that, by the start of the new millennium, over 55,000 students were enrolled on tourism and hospitality programmes at about 175 institutions in the US, while 28 universities were also offering postgraduate programmes (Hudson 2005).

However, these figures are dwarfed in absolute, if not relative, terms by the expansion of tourism higher education provision in China. According to Zhang and Fan (2005b: 119), the number of Chinese higher education institutions providing tourism programmes increased ninefold between 1990 and 2003, from 55 to 494. Over the same period, the number of students studying on these programmes grew from 8,263 to 199,682, a factor of 24, making tourism one of the most rapidly expanding sectors of higher education in China. Other countries in the region have also experienced a significant growth in the provision of and demand for higher education in tourism, though not to the same extent as China. In South Korea, the first four-year undergraduate programme in tourism was established at Kyonggi University in 1964; by 2004, 56 universities were offering four-year tourism programmes and 118 vocational colleges were offering two-year programmes, with 8,108 and 31,602 students enrolled, respectively. In addition, 638 students were enrolled on specialist Masters’ programmes in tourism at a total 32 universities (Cho and Kang 2005). Similarly, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan have all developed thriving tourism programmes within their higher education sectors, while in Thailand the number of universities and institutes offering hospitality and tourism degree progammes grew from 42 in 1996 to 78 in 2003, with a total of over 23,000 students graduating with tourism- and hospitality-related degrees between 1999 and 2003 (Chaisawat 2005).

Elsewhere, the study of tourism has become equally firmly established within higher education. Throughout Europe, for example, there is a long history of education and training in hospitality, with the world’s first hotel school established in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1893. Since the 1980s, the more traditional functional/ operational approach to hospitality and tourism management education offered by hotel and business schools has been augmented by the introduction of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across the continent. Inevitably, significant variations exist between European countries with respect to the nature and extent of their tourism programmes, with differences in national systems and structures of higher education (and in the perceived need for tourism education) reflecting the cultural diversity of the continent. However, a more standardized approach is emerging as a result of the Bologna Declaration (1999), which seeks to promote convergence in the structures and administration of European higher education through, for example, a common structure of three-year Bachelor’s and two-year Masters’ programmes and, of particular relevance to tourism, the internationalization of curricula.

In Australia and New Zealand, too, the growth and development of tourism education has followed a similar pattern. In the former, just four undergraduate programmes were available at the end of the 1970s, and that number had risen to just fifteen by 1989. However, by 2004, after a period of remarkable expansion driven in part by the rationalization of the national higher education system in which colleges of advanced education were accorded university status, this figure had increased to 112. In New Zealand, the growth of tourism education has been much more moderate, which is unsurprising, given the limited size of the country’s higher education sector in relation to that of Australia. Nevertheless, six of New Zealand’s eight universities now offer undergraduate tourism programmes, as do the majority of its polytechnics. Postgraduate provision has also been growing in both countries.

It would, of course, be possible (although, for the purposes of this chapter, not particularly useful) to highlight the rapid development of tourism education in numerous other countries and regions, including the Caribbean, South America, South Africa, Russia and the Middle East. Indeed, it has been not only the growth but the international spread of tourism as a defined field of academic study within universities and other higher education institutions that has been so remarkable. Over the last two decades, the study of tourism has truly become a global phenomenon. Such is its ubiquity that, in all likelihood, it would be difficult to identify a country with a higher education system where tourism is not offered, in some form or another, as a subject of study.

However, two points must immediately be made. First, despite the worldwide presence of tourism in higher education, its development, growth and delivery are by no means uniform. There are, for example, significant differences in the structure, scale and administration of the higher education systems in different countries, resulting in different types and levels of qualifications, different programme curricula, and different levels of demand for and participation in tourism programmes relative to both overall participation in higher education and, specifically, to the national scale and value of the tourism sector (and the importance placed on tourism by governments). Equally, the factors underpinning the characteristics and growth of tourism education vary considerably from one country to another. In some instances, it is explicitly driven by the need to produce a qualified workforce for the tourism industry. As we shall see later in this chapter, the rapid expansion of tourism education from the 1970s onwards is most commonly associated with the equally rapid growth of tourism over the same period. In other instances, different forces may be at play. In the UK in the 1980s, for example, government policy with respect to tourism focused on meeting the sector’s employment needs and, hence, on establishing schemes to address perceived skill shortages, such as providing funding for places on postgraduate tourism programmes. (In fact, as noted in the introduction to this book, being the beneficiary of such a scheme in part led me to embark on my career as a tourism academic.) By the mid-1990s, however, following the 1992 reorganization of the higher education system in which polytechnics and other institutions were accorded university status and, hence, independent degree-awarding powers (similar to the rationalization process in Australia mentioned above), not only was there rapid expansion of the university sector but government education policy sought to increase the numbers of students continuing into higher education, with the (still unachieved) target being 50 per cent of all school and college leavers benefiting from tertiary education. As a result, many new, non-traditional degree programmes, including tourism, were developed to attract students. (It is no coincidence that, with very few notable exceptions, only the so-called ‘new’ universities in the UK offer tourism degree programmes.)

