Book Reviews / Tourism Management 32 (2011) 700–707 701

tourism in Scandinavia with its origins in empirical science butexpanding to include ethnology and anthropology. It shows howsome of the early ideas proceeded many of those by Anglophonescholars but the ‘field of tourism is less clearly demarcated thanmany larger thematic field’ (2009: p. 242).

Chapter 8, ‘The Sociology of Tourism in Spain: ATale of ThreeWiseMen’ by Julio Aramberri, uses the work of three pioneers of Spanishtourism theory to tie its discussion together and emphasizing howoriginally the exclusion of outside ideas created a barrier to the devel-opment of thisfield and has not allowed these three pioneerswork tobe recognized. It suggests that Spain’s focus on ‘hard economic anal-ysis’ (p. 273) over other ideas and approaches including by its journalRevista de Estudios Turisticos (RET) also limited the development ofa sociology of tourism. ChapterNine, ‘Tourism Studies in Belgium andthe Netherlands by Jaap Lengkeek, also shows how tourism wasonce a part of leisure studies and evolved in the last two decades tobecome a substantive scientific field in its own right suggestinga bright future. Chapter Ten, ‘The Sociology and Anthropology ofTourism in Greece,’ by Paris Tsartas and Vasilki Galani-Moutafisuggests the lack of presence in universities of sociology and anthro-pology until the 1970s saw a lack of development of the study oftourism and even then as a ‘peripheral subject’ (2009: p. 300) andso works examining the phenomenon of tourism are low in numberand lack the ‘broader, interdisciplinary theoretical debates andparadigms from the Anglophone world’ (2009: p. 321).

Chapter Eleven, ‘Origins and developments: The Overall Picture’by the editors, is a short summary of the book although somewhatof a repeat of the overview by country in the introductory chapter.However, I did enjoy the section on trends in origins and develop-ments discussion and categorisation of the theories and discussionof how it all might be viewed.

Any aspiring student of the field of tourism should read thisbook it is a invaluable aid in contextualising this field both withinsociology and as a field of study. Without doubt it is an academicwork of some scholarship and is a useful and welcome addition tothe area of tourism for students and practitioners alike who shouldfind it to be stimulating and insightful when doingwork in this area.

Stephen WearingSchool of Leisure Sport and Tourism, Faculty of Business,

University of Technology, Sydney, AustraliaE-mail address: stephen.wearing@uts.edu.au.

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2010.05.017

Tourismand responsibility: Perspectives fromLatinAmerica andthe Caribbean, M. Mowforth, C. Charlton, and I. Munt. (1st ed.).Routledge, London and New York (2008). Cost: (pbk £24.99)

Mowforth and Munt’s previous work on Tourism and Sustain-ability (Routledge, 1998) has gone to second and third editionsin 2003 and 2009 and has become a standard text on undergrad-uate andMasters courses because of its engagement with the issuesof power and the politics of underdevelopment. Their workhas addressed the issue of sustainability in Third World countriesand challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, pointing to unevenand unequal development, the significance of power relationshipsand the negative consequences of globalisation. The text is stillin print demonstrating it continuing utility in addressing, in anaccessible way, the critical questions about the contribution whichtourism can make to development.

In Tourism and Responsibility: Perspectives from Latin America andthe Caribbean, Mowforth andMunt are joined by Clive Charlton, likeMowforth a geographer at Plymouth. Charlton brings a focus onLatin America to the book. This book applies Mowforth and Munt’scritical approach to the issue of tourism and development in SouthAmerica and the Caribbean and extends the scope of the casestudies available in the tourism literature. It should be added toreading lists for this reason alone, as there is too little considerationof Latin America in the study of tourism in the English language.The focus on Latin America and the Caribbean may also assistin ensuring that tourism is addressed in development and areastudies courses focussed on the region.

This is an issues based book focussed on Latin America and theCaribbean. The introduction includes a brief discussion of responsi-bility, sustainability and ethics and makes the obvious but oftenneglected point that these are relative concepts - it is relative tothe values of those who are engaged in tourism as consumers orproviders, and the values and perspectives of those involved whichdiffer according to their role and their culture. The authors limitthemselves to highlighting the different perspectives of touristsand holidaymakers, hoteliers, local communities, tour operatorsand indigenous groups, rather than judging them. As they pointout there is a broad spectrum of engagement, in part a consequenceof structures of power and privilege, with these issues and conceptslike ethical, sustainable and responsibility occupying a continuum.

