The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies. Innovative Research Methods

401 Pages·2007·3.77 MB·English

by  Irena Ateljevic, Annette Pritchard and Nigel Morgan (Eds.)

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Contributors
Cara Carmichael Aitchison is a Professor in human geography at the University of the
West of England, Bristol, where she is Director of the Centre for Leisure, Tourism and
Society (CELTS). Cara’s teaching and research focus on the integration of social, cultural
and spatial theories and policies of leisure, sport and tourism as sites and processes of
inequality, identity, inclusion and social justice.
Martine Abramoviciis a PhD candidate in tourism in the Faculty of Business at Auckland
University of Technology. Martine’s PhD focuses on Italian women and tanning, revealing
the body to be a focal point in understanding Italian contemporary society. Her research
interests include postmodern consumer society and identity, socio-cultural issues, gender
issues, the body and embodiment, and critical approaches to research.
Irena Ateljevicreceived her doctoral degree in human geography in 1998 at the University
of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently positioned within the Socio-Spatial Analysis
Group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Interested in the post-structural analy-
sis of economy and culture, she explores the cultural complexities of gender, class, age and
ethnicity in the production and consumption of tourist spaces and experiences and how
their intersection reproduce power relations of injustice and inequality. She has engaged
with those issues in the context of various subjects, reflective in her published work on
tourism imagi(in)ing, backpacker phenomenon, peripheral regional development and
small tourism firms. Her most recent research interest lies in analysing the political impli-
cations and powers surrounding the production of academic knowledge, which shape and
condition our academic lives and of those we ‘research’and interact with.
Maureen Ayikoru is a PhD candidate at University of Surrey in United Kingdom. Her
PhD thesis looks at the way discourses construct social reality by specifically focusing on
tourism higher education in England. The on-going research entails an analysis of various
texts (documents) that seem to have direct and indirect implications for tourism in higher
education. Thus the field of study is tourism, and main research interests include tourism
in higher education, theoretical and philosophical issues in social (tourism) inquiry, sus-
tainability in tourism and tourism in developing countries.
David Botterill is a Professor and Director of research in the Cardiff School of
Management at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. His current interest is in the
xiv Contributors
interface between the philosophies of the social sciences and the practices of tourism
researchers.
Graham Brown is a Professor of Tourism Management at the University of South
Australia. He gained his PhD from Texas A&M University, has taught tourism at universi-
ties in England, Canada, Mauritius and Australia and serves on a number of academic and
editorial boards.
Kath Browne works in the area of geographies of sexualities and genders. Her research
interests include: non-heterosexual women/lesbians, queer theories, feminist geographies,
Pride festivals, ‘gay’Brighton and Hove, civil partnerships.
Donna Chambersstudied International Relations at both undergraduate and masters level
in Jamaica and Trinidad respectively prior to spending 5 years in the tourism public sector in
Jamaica. She subsequently did a masters degree in Tourism Management and completed a
PhD in tourism with Brunel University in 2003. Donna’s research interests include tourism
and politics, heritage representation, discourse theory and postcolonial perspectives. She has
presented in these areas at national and international tourism conferences and published jour-
nal articles and book chapters also in these areas. She is currently a lecturer in Tourism and
Programme Leader for postgraduate tourism programmes at Napier University, Edinburgh.
Susanna Curtinis a senior lecturer in Tourism Management at Bournemouth University.
Her research is focused on wildlife tourism, particularly that related to marine mammals.
She is currently in the writing-up stages of her PhD and has published several journal
articles from her preliminary findings as well as other related research projects.
Stephen Doorne has a background in human geography and development studies. His
research interests focus on tourism in developing countries, community development,
tourism and periphery. He currently shares his time between academia and consultancy
and has been contracted to the University of the South Pacific since 2002.
Ria Ann Dunkley is a research student and part-time lecturer at the Welsh Centre for
Tourism Research in the Cardiff School of Management, University of Wales Institute,
Cardiff. Her research focuses on the thanatourism experience and she is passionate about
alternative methodologies such as autoethnography.
Jeff Everettis an Assistant Professor in the Haskayne School of Business, The University
of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. His main focus is on social and environmental accounting
and organisational accountability, as well as the application of sociological and cultural
theories to the study of protected areas.
Adrian Franklinis a Professor of sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia and
has held professorial positions at the University of Bristol and the University of Oslo.