Arguably, this divorced tourism education from tourism employment policies. Thus, overall, it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons between the experiences of different countries with respect to tourism education. Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, there are undoubtedly common issues and challenges facing tourism education providers around the world.

Second, the remarkable growth in the provision of tourism education specifically is not the only indicator of the evolution and development of the study of tourism more generally. That is, the dissemination of tourism knowledge and skills is, in a sense, only half the story. Of equal, if not greater, importance is the development of tourism knowledge, or the extent to which an identifiable tourism knowledge base, along with a recognizable community of scholars engaged in the generation of tourism knowledge, has evolved not only to underpin the delivery of tourism programmes (research-based teaching is seen in many countries as an indicator of programme quality) but to enhance the distinctiveness and legitimacy of tourism as a field of academic endeavour.

Again, rapid progress has been made over the last twenty to thirty years. From a tangible perspective, and as described in the Introduction, the volume of outputs from tourism research and other scholarly activity has increased enormously. In a 2004 conference keynote paper, David Airey suggested that ‘A serious uncertainty, at least for the early years [of tourism education], was where the scholarship would come from. In 1972, there were a handful of books, one, not terribly serious journal devoted to tourism, an international organisation of scholars based in Switzerland and a research association based in the USA’ (Airey 2004: 10). The following year, 1973, saw the launch of the Annals of Tourism Research (although the Journal of Travel Research, now soon to reach its fiftieth anniversary, predates the Annals by some thirteen years), while another longstanding tourism journal, Tourism Recreation Research, was first published in 1976 by the Centre for Tourism Research and Development in Lucknow, India. Even by the late 1980s there were only about five established tourism journals, along with a limited library of books. On the one hand, this was quite beneficial for academics at that (pre-Internet) time: not only did libraries usually stock hard copies of all of these journals (budgetary constraints now usually mean that only a selection of titles are held, either in print or electronically), but it was possible to read most, if not all, of them as they were published. On the other hand, there was a limited knowledge base to draw upon for programme development and delivery. However, from a personal perspective, this was not necessarily a disadvantage: the lack of an appropriate text provided me with the incentive to write my first published book, Tourism and Leisure in the Countryside, to support my teaching of a module of the same name. Now, there are more than fifty tourism-related academic journals, many of which focus upon specialized sub-areas of tourism studies, while nothing less than an explosion has occurred in the number of books that have been, and continue to be, published on the subject.

At the same time, the form of tourism knowledge has, according to some commentators, made significant advances over the last thirty years. For example, reference is frequently made to Jafar Jafari’s concept of four ‘platforms’ of tourism research, which suggests progress from an advocacy (that is, an uncritical, economic growth-based perspective) to a knowledge-based (that is, a broader, scientifically based, critical perspective) platform. More generally, Tribe (2002) suggests that tourism knowledge has developed through three stages, from ‘extra-disciplinary knowledge’ generated from non-academic sources, such as industry reports, consultants, policy documents, and so on, through ‘multidisciplinary knowledge’ gathered from a variety of disciplines, to ‘interdisciplinary knowledge’, which is new tourism knowledge generated by the application of one or more disciplines to specific issues in tourism. The last of these relates directly to the contentious question of ‘tourism theory’, which I shall discuss in a later chapter.

From this rather brief review of both the remarkable expansion of tourism education and the significant development of its knowledge base (in volume terms, at least), it could logically be claimed that the development of the study of tourism over the last thirty years has been a success. However, this then begs a question that is rarely asked in this context: what is success?

The study of tourism: a success story?

‘Success’ is a term that is understood by everyone, yet it remains rather difficult to define precisely. In the Chambers Dictionary, ‘to succeed’ is defined as ‘to prosper; to obtain one’s wish or accomplish what is attempted; to avail, be successful’. Consequently, ‘success’ is defined as ‘prosperous progress, achievement, or termination; prosperity; attainment of wealth, influence or acclaim’. Thus, success is usually related to the achievement of wealth, fame/recognition, power and influence, victory. A successful person is someone who is perceived to have ‘made it’, whatever ‘it’ might be, whether in sport, business, public office, or an academic field.

However, success is a relative concept: there is no absolute measure of it (or indeed of failure). By definition, it must be judged against some benchmark, purpose, goal or objective. Furthermore, different individuals, groups of people, businesses, organizations or societies inevitably apply different measures of success, even in a particular context. For example, an academic career might be judged successful by others if a particular position (such as a professorship) or international recognition for research is achieved. However, for the individual concerned, such ‘success’ might be incidental to his/her other objectives, such as supporting and inspiring students to identify and achieve their own educational potential, or even to broader personal goals beyond those related specifically to work and career. Moreover, individual measures or broader social constructs of success might change over time. The 1980s were very much the era of the ‘yuppie’, the young, upwardly mobile individual focused on personal career success to the exclusion of all else (best personified by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street). Whereas, more recently, success has perhaps come to be viewed in terms of so-called ‘work–life balance’.

