Philosophical Issues in Tourism

John Tribe

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781845410964
• eBook ISBN: 9781845412494
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Despite the geometric expansion of tourism knowledge, some areas have remained stubbornly underdeveloped and a full or comprehensive consideration of the philosophical issues of tourism represents one such significant knowledge gap. A key aim of this book therefore is to provide an initial mapping of, and fresh insights into this territory. In doing so it discusses key philosophical questions in the field such as What is tourism? Who is a tourist? What is wisdom? What is it to know something? What is the nature of reality? Why are some destinations considered beautiful? Why is tourism desirable? What is good and bad tourism? What are desirable ends? These and similar topics are addressed this book under the headings of truth, beauty and virtue.

Part 1

Introduction

Chapter 1

Philosophical Issues in Tourism

JOHN TRIBE

Introduction

The more I have studied tourism, the more I have been drawn to three questions that are perennial ones in philosophy. These are questions about truth, beauty and virtue. Indeed, I have made some preliminary forays into these areas in previous writings such as ‘The truth about tourism’ (Tribe, 2006), ‘The art of tourism’ (Tribe, 2008) and ‘Education for ethical action’ (Tribe, 2002). Yet despite the geometric expansion of tourism knowledge, it seems that some areas have remained stubbornly underdeveloped and a full or comprehensive consideration of the philosophical issues of tourism represents one such significant knowledge gap. A key aim of this book therefore, is to provide an initial mapping of, and insights into this territory.

In fact, two of these areas – truth and virtue – have attracted pockets of interest, with methodology being the main driver of interest in truth and sustainability sometimes interpellating wider issues of virtue. On the other hand, with the exception of de Botton's popular writing on The Art of Travel (2003), beauty has attracted scant attention indeed. This is curious. For tourism has become a significant creator of forms in the contemporary world. At a micro level, tourism creates souvenirs and representations. It affects dress. It generates signage and interpretative clutter. It causes buildings (restaurants, terminals, accommodation, galleries) to rise into being with their exterior architecture and interior design. At a macro level it scapes parts of the world into seasides, ski resorts and whole tourism cities such as Las Vegas. It causes some land and city scapes to be revered and preserved, others to be overturned by development.

Indeed the word development (Pearce, 1995) and that of planning (Gunn, 1994) each suggests an interest in and an ability to affect the way in which tourism will be delivered in the future. These words further suggest that there are particular ends that have been thought out to which development is directed. Against this notion of a tourism world created through rational planning, the sociologist Anthony Giddens (2002) employed the term Runaway World as the title for a series of lectures and a book. He used the term to describe a world that was developing quickly and out of our control. In his book, Giddens (2002: 2) notes that post-Enlightenment philosophers shared a belief that ‘with the further development of science and technology the world should become more stable and ordered’. But instead Giddens (2002: 2) finds that:

The world in which we find ourselves today, however, doesn't look or feel much like they predicted it would. Rather than being more and more under our control, it seems out of our control – a runaway world.

In many cases tourism proceeds in an essentially unplanned and barely controllable way. Hence, it is possible to appropriate Giddens’ idea to talk about Runaway Tourism. This is because, like most things, tourism is delivered in a largely uncontrolled neoliberal market environment, which often precedes and overpowers attempts at planning and management. But more importantly, neoliberalism is a deeply ideological project. That Adam Smith (1904) talked about the invisible hand is significant here as neoliberalism creates and forms our (tourism) world in a seemingly unconscious, routine, common sense way almost as if it were the natural way and that there was no alternative. Tourism development seems to happen without much conscious effort. Moreover, the study of economics often lays claim to the importance of value-freedom. But there are implicit values at work in neoliberalism. These include individualism, competition, technology, the reification of markets and (after Adam Smith) the belief that the pursuit of self-interest leads to socially beneficial results. Indeed against the themes of this book – truth, beauty and virtue – it might be said that neoliberalism promotes a particular set of values – performativity, consumerism and profitability. The idea of performativity is particularly potent for, as Lyotard explained, it is a key force driving the progress of technological knowledge. Technology is dominated by performativity (the maximum output for the minimum input) and the importance of this is that ‘an equation between wealth, efficiency and truth is thus established’ (Lyotard, 1984: 45). Here, useful knowledge is favoured so that

The production of proof … thus falls under control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity – that is the best possible input/output equation. (Lyotard, 1984: 46)

This analysis gives a special significance to a considered enquiry into what truths are in tourism.

