Contemporary currents in tourism sociology

Dr Scott Allen Cohen

School of Hospitality and Tourism Management

Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

University of Surrey, United Kingdom

s.cohen@surrey.ac.uk

The centrality of tourism sociology

• For more than 50 years sociology has been a central informant to the development of tourism studies

• “Tourism research continues to be inter-disciplinary but is largely being driven by sociology, anthropology, psychology, geography and consumer behavior perspectives” (Benckenendorff & Zehrer, 2013)

• “Collective body of sociology and anthropology work with a strong postmodern emphasis as a major cluster of influence for tourism researchers” (Benckenendorff & Zehrer, 2013)

Co-citation/network analysis of most cited works (Benckendorff & Zehrer, 2013)

Black nodes= sociology, anthropology & psychology theme

Why are developments in the sociological study of tourism important?

• Crucial to stay on top of contemporary currents in the sociological study of tourism

• Understandings of the changing social world should filter through to practical applications

• Implications for consumer behaviour, marketing, management, development and planning

Two primary developments we must come to grips with

• The increasing overlap and blurring of tourism with other forms of mobility

– Contributes to a breakdown in fixed binary concepts we’ve used to understand tourism, such as ‘host’/’guest’

• An implicit Eurocentrism that underpins the majority of past tourism studies

– With the rapid rise of tourism from emerging world regions, our knowledge on tourists’ motivations and practices is left questionable

The blurring of tourism with other forms of mobility • World has become highly fluid and pluralised through

processes of globalisation and rapid technological changes – Liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000)

• The ‘mobilities paradigm’ was instigated as a framework to deal with these social changes (Urry, 2000)

– Alleges a paradigm shift whereby the theoretical focus moves from the sedentary or the fixed to the mobile

• Rather than made of bounded entities, societies are perceived as merged in boundless network of diverse flows, interconnected by nodes/moorings

– Tourism (as a flow) enmeshed spatially, temporally and socially with other forms of mobility (Hall, 2005; Williams, 2013)

Implications of the mobilities paradigm for tourism studies

• Fresh perspective on tourism as entangled with other kinds of mobilities

– e.g. pilgrimages, VFR, 2nd home commuting, diasporic “old home” visits, travel for education, medical purposes, volunteering, work and various forms of migration

• Blurring of boundaries between different mobilities provoked some to claim ‘the end of tourism’ (Gale, 2009)

• This process of social de-differentiation weakens the divide between distinct domains:

– work and leisure; study and entertainment; and reality and fantasy

Breakdown of foundational concepts

Mobilities paradigm destabilises some of the fixed binary concepts on which sociological studies of tourism have been grounded (Cohen & Cohen, 2012)

• The ‘tour’ – distinction between ‘home’ and ‘away’, with tour as a circular trip of home-away-back home is weakened by ICTs and multi-locality

– Feeling ‘home’ while ‘away’ through ICTs

– Increased labour and residential migration, 2nd homes

Extraordinariness

• Pushes us to take account of more localised ‘tourisms’ at the domestic and regional scales, which are often ignored in favour of international tourism, despite being more voluminous (Ghimire, 2001)

• Tourism is viewed as an everyday activity, rather than as an extraordinary bounded practice (Franklin & Crang, 2001)

– Uncoupled from the quest for the exotic ‘Other’, a quintessential motive of modernist ‘Western’ tourists

– Contrast between the ordinariness of everyday life and extraordinariness of tourism (e.g. distinction of everyday-holiday, comparable to secular-sacred) is becoming blurred

Hosts and guests

• Cornerstone social relationship of the tourist system, host-guest, is being contested (Sherlock, 2001)

• ‘Hosts’ are frequently ‘guests’ themselves

– Migrant workers often assume the role of host through tourist employment in other countries (e.g. Janta et al., 2011)

A challenge ahead

• The practical implications of these social changes, as framed by the mobilities paradigm, for tourism marketing and management have hardly been worked out

• An exception in sustainable destination governance (Dredge & Jamal, 2013) -

– Spatial re-structuring of destinations

– Pluralisation of destination management

– Re-envisioning of community

Eurocentrism in tourism studies

• 20th century sociology of tourism focused on relationship between tourism and modernity (Wang, 2000)

• Salient issue was authenticity as a cultural motive in tourist experience

• Staged authenticity (MacCannell, 1973)

– Moderns seek authenticity outside modernity and locals stage it for them

– But is authenticity a universal or culturally determined motive for tourism? THE TOURIST?