The authors have pulled together various themes relating totourism and development in the region and the book is intendedfor those who have visited, intend to visit, or have an interestin the region, raising issues about sustainability and responsibility.The book is intended to stimulate thought amongst travellers,academics froma range of disciplines, governments, NGOs and inter-governmental agencies. They point out that this is an issues basedbook; it is neither an academic text nor a text book. Its value is inraising issues too often not addressed in the text books and raisingsome of the fundamental questions about the political economy ofthe industry and the activities of tourists.

For example, in Chapter Two, the authors discuss global politics,power and play, looking at the political history of tourism develop-ment in the region, the idea of development and the link withthe Millennium Development Goals, tourism, free trade and theimplications of the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Theyconclude by looking at some mitigating measures: self-regulation,fair trade, codes of conduct and Corporate Social Responsibility.In the next chapter on local politics, poverty and tourism: themicrolevel of responsibility, the focus is on poverty reduction throughtourism, but there is little on local governance or responsibility.The fourth chapter addresses environment citing the UNWTO’s2001 definition of sustainable tourism rather than the more usefuland robust 2004 conceptual definitionwhich refers explicitly to theneed for political leadership. They address mass tourism usingMexico as an example of the difficulty of containing resort develop-ment and domestic tourismwith examples from Colombia, Mexicoand Argentina. The chapter on tourism and indigenous peopleaddresses diversification, assimilation, zooification and transcultu-ration; as well as pointing out that the alternative, new, touristsshoot the locals too, like the mass tourists they use cameraswith zoom lenses to get their trophy photographs. In the chapteron urban tourism there is a useful discussion of the role of tourismand slums in cities and the scope for pro-poor city tourism, an areaneglected by academics and practitioners alike. Chapter sevenconsiders sexual exploitation through tourism in Latin America,pointing to the way in which it reflects power relationships andinclude a section on women sex tourists.

Mowforth andMunt’swork, here extended to LatinAmericawithCharlton, is important because it reminds us of the relationships of

Book Reviews / Tourism Management 32 (2011) 700–707702

power which lie behind all tourism exchanges and that it isindividual tourists, planners, and individuals in banks, tourismbusi-nesses and government who make the decisions and exercise thepower which give us tourism as it is. However, their treatment ofthe concept of responsible tourism is disappointing. They say, inthe foreword, that theychose touse the concept “owing to its genericnature and the fact that it does not restrict [their] coverage of themany not-so-new forms of tourism”. The book achieves the authors’objective of discussing the issues around new forms of tourism,they use responsible to mean the converse of irresponsibility. Theyconclude that the new forms of tourism are used to “mitigate theproblems caused by the prevailing model of development and areseen by some as a means of obviating the need for the regulationof the industry.”(p. 47) Responsible tourism is usedmerely as a cate-gory to describe a collection of alternative forms of tourism, ratherthan as a coherent approach to making tourism more sustainable,an approach in which those with power in mainstream tourismtake responsibility for ensuring that the positive impacts of tourismare maximised and the negative ones minimised.

Harold GoodwinInternational Centre for Responsible Tourism,

Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds LS1 3HE, UKE-mail address: harold@haroldgoodwin.info.

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2010.05.018

Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities,Constructed, Imagined and experienced, R. Govers, F. Go.Palgrave MacMillan (2009). ISBN: 978-0-230-23073-6

The paradox at the heart of place branding is that it has beenquite recently, widely and often with a messianic verve, embracedby place management authorities world-wide as a panacea fora bewildering diversity of economic and social ailments yet it lacksat present any intellectual grounding or even positioning withinplace planning and policy making. Practice is all around us in abun-dance but theory is scarce. We have countless answers, drawn fromcase studies, to the technical question of how to do it but next to noresponse to the more profound and ultimately essential questionsof why, when and where. For this reason alone this book is tobe welcomed, being, as far as I am aware, the first serious and sus-tained attempt to root the burgeoning practice in the wider contextof ideas. That it is written by two justly well-regarded academicswith long experience in the study of tourism destination manage-ment bodes well for satisfying this pressing need.

