Understanding Tourism

A Critical Introduction

Kevin Hannam, Dan Knox

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412922784, 9781412922777
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This text introduces tourism students to concepts drawn from critical theory, cultural studies and the social sciences. It does so with a light and readable touch, highlighting the ideas that underlie contemporary critical tourism studies in a practical and engaging way.

Specifically, the authors examine how post-structuralist thought has led to a re-imagining of power relationships and the ways in which they are central to the production and consumption of tourism experiences.

Eleven clear, relevant chapters provide an accessible introduction to tourism defining, explaining and developing the key issues and methods in this exciting field.

These topics include:

• Regulating Tourism

• Commodifying Tourism

• Embodying Tourism

• Performing Tourism

• Tourism and the Everyday

• Tourism and the Other

• Tourism and the Environment

• Tourism and the Past

• Tourism Mobilities

• Researching Tourism

A strong teaching text, this will be well received by lecturers seeking an authoritative, multi-disciplinary book on contemporary tourism and by students who want a practical, grounded introduction which understands their learning and research needs.

1	UNDERSTANDING TOURISM: AN INTRODUCTION

Tourism is of central importance to social, cultural and economic lives in the twenty-first century.This book details the significance of the practices of tourist planners, tour operators, travel agencies and, above all, tourists and travellers themselves. The overarching aim of the book is to help you reach a point of understanding of the many worlds of tourism, as well as to introduce you to some of the more interesting insights of recent research and scholarship in the academic subject of tourism studies. This chapter is intended to not only welcome you to our book but also to outline the position from which we have written it, and to introduce ourselves (Image 1.1). We want to enliven teaching and learning in tourism-related degree programmes at universities everywhere, and we believe that this can only be achieved by successfully engaging students with the contemporary critical tourism studies literature in an accessible, readable and enjoyable way. If you happen to find yourself smiling, or even enjoying yourself as you read this book, please do not worry: we meant for that to happen. More crucially, however, we wish to present you with a reading experience that will challenge some of your own preconceptions about tourism and tourism studies.

We are interested in the ways in which tourism as a cultural activity blurs with or fades into other aspects of contemporary social, cultural, economic and environmental experiences. Hence, in this book we question simple binary structures that inform much academic writing and the overt rationality that pervades many tourism texts, and argue that there are many competing interpretations of the world. The sometimes very simple explanations given for tourist motivations in much writing on the subject need to be rejected in favour of a more nuanced discussion of the underlying power relations in tourism production and consumption, as well as how these structures are sometimes transgressed and subverted. In the contemporary world, basic models of tourism that do not problematise social categories and motivations are not just stale (and even boring) but also rather misleading because they frequently give deceptively simple answers to difficult questions.We would contend that, in many cases, they do not even ask the right questions, and frequently they do not ask sufficient numbers of questions. The aim here, then, is to give more complex answers by asking additional questions, and by utilising critical theory to explore exactly what is happening in the worlds of tourism.

Image 1.1 The authors, Aberdeen, UK

The study of tourism is a vibrant, innovative and interesting academic subject, although you would hardly know so from reading some of the introductory textbooks in the field. In their monumental text, Tourism: Principles and Practice, Cooper et al. (2005: 6–7) acknowledge that the study of tourism is ‘bedevilled by conceptual weakness and fuzziness’ and go on to note that ‘recent authors have been critical of this “reductionism”’. However, they then discuss at length an overall framework for studying tourism as a system adopting the reductionist model suggested by Leiper (1990) concerning just three elements: tourists, geography and the tourism sector. They go on to note the difficulties in defining tourism and, paradoxically, contrast demand and supply side definitions. Similarly, in his introduction to Tourism Management, Page (2006: 5) points to the ‘lack of clarity and definition in how to study tourism, something that other researchers have defined as reductionism’. However, his book unfortunately continues to analyse the study of tourism as divided between supply and demand. So, clearly, authors are aware of some of the problems in the tourist studies literature but are uncertain as to how to proceed in a more critical and engaging way. This book is thus our proposal for a more thoughtful, critical and interesting study of tourism, and it is aimed more at students rather than at existing academics, who may be more critical of our philosophical approach (although, of course, we do hope they enjoy the book too).

OUR PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH

We fully agree that tourism management matters and that the existing texts are valuable introductions to the management of tourism, but in this book we wish to inspire students not just to understand contemporary tourism from the binary of supply and demand perspectives, but also to encourage them to begin to think critically and question the assumptions inherent in much writing about tourism. While contemporary tourism textbooks are generally critical of reducing tourism to a simple set of propositions, they do by and large replicate this same reductionism in their laudable aim of making the study of tourism sensible and understandable to students. In contrast, in order to avoid making the same mistakes (though we may make others) we wish to start (and indeed finish) from the perspective that the study of tourism is always difficult and contested. So, if you are looking for neat models of tourism behaviour – be warned – look elsewhere, as we no longer find such lifecycle models particularly useful or insightful. Instead, we draw inspiration from Franklin’s (2003) Tourism text, even though we feel that he does not go far enough, neither in radicalising and problematising the understanding of tourism, nor in making the material accessible to those new to critical theoretical perspectives. While he too ‘considers general theories of tourism to be inadequate on their own’ he draws predominantly upon anthropological approaches to overcome this problem. Our intention here is to search further and wider to incorporate information and ideas from disciplines as diverse as human geography, literary criticism, history, archaeology, sociology and media studies. Moreover, we would like this book to really introduce students to a new way of thinking about tourism.

