Fieldwork in Tourism

Methods, Issues and Reflections

Michael C. Hall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138883574
• eBook ISBN: 9781136927706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The inherent mobility of tourists and consequent relative ephemerality of contact between the visitor and the visited tourism phenomenon have specific characteristics that challenge the usual fieldwork practices of the social and physical sciences. Such conditions create specific concerns for the tourism researcher in terms of their positionality, relationality, accessibility, ethics, reflexivity, and methodological appropriateness.

Fieldwork in Tourism is the first book to focus on this extremely significant component of contemporary tourist research and provides hands on approaches to conducting tourism fieldwork in a range of settings, exploring the methodological considerations and offering strategies to mitigate these. The book also discusses how fieldwork affects researchers personally and what happens to field relationships. Divided into five sections, each with an introduction and a guide to further reading, the chapters cover the context of fieldwork, research relationships, politics and power, the position of the researcher in the field, research methods and processes, including virtual fieldwork, and the relationships between being a tourist and doing fieldwork. The concluding chapter suggests that the link between tourism and fieldwork perhaps offers greater insights into understanding creative fieldwork than may be imagined.

This book incorporates a rich and diverse set of fieldwork experiences, insights and reflections on conducting fieldwork in different settings, the problems that emerge, the solutions that were developed, and the realities of being 'in the field'. Fieldwork in Tourism is an essential guide for Tourism higher level students, academics and researchers embarking on research in this field.

1
Fieldwork in tourism/touring fields

Where does tourism end and fieldwork begin?

C. Michael Hall

Introduction

Fieldwork is one of the defining approaches of academic research. Whether in the social or natural sciences, to get out of the office, lecture theatre or laboratory and study, ‘the real world’ is a vital component of the generation of knowledge. In the study of tourism too fieldwork has long been utilised not only to observe tourists and the interactions between tourists and destination communities but also to better understand the social, economic, political and environmental effects of tourism. Yet despite the long tradition of fieldwork in tourism studies and in cognate disciplines, such as anthropology, ecology, geography and sociology, that also place a high value on fieldwork, there is surprisingly little reflection on the role of fieldwork in tourism research (see Bruner [2005] as an exception).

Of course, studying tourism has often not been held favourably in other fields nor has it often been seen by other disciplines as providing anything unique or having its own body of knowledge (Hall 2005). Indeed, in the experience of the author, travel for tourism research purposes is often seen in disparaging terms by funding bodies and university research bodies as ‘a subsidized holiday’, while in a broader context travel for research is often viewed through an ‘ironic lens’ (Crick 1985). Hence, Mowforth and Munt (1998: 101) refer to ‘academic tourism’, Zeleza and Kalipeni (1999: 3) to ‘academic tourists’, Clifford (1997: 67) to ‘research travelers’, Kotarba (2002; 2005) to ‘ethnographic tourism’ encouraging the researcher to act like a stranger or a tourist in a foreign land and to treat the common as exotic and the taken-for-granted as unusual, while Stein (1998) uses the same phrase with reference to tourists ‘armed with camcorders and a passion for local practices’! Of course, to separate ‘academic travel’ from ‘popular travel’ (Galani-Moutafi 2000) is an important concern for many researchers worried as they may be about being accused by university administrators, politicians, journalists or other academics who seek to purchase equipment (who all clearly never travel for work purposes) of misspending money for leisure purposes rather than serious research or paper presentations. Of course, as a result of processes of globalisation the increasing internationalisation of higher education, institutional collaboration and knowledge transfer does mean that academic work requires greater international travel than it did in the 1970s or 1980s. Clifford (1989: 177) stretches this point even further when he claims that, in order ‘to theorize one leaves home’, although, of course, like any act of travel, theory has to begin and end somewhere. Nevertheless, as Rojek and Urry (1997: 9) note, ‘It is hard to justify just what makes academic travel a special source of academic authority. Where does tourism end and so-called fieldwork begin?’