The ability to locate ourselves in a tourism world that has runaway qualities and identify and question its powerful neoliberal driving forces is in itself a philosophical act. For at its very simplest, philosophising is the ability to extract ourselves from the busy, engaged world of making and doing things, to disengage and to pause for refection and thought especially about meaning and purpose. The word philosophy is derived from the Greek term meaning love of wisdom and the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines philosophy as:

Seeking after wisdom or knowledge, esp. that which deals with ultimate reality, or with the most general causes and principles of things and ideas and human perception and knowledge of them, physical phenomena (natural philosophy), and ethics (moral philosophy); advanced learning in general (doctor of philosophy); philosophical system; system of principles for the conduct of life; serenity, calmness.

The unpacking of this definition provides a further indication of the interests of this book since it merely raises more questions. What is wisdom? What is it to know something? What is the nature of reality? Why are some things considered beautiful and desirable? What are ethics and what is good and bad? What are desirable ends? It is these questions that are now addressed more fully in the three main sections of this book under the headings of truth, beauty and virtue.

Truth: Reality, Knowledge and Disciplines

Tourism is often portrayed as a new subject of research and activity in universities, but despite its relative youth it has already generated substantial amounts of knowledge. For example Annals of Tourism Research has been producing articles since 1973, the number of specialist research journals stands at over 50 and a recent search of the CABI abstract service revealed the existence of around 50,000 items (mainly articles but also including books and chapters) recorded under the subject head of tourism. The field also generates a substantial programme of conferences. Amazon lists over 7500 book titles that include the word tourism. But most of the knowledge produced in these ways is what might be termed additive knowledge, that is knowledge that seeks to add or adapt theories, insights or understandings about the phenomenon of tourism. In contrast, the task of this section is to place the process of tourism knowledge production under scrutiny and to consider more carefully what it means to know.

Such an enquiry is perhaps particularly necessary in the present era, which is witnessing an explosion of information largely enabled by rapid developments in digital communications and media. For example, a Google search for the term tourism generates 166 million hits. These include all sorts of representations of tourism, including websites, images, blogs, postings, videos, discussion groups etc. The question of web-based information immediately raises a number of questions requiring clarification.

The first of these is about scope and framing and this relates to what is meant by the concepts of the tourist and tourism, how we frame these concepts and hence what are the boundaries of the concepts, what are the consequences of such framings and what lies inside and outside of our fields of enquiry. The second question for clarification is about the meaning of knowledge itself. This concerns questions such as what is knowledge, what is it to know something and how do we distinguish between truth, assertion, lies and propaganda? Here, Plato set the scene, stating that in order to count as knowledge, statement must be justified, true and believed.

The conceptualisations and problematiques of the terms tourists and tourism are covered in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. In Chapter 4, consideration is given to issues in the production of knowledge about tourism, specifically those of how we know things (epistemology) and the nature of the tourism world we wish to know (ontology). Chapter 5 presses at our conventional discipline-based way of understanding tourism and develops the idea of post-disciplinarity epistemology. The section ends with Chapter 6, which considers recent challenges to the concept of tourism and possible replacement concepts such as mobilities which allow a much wider framing (Bernstein, 1971) than that offered by tourism. The discussion of one aspect of this section invariably involves consideration of another and so some key ideas weave their way across the chapters of this section.

It seems that much of the population prefers to see itself as traveller rather than tourist, but as Scott McCabe argues this has considerable implications for tourism research and its findings. In Chapter 2, he poses a fundamental philosophical question and implied approach to answering it: Who is a Tourist? Conceptual and Theoretical Developments. His purpose is to illuminate the problematic relationships between the use of the term tourist by the industry, the academy and with its use as a lay construct by ordinary people in everyday conversation. Part of McCabe's interest arises from observing an established discourse that connotes ‘tourist’ as a pejorative term and his aim is to discover how tourists construct the activities of themselves and others as social practices, as well as to warn of the dangers of working with a category that is so saturated with particular meaning.

The chapter commences by outlining the main definitions of tourists, including industry and social science perspectives. McCabe uses dictionary and literature sources to arrive at a common definition of a tourist, roughly ‘the act of travelling, or making a journey which starts and finishes in the same place … for pleasure, interest, culture, holiday, recreation etc’. But, this is not his destination – merely a stop over – for he warns that definitions are not able to encompass the multiplicity of experiences often desired by travellers in the same trip. To address this, the chapter then moves on to discuss and evaluate critical and poststructuralist conceptualisations of tourist activities and behaviour in the tourism literature. It discusses postmodernist empirical research which emphasises the subjective and negotiated characteristics of an individual's experiences. Such research tends to focus more deeply on the nature of tourist roles, experiences and meanings, and attitudes avoiding more reductionist and rigid conceptualisations.