In this context, then, we are acutely aware that the world we live in is fast-changing and full of transformations. Whether you are reading for a degree or undertaking research, you need to be equipped with knowledge and skills that enable you to think about these changes as they happen, and to apply theoretical ideas to new practical problems as they emerge. We cannot confidently predict all of the changes that will occur within a dynamic cultural and economic activity such as tourism, but we can hope to provide readers with a set of tools for engaging with events after the publication of this book. Thus, this book should not be thought of as the definitive answer to students’ questions about tourism, but rather as a starting point for an on-going project. Our account of tourism draws on many aspects of post-structuralist philosophy, not because it may be fashionable but because we do find it helps us to understand contemporary tourism as a set of complex, negotiated, contingent, blurred and incomplete practices and ideas. We also draw on the politicised aspects of tourism and tourism development to highlight how some views of tourism become normalised, legitimised and dominant as the result of their repeated use by governments, practitioners and tourists themselves. Such legitimisation of understandings is always at the expense of other more marginal and marginalised viewpoints. However, although we are politicised in our thinking we are not advocating any particular liberal, socialist or conservative political position: we seek instead to deconstruct many of the taken-for-granted positions held by thinkers and writers in contemporary tourism research. Following Nietzsche (1990), we hope that any hint of cynicism in this book is also very close to honesty. Our wish has been to write a book that truly develops the call for a critical approach to tourism studies, paying heed to the call by Pritchard and Morgan (2007: 11) that ‘there remains a crucial challenge to develop conceptualisations of tourisms that encompass multiple worldviews and cultural differences and research praxis that recognises and reflects the plurality of all positions, practices and insights’. If the discipline of tourism studies is taking note of post-structuralist and other critical bodies of thought, it is only reasonable that the study of tourism at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in universities and colleges around the world makes a similar adjustment in terms of focus.

At the outset we ought to emphasise to students that our philosophical approach is premised upon the notion of the social construction of reality. We do not take this to the logical extreme of social relativism by suggesting that nothing in our social and cultural worlds is real, but simply assert that appearances of reality are influenced by thinking, writing, gazing and experiencing. We accept that there are objective facts about extant things in the world, but that the meanings we place upon these things are socially constructed: a beer may be a beer, but it has a whole host of social meanings according to the social context in which it is produced, poured and consumed. Over time, our apprehensions and mental representations of a product or service can take on new meanings as they are circulated between individuals, in the media and in society. Meanings can become fixed, dominant or subordinate depending on the strength they acquire in different societies or cultural groups. Dominant meanings or understandings take on the appearance of truths and may become institutionalised and embedded within larger schemes of meaning and understanding, which are liable to change over time. While the notion of the social construction of reality is perhaps now commonly understood, in this book we also draw on broader post-structuralist philosophy, which helps us to further understand the contemporary fluidity of the social construction of realities that include the arenas of tourism. A post-structuralist approach seeks to avoid developing grand theories of everything in favour of a more critical engagement that investigates how different viewpoints are actually produced in contemporary society through relations of power at both macro and micro scales.

Thus, while empirical studies of tourism have grown rapidly in recent years, this has been mainly through case-study research that critiques tourism policies (R. Butler, 1997; Church et al., 2000; Desforges, 2000; Notzke, 1999). Such engagement with the practical consequences of tourism should be applauded, but we recognise that more sophisticated theoretical analyses of tourism are also needed (Davis, 2001; Hughes, 1992; Squire, 1994). Indeed, Dann (1999a: 27) argues that ‘unless issues are problematised – unless we acknowledge that our understanding is incomplete – we will never adequately address issues of tourism development’. The launch of more theoretically orientated and informed academic journals, such as Tourist Studies (Franklin and Crang, 2001), Tourism Geographies (Lew, 1999) and Tourism and Cultural Change (Robinson and Phipps, 2003), as well as a more explicit engagement with theory in longer-established journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, demonstrates that research into tourism has begun to take on board theoretical issues that have been the mainstay of other social sciences for some time. As Franklin and Crang (2001: 3) have pointed out: ‘tourism has broken away from its beginnings as a relatively minor and ephemeral ritual of modern national life to become a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organised’. This engagement with theory does not mean that tourism research will or should retreat into a theoretical ivory tower. By developing more sophisticated theoretical frameworks we may actually hear better the voices of people involved in the practices and processes of tourism development and management. We are firmly of the belief that critical, nuanced understandings of people and places should be central to an academic discipline that many see as being primarily vocational. The kinds of accounts offered in this book and the bodies of literature that we aim to guide you through should be of the utmost importance to practitioners and professionals throughout tourism and related industries. This chapter thus reviews the importance of the recent engagement with theory in tourism research with reference to issues of globalisation and power (Hannam, 2002).