In fact, for many people one of the features of fieldwork is the notion of working in a different environment or space. As Scheyvens and Storey (2003: 8) note, ‘spatial differences are inherent in dominant conceptualisations of “the field”.’ Clifford (1997: 54) also observed that ‘When one speaks of working in the field, or going into the field, one draws on mental images of a distant place with an inside and outside, reached by practices of physical movement’. The locational notion of the field, especially in contemporary studies of fieldwork in tourism which by itself often illicits ideas of ‘otherness’, strongly contributes to ideas of ‘the field’ being tied to cultural and environmental difference and ‘the exotic’. Indeed, such is the strength of such ideas in anthropology that Clifford (1997: 55) noted; ‘ “Exotic” fieldwork pursued over a continuous period for at least a year has, for some time now, set the norm against which other practices are judged. Given this exemplar, different practices of cross-cultural research seem less like “real” fieldwork’ (Clifford 1997: 55). Similarly, Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 1) comment that ‘the single most significant factor determining whether a piece of research will be accepted as (that magical word) “anthropological” is the extent to which it depends on experience “in the field” ’, thus, incorporating an expectation that the researcher will travel away from his or her normal home environment. Indeed, such has been the strength of this idea in ethnography, and to this we could also arguably add some of the research in other fields such as ecology, geography and sociology, that Gupta and Ferguson suggest the importance attached by some academics to the importance of a cultural, spatial and temporal distance between ‘home’ and ‘the field’ has resulted in a ‘hierarchy of purity of field sites … After all, if “the field” is most appropriately a place that is “not home”, then some places will necessarily be more “not home” than others, and hence more appropriate, more “fieldlike” ’ (1997: 13). Yet, as they also note, notions of ‘home’ and ‘away’ should not just be understood in terms of geographic location or place, as they note with specific reference to ethnography, its ‘great strength has always been in its explicit and well-developed sense of location, of being set here-and-not-elsewhere. This strength becomes a liability when notions of “here” and “elsewhere” are assumed to be features of geography, rather than sites constructed in fields of unequal power relations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 35).

Nevertheless, while there is a familiar portrait or representation of ethnographic (and other fieldwork) which ‘involves travel away, preferably to a distant locale where the ethnographer will immerse him/herself in personal face-to-face relationships with a variety of natives over an extended period of time … it is a rendering of … “fieldwork” that in one respect or another no longer suffices even as a serviceable fiction’ (Amit 2000: 2; also see Caputo 2000). As in the case of Amit’s (2000) edited work, the contributors to the present volume are not alone in their unease between the experience and archetype of fieldwork and they identify a number of paradoxes with respect to the realities and representations of fieldwork and its research outputs. To mirror Amit’s (2000: 2) approach, such a situation represents epistemological, institutional and methodological variabilities that are not amenable to overly generalised solutions, but how we respond to them will affect whether we open up or limit the scope of tourism inquiry. And it is to the former orientation that the chapters in this volume are dedicated.

Journeys of fieldwork

One way in which we can respond to Rojek and Urry’s (1997) above semi-rhetorical question is to draw upon tourism theory itself. One of the most long-standing concepts of tourism is the ‘stages’ model of the travel process that was arguably originally proposed by Clawson and Knetsch (1966). As the seminal review on the stages of the travel experience by Fridgen (1984: 24) stated, tourism ‘involves people moving from one environment through a range of other environments to a destination site and then home via a return trip … people not only act in their present setting, they also plan for subsequent settings. People prepare to arrive in another setting to carry out preplanned behaviors.’ From this perspective travel can be recognised as having five distinct stages: (i) decision making and anticipation; (ii) travel to a tourism destination or attraction; (iii) the on-site experience; (iv) return travel; and (v) recollection of the experience (Hall 2005). From the tourist perspective each of these five stages has different psychological characteristics and, although not directly relevant to the personal perspective of the present chapter, it is useful to note that each stage also has different implications for production, management and impacts (Hall and Lew 2009). However, the stages of the tourist journey, and many dimensions of the experience, also reflect the stages of the fieldwork journey – both physical and metaphorical (Table 1.1). For both tourist and researcher relationships to significant others change as they pass through the journey and new relationships are developed (see Yamagishi, Chapter 7, this volume). Changing positionalities can also be a feature of the tourism journey as well as the research journey with respect to such matters as insider/outsider (see Tantow, Chapter 9, this volume), observer/observed (see Allan, Chapter 10, this volume), gender (see Bensemann, Chapter 11, this volume), and culture (see Wan Hassan, Chapter 8, this volume), while the fieldworker will also have the extra layer of positionality with respect to being a researcher (see Leopold, Chapter 6, this volume). Time spent in the field may also clearly create new issues of identity and positionality in relation to the people in the field