Recent books include Tourism(London: Sage), Nature and Social Theory(London: Sage),
Animals Nation(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press) and Animals and Modern
Contributors xv
Cultures (London: Sage) and he is co-editor (with Mike Crang) of the journal Tourist
Studies.New tourism papers include the problems of wilderness as a concept, the theoret-
ical implications for consumptive wildlife tourism, tourism theory and ordering, and an
interview with Zygmunt Bauman on the sociological significance of tourism.
Derek Hall has degrees in geography and social anthropology from the University of
London and a postgraduate qualification in linguistics. He has latterly been Head of the
Leisure and Tourism Management Department at the Scottish Agricultural College where
he has also had a personal chair in Regional Development. He is currently visiting profes-
sor at HAMK University of Applied Sciences, Mustiala, Finland. With around 300 publi-
cations, his interests have included tourism, transport and regional development.
Candice Harris is a senior lecturer in Management and Employment Relations in the
Faculty of Business at Auckland University of Technology. Candice’s PhD (Victoria
University) focused on New Zealand women as business travellers. Her research interests
include gender and diversity issues in tourism and management, human resource manage-
ment, and qualitative and critical approaches to research.
Bente Heimtun is a PhD student at the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of
West of England and a research fellow at Lillehammer University College, Norway. Her
research coheres around the sociology of tourism, gender and identities. The current PhD
research project focuses on the importance of social capital in the holiday, based on the
experiences of midlife single women.
Keith Hollinsheadis an Anglo-Australian researcher of the interface that tourism and travel
have today with the cultural inheritances and the received understandings of the world’s pop-
ulations. Having first been trained light-years-ago in Romano-British history, he worked in
various public and private sector marketing and development positions in recreation man-
agement in Wales and Australia (mainly in outback locales in Western Australia and the
Northern Territory), before undertaking a Foucauldian study of the politics of heritage at
Texas A&M University in the USA. Principally a transdiciplinary cum adisciplinary thinker,
Keith’s main critiques concern the way peoples, places, and pasts are ‘represented’today and
supposed/presupposed cosmologically. His current investigations focus upon those critical
but slippery questions of traditonality/transitionality that arise in the projection of both indi-
geneity(especially in Australasia and The Pacific) and otherness. His work is much in debt
to the insights of his father (Charles James) and his mother (Joyce), and to the outsights of
Homi Bhabha, Edward Sampson, Nicholas Thomas, Stuart Hall, and Carwyn James.
Stephanie Hom Cary is in the Italian Studies PhD programme at the University of California,
Berkeley, and is a co-founder of the UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group. Her
current research focuses on tourism, colonialism, and the modern Italian nation-state.
Tazim B. Jamal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Recreation, Park and
Tourism Sciences at Texas A&M University. Her main research areas are community-
based tourism planning, sustainable tourism (theory and pedagogy), heritage tourism.
xvi Contributors
Gayle Jennings is an Associate Professor in Tourism Management in the Department of
Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sport Management, Griffith Business School, and Director,
Tourism Management Cluster, Service Industry Research Centre, Griffith University.
Gayle, along with Erica Wilson, Southern Cross University is co-founder of the
Qualitative Research in Tourism and Hospitality Network. Her research interests include
theoretical paradigms informing research processes, research methodologies, qualitative
research, tourism education at the tertiary level, impacts of tourism, tourism and develop-
ment studies, policy and planning, special interest tourism, marine and national park
tourism rural tourism, adventure tourism, and sport tourism.
Olga Junek is a lecturer in Tourism and Event Management in the School of Hospitality,
Tourism and Marketing at Victoria University. Her professional experience in the educa-
tion sector has fostered her interest in tertiary international students and their leisure and
travel experiences, an area in which she is currently undertaking her PhD research. Her
other research interests include event visitation, sustainable tourism, Chinese inbound
tourism and risk and crisis management in tourism.
Jo-Anne Lester is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Tourism Policy Studies, University
of Brighton. Key interests in teaching and research include tourism and visual culture.
Jo-Anne is currently registered for a PhD programme at University of Wales Institute
Cardiff (UWIC) investigating discourses of cruise tourism with a focus on popular film.
