Tourism Studies

Tourism studies refers to a still evolving, multidisciplinary academic field that examines various dimensions of travel, ostensibly for leisure purposes. In the sense that tourism is a discretionary “mass” leisure practice of the developed world, is built on technological capacities, and has largely flourished as a liberating practice within capitalist societies, it can be seen as both a product and a project of modernity. Tourism studies have emerged over the past forty years and can be characterized as a complex field that mirrors the increasing complexities of both domestic and international tourism. Tourism studies covers scholarly interests relating to three interrelated dimensions of tourism. First, it focuses on the movements, motivations, behaviors, practices, and performances of people as tourists. This extends to the relationships that emerge between tourists and the host communities. In this sense, tourist studies draws heavily on sociological and anthropological traditions to interrogate these relationships. Second, tourism studies examines the changing physical and organizational structures and institutions that allow tourism to take place. Broadly speaking, tourism is used as shorthand for a diverse number of sectors of production that collectively, though not exclusively, constitute the tourist experience. The economic realities of tourism as a source of revenue and employment, and as an instrument of development, has imbued tourism studies with a strong leaning toward economics, business management, and international relations. Third, tourism studies increasingly addresses the represented and mediated forms of peoples and places that constitute the experience of the tourist and that problematize concepts of space, identity, and social relations. In seeking to bring together these three dimensions, and with a focus on issues relating to leisure, taste, exchange, and the commodification of places, peoples, and pasts and resultant symbolic economies, tourism studies draws on a central understanding of the consumptive process and the cultures in which consumption operates. This inevitably takes us into the realms of “cross-cultural” consumption as tourists continually negotiate, re-negotiate, confirm, and challenge not only the boundaries of the represented world but the “real” world as experienced, performed, and practiced, together with the boundaries of self and “other.”

At one level, given the sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of tourism, not only as a major form of mobility but also as an increasingly significant sector in a majority of economies in the developed and developing world, it is not surprising that it has become the focus of scholarly attention. On another level, it remains the case, in some quarters, that tourism studies struggles for academic legitimacy and is all too easily characterized as somewhat frivolous, attracting some resistance from more established and classical academic interests. Criticisms relate, in part, to the novelty of the field, its sheer scope, and the ways it shifts between disciplines, subdisciplines, and methodologies. Nonetheless, tourism studies has managed to assert itself over the past forty years or so in parallel to the democratization of international travel and the period when the patterns, processes, and impacts of tourism were being firmly established and enacted.

Indicators of the extent and influence of tourism studies are imprecise and fragmentary and, to an extent, mirror the diversity and the fluidity of approaches, which in turn reflect the realities of tourism as an amalgam of structures and practices. A starting point is to reflect on the forecast by the United Nations World Tourism Organization that, by the year 2020, international arrivals are expected to reach over 1.6 billion. This figure will comprise 1.2 billion intraregional arrivals and 0.4 billion [Page 1463]long-haul travelers. Europe is scheduled to be the top receiving region with 717 million tourists, followed by East Asia and the Pacific with 397 million, the Americas with 282 million, and Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Above-average growth regions are predicted to be East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Despite recent economic downturns, the overall upward trends remain, with some shifts in interregional travel and some destinations capturing markets from others. In addition to these international tourist figures, there are also significant volumes of domestic tourism (tourists within countries) that vary considerably in terms of their contributions to gross national product levels. It is the case that sustained growth in tourism and attendant political recognition of tourism as a mechanism of growth, development, and diversification have been a key driver in establishing the field of tourism studies. Importantly, the focus of study reaches far beyond the idea of the tourist as a conventional consumer of tangible goods. Initially, tourists consume vacations to destinations without directly encountering such destinations and effectively are consuming the vast spectrum of mediated representations of places and peoples. While on vacation, tourists consume some goods and services in the same way they would at home; others they will consume differently. But the focus on tourists as consumers is only part of a wider picture. The tourism sector as a vast, overlapping, and “messy” agglomeration of public organizations and private businesses, large companies, and small enterprises also engages in the practices of consumption—both real and symbolic.

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