The introduction is a very wide and far-ranging discussion ofimage and reality as envisaged in modernity. In contradiction tothe idea of recentness, the authors trace a history of place brandingback not only to its parent discipline of product marketing but,unexpectedly, further back to a development of philosophical ideasas distant as Descartes. Indeed the discussion is so far ranging thatsome readers may feel impatience that the fundamental definitionsof place branding are delayed until well into the book and then arerather narrowly conceived [p.19]. It is unfortunate that the distinc-tion between marketing and branding is not clearly made, as theyare often used by practitioners as near synonyms when they arenot. Similarly the distinction between the marketing of the productand that of the producer through corporate marketing is notexplicitly discussed when defining the terms [p.13] but is buriedin a much later section on identity and culture [p.50].

The book is structured by a ‘three gap place branding model’[p.21]. The authors identify discrepancies between product and

identity, product and experience and experience and image. Thisclear and simple structure, adequate enough to serve as a clothesline on which to hang the discussion, is then illustrated by oneof those complex, overloaded and for me quite incomprehensiblediagrams [p.41], into which everything is thrown in somewhereand the attempt to be all-encompassing results in unintelligibility.

A distinctive feature of the book is its use of case material.Instead of drawing upon amyriad of different examples the authorshave chosen to focus upon a small group of running cases that reas-suringly reappear throughout the book in illustration of differentpoints. The advantages of this technique are that the backgroundinformation needed by the reader to understand the significanceof the case is built up incrementally, there is a depth of contextualinformation and repetition of background facts is avoided. All thethree major cases are authoritatively described on the basis of theauthors’ long experience.

Dubai is the longest and most often appearing such ‘signaturecase’, which is a refreshingly original if somewhat unexpected devi-ation from the more well-known North American or Europeanexamples. However, this inevitably necessitates a long introductionto society, economy and political structures in the Gulf States. Anyuse of case studies is open to the accusations of providing too littleinformation for the case to be understood or too much informationnot specifically relevant to the point being made. Here the authorserr on the side of the latter and much of the long discussion ofDubai is about general economic and social development, in whichbranding no doubt played a role but the extent of this role is notcarefully delineated which is what the reader requires. The readerlearns that the ‘success of Dubai as a global brand to date has notbeen built on fancy brand construction strategies’ [p.88], which issomewhat surprising to an outsider aware of the country onlythrough its spectacular buildings and urban designs.

The other signature cases are novel if less well embedded in thegeneral argument. The Dutch province of Zeeland is used to illus-trate associations between place identity (specifically expressedthrough place nomenclature) and gastronomy, which it is arguedis important for identification by both tourists and residents.The simple and interesting relationship however, is somewhatburied under methodological detail. Indeed there is a tendency tooverburden all the case studies with too much detail when mostreaders are really only interested in a summary of the findings.The case of Flanders appears only once and is a lengthy and faintlyincongruous, history of the Flemish nationalist movement and anethno-political description of contemporary Belgium. Its relevanceto the place branding issues is not made explicit.

That the book is obsessed with place branding for tourism isunlikely to be a problem perhaps for readers of this journal. The keystructuring model [p.41] is based on a hosts/guests dichotomy andthe authors constantly fall back upon their experience of tourismdestination management at the cost of ignoring the non-tourismmarkets. It is, however, a truism to state that residents are themost important target group in place marketing and that successfulexternal branding should be preceded by internal branding amongresidents and current users. It is not enough to conclude that ‘Thequality of the place experience is derived from the interfacebetween host and guest’ [p135].

The conclusions return to the three gap model [p.245] in anassessment of the extent to which the gaps have been bridgedand a discussion of the major remaining issues (all of which arerelated directly to tourism but would be equally applicable to othermarkets). The three gaps remain evident, namely: unique identitiesare not transformed into products reflecting this uniqueness;product performance is often disappointing due to off brand imple-mentation; and cultural differences still determine that differentgroups perceive brands differently.