Scott McCabe has main research interests in the field of tourist experience and touristic
consumption, particularly the mundane, practical and rhetorical uses of language that
makes up human social life and tourist interaction. He has written a number of journal arti-
cles and book chapters on subject including the construction of place identity in tourists
talk, and the rhetorical function of the term tourist in everyday discourse. Centre for
Tourism and Cultural Change, Faculty of Organisation and Management, Sheffield Hallam
University, Howard Street, Sheffield. S1 1WB.
Nigel Morgan isa Professor of Tourism Studies at the Welsh Centre for Tourism Research
in the Cardiff School of Management at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. His
research interests embrace the socio-cultural dimensions of tourism and destination mar-
keting and critical tourism studies and he is currently working on Tourism, Identities and
Embodiments, to be published by Channel View.
Chaim Noy (PhD) is an independent scholar, presently teaching in the Departments of
Communication and Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. His
research interests combine performance and semiotic perspectives with language-oriented
research, in the contexts of travel, tourism and transportation. His recent publications
include “A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers” (Wayne State University
Press, 2006), and “Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to a Rite of Passage” (SUNY Press,
2005), co-authored with Erik Cohen.
Tomas Pernecky is a PhD Candidate at the Wageningen University, The Netherlands. In
his PhD thesis, Tomas draws on the recent debates in tourism studies with respect to new
Contributors xvii
ways of tourism theorising also addressed under the term ‘Critical Turn’. In his work, he
explores the New Age becomingand the role tourism and travel play in the process. Tomas
is interested in New Age tourism, tourism theory, constructivism, qualitative methods,
Hermeneutic phenomenology and Out-of-Body experiences.
Annette Pritchard is a Reader in tourism studies and Director of the Welsh Centre for
Tourism Research in the Cardiff School of Management at the University of Wales
Institute, Cardiff. Her research interests focus on the relationships between tourism, rep-
resentation and social structures, experiences and identities and her next book will be
Tourism, Gender and Embodiment(CABI, 2007).
Diane Sedgley is a senior lecturer in tourism and leisure studies at the Cardiff School of
Management at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff. Her research interests include
minority groups in tourism and leisure. She has published work on lesbian and gay tourism
and leisure and, more recently, has been involved in research looking at the role of leisure
in the lives of older women. Her current research interest is focussed on examining the role
of biographical research in understanding leisure and tourism behaviour. She also plays an
active role in the Welsh Centre for Tourism Research.
Dr Jennie Small is a senior lecturer in the School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism at the
University of Technology, Sydney. Her specific research interest is tourist behaviour in terms
of gender, age, disability, and the life-course. More generally, she is interested in a Critical
Tourism approach to tourist behaviour.
Margaret Byrne Swain teaches at University of California Davis Women and Gender
Studies. Her research applies feminist analysis to tourism and other issues of globalization,
with a particular focus on Yunnan China and the Sani of Stone Forest. She directs the
Gender and Global Issues Program, and co-directs the Women’s Resources and Research
Center.
Julia Trapp-Fallon is head of centre for tourism, leisure and events and MSc Award
Director in the Cardiff School of Management at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff.
Her work in the Welsh Centre of Tourism Research concentrates upon oral history method-
ology and its application in tourism and leisure.
John Tribe is a Professor of Tourism at the University of Surrey, UK. He has authored
books on strategy, economics, education and environmental management in tourism and
his research concentrates on sustainability, epistemology and education in tourism. He is
Chair of the ATHE (Association for Tourism in Higher Education) and edits the Journal of
Hospitality, Leisure Sport and Tourism Education for the Higher Education Academy
Subject Network.
René van der Duim since 1991 is an Assistant Professor at the Socio-spatial Analysis
Group (Department of Environmental Sciences) of Wageningen University. His research
focuses on the relation between tourism and sustainable development and he executed
research project in Costa Rica, Kenya and The Netherlands. He has published his results
xviii Contributors
in professional and scientific journals (e.g. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Annals of
Tourism Research, Current Issues in Tourismand Vrijetijdstudies) and has presented inter-
mediate results at several conferences and workshops. In 2005 he completed his disserta-
tion, titled Tourismscapes, an actor-network perspective on sustainable tourism
development.
Soile Veijolais a sociologist and works at the University of Lapland, in Rovaniemi, Finland,
as Professor of cultural studies of tourism. Her earlier publications include feminist critique
of theorising on tourism (mostly co-authored with Eeva Jokinen) and analyses of mixed
social orders in sport and society. She is currently leading an interdisciplinary research
project entitled Tourism as Work.