Table 1.1 Stages of the travel experience/Stages of the fieldwork experience

location but even this bears similarities to the sojourner tourist/working holidaymaker who spends a significant period of time in a particular location, therefore often developing relationships with people in that area. Clearly, such a perspective does not make the task of separating tourism and fieldwork any easier. In fact, it is not the intention of this introductory chapter to separate them, but it is the goal of the chapter to stress, along with the experience of the authors of many of the chapters in this volume, just how important the multiple identities, positionalities and relationships of the researcher are when conducting fieldwork and the different spaces in which fieldwork occurs.

Spatiality is vital to our understanding of fieldwork. Table 1.2 lists a number of definitions of fieldwork provided by participants of a graduate workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in October 2009, to the author. The definitions were collected prior to the start of a presentation by the author on issues in tourism fieldwork. The notion of movement, whether away from the office or a laboratory or to somewhere in the ‘real world’, is clearly significant in these definitions. However, as the definitions also suggest, the mobility of the researcher undertaking fieldwork – as well as that of the tourist, for that matter – is more than just shifts in space or time. Rather than being isolated, separate entities, space and time are inextricably woven together to constitute social and economic relations. ‘Space is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the

Table 1.2 Definitions of fieldwork provided at University of Southern Denmark workshop

non-interlocking, and the network of relations at every scale from local to global’ (Massey 1993: 155–6) (see also Allan, Chapter 10, this volume; Salazar, Chapter 12, this volume). Indeed, as Couclelis (1992) observes, it is appropriate to write of a variety of behavioural, experiential, political, physical and other spaces. This notion of movement and positionality in multiple spaces therefore lies at the heart of understanding the problems of undertaking fieldwork in tourism and is arguably more pronounced because of the inherent role of mobility within tourism phenomena (Hall 2005).

Tourism is integral to the increased mobility and connectivity (for many) wrapped within social and economic processes of contemporary globalisation, transnationalism and the development of new communications media. It both influences and is affected by such processes. Moreover, by its very nature as a form of temporary mobility (Hall 2005), the character of tourism and the socio-economic and technological systems within which it is embedded means that many of the social and economic relationships to which it contributes are temporary and ephemeral. Such a situation stands at odds with the ‘traditional’ ideas of socially and anthropologically oriented fieldwork occurring in relatively static and easily identifiable communities and social groupings (Hastrup and Hervik 1994). As Amit (2000: 14) anticipated:

Episodic, occasional, partial and ephemeral social links pose particular challenges for ethnographic fieldwork. How do we observe interactions that happen sometimes but not necessarily when we are around? How do we participate in social relations that are not continuous, that are experienced most viscerally in their absence? How do we participate in or observe practices that are enacted here and there, by one or a few? How do we take into account unique events that may not be recurring but still have irrevocable consequences [e.g. an event]? Where do we ‘hang out’ when the processes which we are studying produce common social conditions or statuses (freelance workers, peripatetic entrepreneurs, consultants, tourists) but not necessarily coterminous collectivities?

Indeed, from a tourism perspective one of the great weaknesses in tourism studies is the lack of research that traces the same group of individuals from their home environment, their travel to and from the destination, what occurs at the destination, and then wha...

Table of contents

• Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introducing the contexts of fieldwork
• 1 Fieldwork in tourism/touring fields
• 2 Defining and redefining conceptual frameworks for social science field research
• Part I Research relationships
• Part II Positionality
• Part III Methods and processes
• Part IV Future directions and new environments
• Index