THE NEED FOR CRITICAL THEORY IN TOURISM STUDIES

Since tourism is integral to processes of globalisation both as an outcome and as a contributing factor, any analysis of tourism needs to take account of theoretical advances in the study of the processes of globalisation. As a result of processes of globalisation, virtually everyone now lives in a region that hosts tourism and such restructuring of places has resulted in greater flexibility, hybridity and difference (Potter et al., 1999). On the one hand, such additional differences have become evident because places have sought to position themselves as unique in relation to competing destinations: regions and cities that historically have done little to promote themselves now need a message to communicate to would-be visitors as they seek income from tourism. On the other hand, however, there has also been a process whereby places have become much more similar as a result of the progress of multinational companies, international popular culture and tourists themselves (Harvey, 1989; Ritzer, 2004). Indeed, Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000) point to the homogenisation of tourist-historic cities that occurs through standardisation, the repetition of successful models (e.g. waterfront regeneration) and what they call ‘catalogue heritigization’. Increasingly, tourist destinations become more and more like home and more and more like each other, meaning that those responsible for promoting them have to work that much harder to generate a degree of the exotic (see Chapter 7).

However, Stebbins (2002, 2007) and Crouch (1999), meanwhile, have questioned the traditional division between tourism, leisure and everyday life, and Larsen (2008) has shown that holidays often involve socialising primarily with the people with whom you travel. Moreover, the growing literature on ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR) tourism similarly examines the close relationships between vacations and everyday lives (Poel et al., 2006). In this context, Melanie Smith tells us that:

many tourists are actively engaging in the kinds of activity that they could quite feasibly do at home (e.g. shopping for global brands, eating international fast food, watching sport on satellite TV). Media pervade some people’s lives to the point that they watch their favourite soap opera or football team play while they are in beach bars abroad. Work and leisure are scarcely differentiated as tourists increasingly check e-mails, carry around laptops, and are glued to the ubiquitous mobile phone whilst on holiday! (2006: 220)

The close ties and connections between what we do at home and what we do on holiday has been further explored by Knox (2009) in an account of mass tourism in the Mediterranean. If, in many cases, tourist behaviour is simply a manifestation of the same kinds of behaviour that people would engage in at home, then destinations and attractions need to have a definable experience to offer the visitor. Sometimes such experiences are not what we or local authorities would imagine or desire them to be (see Chapter 6).

Nevertheless many tourists revel neither in the exotic or the everyday but are in search of ‘experiences’ however imagined. This has been shown empirically by Nijman (1999: 155) who stated: ‘[f]oreign visitors no longer come to Amsterdam to seek refuge from persecution, in search of economic opportunity, or to marvel at the city’s achievements as a “laboratory of modernity” as they did in the seventeenth century. Instead a growing number come to “let it all hang out” and enjoy the entertaining spectacle of “tolerance”’. As a result, a significant part of Amsterdam has evolved into a globalised cosmopolitan theme park geared to young adult tourists who watch other tourists rather than look at the city itself. Chang and Yeoh (1999) chart a similar process occurring in the re-working of Singapore as a themed and dynamic experiential tourist destination. The Singapore government has developed a policy that ‘borrows’ cultural resources from around the world in order to emphasise its contemporary image as a meeting place of modernity and exoticism. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has had an even more explicit policy of utilising tourism resources from around the world in its reconstruction of various foreign places in China.

In terms of the nascent experiential economy, recent research in tourism studies has also indicated that the processes of globalisation have also begun to transcend taken-for-granted environmental divides. For example, mass-market cruise companies now recognise that land-based resorts are their main competition. Ships are sold as the primary destination and as an experience in themselves, rather than the more traditional focus on the places along the way on the itinerary. As a result, cruise tourism has become more like non-cruise mass tourism. As Wood (2000: 349) argues, cruise tourism’s ‘distinctive characteristic of sea-based mobility has enabled it to participate especially fully in the processes of globalisation’. Lofgren’s (1999) historical study of tourism similarly notes how globalisation has transcended sand, sun and sea to create the notion of the ‘global beach’. Gale (2009) further backs this up with his study of the Plage, the synthetic beaches located on t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of boxes
• List of exercises
• List of images
• 1 Understanding tourism: An Introduction
• 2 Regulating tourism
• 3 Commodifying tourism
• 4 Embodying tourism
• 5 Performing tourism
• 6 Tourism and the everyday
• 7 Tourism and the other
• 8 Tourism and the environment
• 9 Tourism and the past
• 10 Tourism mobilities
• 11 Researching tourism
• Glossary
• References
• Index