Sheena Westwood is a senior lecturer in Marketing and Research Methods at Cardiff
School of Management, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Her research interests
include tourist consumption behaviour, marketing and progressive qualitative research
inquiry. She has published work on gender issues in airline marketing, tourism branding
and tourism experiences for the Welsh Centre for Tourism Research. Forthcoming work
includes papers on the age–time–leisure paradox, and tourism shopping experiences.
Erica Wilson is a lecturer in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at
Southern Cross University in Lismore, Northern NSW. Her doctoral thesis (Griffith
University) focussed on the solo travel experiences of Australian women, particularly the
constraints they face and how these are negotiated. Her research interests are with gender
and tourism, the tourist experience, leisure constraints/negotiation and critical/qualitative
research methodologies.
Acknowledgements
No book is ever the result of three people’s efforts and this book is certainly no exception.
We thank all our contributors for agreeing to be part of this project and then for speedily
and cheerfully meeting our deadlines and for allowing us to edit their hard work. We
express our gratitude to our editors at Elsevier for their assistance and guidance through-
out the project, particularly the book series editor, Stephen Page for giving us the oppor-
tunity to publish the book in the first place. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Renee
Pryce for all her painstaking editorial work on the manuscript — you know we could not
have done it without you! Finally, the three of us owe so much to so many wonderful and
beautiful people — our families, our friends and our colleagues — that to attempt to name
you here would be an invidious task. Please forgive us and accept our simple thank you for
inspiring and supporting us in this and all our efforts.
Irena Ateljevic
Murter, Croatia
Annette Pritchard
Cardiff, Wales
Nigel Morgan
Cardiff, Wales
26th July 2006
Foreword
As in any field of research, the cornerstone of tourism studies consists of people talking —
and, preferably, being encouraged to publish their talks for a wider audience to read, and to
talk about some more. The volume at hand distinguishes itself from many previous academic
conversations, launched for the field of tourism and hospitality studies, by its spirit — and
stamina — of a self-reflexive and engaged freedom fighter.
From what should the field of research be liberated, then? According to the editors of the
volume, tourism studies are handicapped by an internal dichotomy of interests — between,
on the one hand, critical social and cultural studies of tourism and, on the other, business-
oriented tourism management. Writing in an academic context, the construction of the
reader causes additional distress: should one accept the notion of an ‘objectivist’discourse
of ‘events reporting themselves’or explore the possibilities opened through the use of per-
sonal experience in an academic enterprise? A third source of constraint is that work at uni-
versities is increasingly affected by new managerialism and the promotion of applied
studies at the expense of independent research. This makes it difficult to enhance and
maintain a sustained, focussed conversation between academic and applied research — no
matter how much the travelling world would benefit from such a connection.
The numerous writers in this volume have turned the tables in order to articulate their the-
oretically and empirically based critique of the mainstream discourse of tourism research
as a relatively isolated field, quantitative in nature and biased in favour of business appli-
cations rather than critical and reflexive research. The mainstream discourse is, further-
more, claimed to be masculinist in nature, which means that it excludes the perspectives
and contributions of women and others who were not born with a white male body.
Do we need outspoken books like this in tourism research? In my view, they are pivotal.
They articulate the often by-passed constitutive rules of both knowledge production and
tourism scholarship. Moreover, they challenge readers from first-year students to the gate-
keepers of academic journals, not to mention people wishing to learn and benefit from the
research, to approach issues in tourism and travelling as a power-charged field of interdis-
ciplinary expertise, firmly rooted in the lived realities of tourism, travelling or other mobil-
ities and immobilities. Tourism in itself is as scientific as a glass of Piña Colada is. It needs
to be theorised into a research field trough multiple research and knowledge strategies.
xxii Foreword
This is mainly what the individual chapters of this book are doing. They outline a future
ethics for research on tourism, whereby traversing other schools of thought may be done
with respect and curiosity. They also provide an impressing cavalcade of methodological
insights for qualitative and theoretical research.
After alerting the academic community to its own unsustainable and biased practices, the
same community needs to proceed with an even harder task: freeing knowledge from
exclusive academic forums. How to make sense to all the hosts and guests of the mobile
world in real life terms — without trivialising knowledge or wrapping it into promises of
easy money?
Soile Veijola