The discussion then moves on to assess the epistemological basis through which knowledge claims about tourists and their identifying characteristics are made. McCabe argues that social sciences of tourism, and particularly postmodern and poststructuralist interpretations of tourists (as well as sociological and psychological research coming from an ethnographic and qualitative perspective) often fails in its attempts to understand tourists’ behaviour. This critique stems from Jacobsen's (2000) idea of an ‘anti-tourist’. It is re-enforced from noting a comprehensively pejorative use of the concept ‘tourist’ by tourists when they contrast their own activities with those of others. Here, ethno-methodological techniques, membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis offer useful tools in getting to the heart of the term. The term ‘tourist’, McCabe concludes, turns out to be little more than a rhetorical device, an ideological and political construct. We should therefore be very wary of using the term. For as the lay concept ‘tourist’ is used as an ideological construct, this has important consequences on the ways in which it is operationalised in social science research in tourism. Consequently, a great deal of care needs to be taken in using empirical data that is premised on the use of this term. In simple terms, using the expression ‘tourist’ in research instruments may influence the results we get in unexpected and hidden ways. It is loaded and freighted with much hidden ideological baggage.

The word tourism describes an activity and this activity has given rise to academic interest and study. In Chapter 3, Alexandre Panosso Netto considers the question: What is Tourism? Definitions, Theoretical Phases and Principles. In the first part of the chapter, he presents and analyses different explanations of what tourism is according to different organisations and researchers. These might be termed issues of framing tourism. In the second part of the chapter, he turns to the study of tourism. His discussion uses Kuhn (1962) to classify some of the key theoretical models and approaches. Panosso Netto proposes that general systems theory became established as the basic paradigm of tourism studies. This realisation enables Panosso Netto to suggest a division of tourism studies into three distinct phases: the preparadigmatic, the paradigm and new approaches. Included in the latter is Nechar's (2005) ‘critical epistemology’. This foregrounds certain habits that have taken root in tourism academic life (i.e. the operation of a paradigm) and advocates critical, reflexive and hermeneutic moves to advance the understanding of new knowledge and meanings. Along with each of these three phases, Netto identifies a transition area, constituted of researchers that are migrating from one phase to another.

In the final part of his chapter, Panosso Netto returns to the concept of tourism and offers a normative schedule of tourism principles. These are divided into fundamental principles and desirable ones. These principles are condensed into a new proposal for the definition of tourism.

In Chapter 4 – Epistemology, Ontology and Tourism – Maureen Ayikoru engages with two of the key concepts that are central to understanding truth, knowledge and representation. These are epistemology and ontology and these concepts recur throughout the chapters in this section. Ayikoru defines ontology as that branch of philosophy that studies the nature of reality. Ontology asks what is the nature of that which is to be known. Epistemology is referred to as that branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. Epistemological questions ask about how we know things. Knowledge has a knowing subject and epistemology focuses on the relationship between the knower (researcher) and that which is to be known. Like Panosso Netto in the previous chapter, Ayikoru invokes Kuhn (1962) to organise her argument, in her case according to scientific (post)positivism and interpretive paradigms.

Positivism adopts a realist ontological perspective whereby it is assumed that there exists a reality out there, driven by immutable natural laws. This reality is therefore objective and independent from the knowing subject. (Postpositivism adopts a critical realist ontological viewpoint which assumes reality to be imperfectly apprehendable but nevertheless apprehendable.) Positivist epistemology operates on the principle that the knower and the object of inquiry are independent entities. Its emphasis is therefore on objective rigorous scientific method by corroboration or falsification of factual evidence.

However, Ayikoru points out that knowledge of the social (as opposed to the physical) world of tourism is imbued with meaning-making mechanisms of the social, mental and linguistic worlds of the knowing subjects. In this case, what is to be known cannot be separate from the knower. Hence the importance of the interpretive paradigm that subscribes to a relativist ontology. Here, Ayikoru explains, knowledge does not exist independently and is not waiting to be discovered, but rather enquirers contribute to its construction, imbuing meaning according to different historical and sociocultural influences. She adds that the constructivist epistemology is usually described as being transactional and subjectivist as the inquirer...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Frontmatter
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Truth: Reality, Knowledge and Disciplines
• Part 3 Beauty: Well-being, Aesthetics and Art
• Part 4 Virtue: Ethics, Values and The Good Life
• Index