Thames Town near Shanghai

Modelled after an English village: do we still need the ‘real thing’?

THE TOURIST?

• Several authors suggested authenticity is not an important motive for Chinese tourists (e.g. Arlt, 2006; Nyíri, 2006)

– Tourism from expanding middle classes of emergent economies driven by motives other than authenticity (e.g. Mkono 2013 on Africa and aesthetics)

• Motivations, perceptions and practices are not universal; they are culture bound

• Eurocentrism has resonated through the sociological study of tourism in its early decades

Modernist sociology of tourism

• Taken-for-granted assumptions of a modernist sociology of tourism – Tourism is a modern Western phenomenon, born in the

West and spread to the rest of the world

– Dominant geographical pattern of international tourism is North-to-South or West-to-East (to pleasure periphery)

– Westerners are the international tourists and the people of the destinations are hosts or tourees

– Tourists travel in quest of difference, authenticity and/or the exotic ‘Other’

• But this is clearly Eurocentric

Eurocentrism in tourism studies

• Tourism academy only recognised its Eurocentrism in the last decade

– Prompted by growth in tourism demand from emergent world regions, especially expanding Chinese middle class

• Eurocentrism recognised in the power relations of the academy itself, especially among its gatekeepers! (Ren et al., 2010)

– Xiao & Smith (2006) called for Chinese research communities to be critical of tourism research knowledge generated in the European and Anglosphere world regions

• Raises the question of how applicable sociological theory in tourism is to tourism from emergent world regions such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America?

Moving forward

• Eurocentrism in tourism studies is not just in the sociological study of tourism

– Eurocentrism has bled through to studies of tourist behaviour and tourism development

– The universal significance of much tourism knowledge remains untested outside ‘Western’ contexts

• As tourism research shifts towards the rise of tourism from emergent world regions, the assumptions that underpin tourism marketing, management, planning and development will have to be revisited and checked for a Eurocentric bias

References Arlt, G.W. (2006). China’s outbound tourism. Oxford: Routledge.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Benckenendorff, P. & Zehrer, A. (2013). A network analysis of tourism research. Annals of Tourism Research, 43, 121-149.

Cohen, E. & Cohen, S.A. (2012) Current sociological theories and issues in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 39(4), 2177-2202.

Dredge, D. & Jamal, T. (2013). Mobilities on the Gold Coast, Australia: Implications for destination governance and sustainable tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 21(4), 557-579.

Franklin, A. & Crang, M. (2001). The trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist Studies, 1(1), 5-22.

Gale, T. (2009). Urban beaches, virtual worlds and ‘‘the end of tourism’’. Mobilities, 4(1), 119–138

Ghimire, K.B. (2001) The native tourist: Tourism development within developing countries. London: Earthscan.

Hall, C.M. (2005). Reconsidering the geography of tourism and contemporary mobility. Geographical Research, 43(2), 125-139.

Janta, H., Brown, L., Lugosi, P., & Ladkin, A. (2011). Migrant relationships and tourism employment. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), 1322–1343.

MacCannell, D. (1973). Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings. American Journal of Sociology, 79(3), 589-603.

Mkono, M. (2013). African and Western tourists: Object authenticity quest? Annals of Tourism Research, 41, 195-214.

Nyíri, P. (2006). Scenic spots; Chinese tourism, the state and cultural authority. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Ren, C., Pritchard, A. & Morgan, N. (2010). Constructing tourism research: A critical inquiry. Annals of Tourism Research, 37(4), 885-904.

Sherlock, K. (2001). Revisiting the concept of hosts and guests. Tourist Studies, 1(3), 271–295.

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge.

Wang, N. (2000). Tourism and modernity: A sociological analysis. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Williams, A. (2013). Mobilities and sustainable tourism: Path-creating or path-dependent relationships? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 21(4), 511-531.

Xiao, H. & Smith, S.L.J. (2006). Towards a paradigm shift of knowledge: Implications for tourism research in China. China Tourism Research, 2(4), 402-422.

Contemporary currents in tourism sociology

Dr Scott Allen Cohen

School of Hospitality and Tourism Management

Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

University of Surrey, United Kingdom

s.cohen@surrey.ac.uk