In short, success can be judged only in relation to particular measures, goals and perceptions that vary from one individual to another – one person’s success may be another’s failure – from one organization to another, or from one socio-cultural context to another. Thus, when looking at a phenomenon such as the study of tourism, which embraces a wide variety of stakeholders – students, members of the academic community, universities and other institutions of higher education, public-funding or quality-assurance bodies, publishers of tourism texts or journals, and the tourism sector itself as the potential employer of tourism graduates – there are numerous, probably innumerable, measures or perceptions of success, depending on the particular perspective that is adopted. For example, from the point of view of a university, success in the development of tourism as an academic field is likely to be judged according to a variety of indicators that are applied similarly to any other subject area and are usually related to the broader objectives or ‘mission’ of the institution. These will include meeting recruitment targets, contributing to the widening of access to higher education, improving student retention and progression rates, raising the average grades/degree classifications achieved by students, enhancing the employability of graduates (as measured by the proportion finding employment within a specified period after completing their studies), attracting highly qualified staff, and success (however defined) in research. All of these indicators may collectively contribute to improving the national or international standing of the university relative to other institutions, both generally and specifically as providers of tourism programmes.

Of course, not all of these objectives may be achieved at the same time. At one university where I worked in the early 1990s, high levels of enrolment in the tourism programme were achieved among a local, multi-ethnic population with a limited tradition of progressing into higher education. Many students achieved good degrees and went on to enjoy successful careers (two became tourism academics), yet the institution remained steadfastly near the bottom of the UK’s university ‘league tables’, suffering from what was described by a colleague as a ‘PR deficit’. Moreover, a subsequent focus on enhancing the research profile of the tourism department met with only temporary success. Nevertheless, the development of tourism programmes at that institution could be regarded, at least according to parochial institutional objectives, as a success.

For other stakeholders in the study of tourism, different measures of success apply. Students, for example, are likely to judge it in terms of achieving a ‘good’ degree and securing well-paid employment as a result. They may perceive the study of tourism as a route to a qualification and a passport to a good career, although perhaps not more broadly as part of their education. For potential employers – businesses and organizations within the tourism sector – successful tourism programmes will be defined by the extent to which they produce individuals with appropriate knowledge and skills. From the perspective of the tourism sector as a whole, the study of tourism may be thought of as successful if the development of the tourism knowledge base is considered to be of value to the practicalities of the business of tourism.

The point is that, given the diversity of stakeholders in the study of tourism, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define what is meant by its ‘successful’ development. Nevertheless, from an academic’s perspective, certain parameters might be applied. For example, I have long considered the development of the study of tourism in Australia to have been particularly successful inasmuch as, alongside the remarkable growth in the provision of tourism programmes, many in the tourism academic community in that country have gained international recognition as researchers, collectively making a significant contribution to the tourism knowledge base. At the same time, the subject is taken seriously at the national level, as evidenced by the establishment in 1997 of the (now defunct) Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC). In addition to providing funding for research projects, the STCRC stimulated cooperation not only among academics but between the academic community and relevant organizations in the private and public sectors, thereby enhancing the value and applicability of research to the ‘real world’ of tourism. Thus, although tourism education in Australia faces a number of challenges – not least the static or declining demand for places on degree programmes (perhaps reflecting an inevitable rebalancing of supply and demand after two decades of rapid growth) – tourism does appear to have established itself as a legitimate, recognized field of academic endeavour within the Australian higher education context.

However, the same cannot be said about the study of tourism more generally. The apparently successful development and growth of the subject – as manifested in the exponential expansion in the provision of tourism programmes, the development of the tourism knowledge base and commensurate growth in academic journals, books, doctoral theses and other research outputs, and the evolution of an international community of tourism academics and related groups, networks and associations – mask a number of underlying challenges and issues. Prominent among these is the fact that tourism suffers from a lack of cohesion, focus and common purpose as an academic field (see the discussion on the disciplinary foundations of the study of tourism in Chapter 3). In a sense, the study of tourism displays what the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) calls ‘ontological insecurity’. In a sociological context, ontological security can be defined as a sense of order, purpose, certainty and continuity, stemming from a ‘practical consciousness of the meaningfulness’ of everyday life (Giddens 1991: 26). Thus, ontological insecurity arises when th...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• The study of tourism
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 So why study tourism?
• 2 The study of tourism where we are now
• 3 The contemporary study. of tourism approaches and critiques
• 4 The study of tourism future directions
• References