604 PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW

The Tourist Gaze

By John Urry. Sage Publications (28 Banner Street, London EClY 8QE)
ISBN o-8039-8182-1, 1990, 176 pp. (photos, bibliography, index) $45.00
(cloth).

Neil Leiper
Massey University, New Zealand

Readers might infer a double meaning from this book’s title. It could refer
to the gaze of tourists and also to the tourist, Gaze. This would be Henry
Gaze, a tourist who went into business and helped pioneer the modern form
of tour operations, like his contemporary, Thomas Cook (two names symbol-
izing features of the tourism industry: sightseeing and food?). Unlike Cook,
Gaze has been relatively neglected in the literature, although coordinated
advertising by the two superficially competitive firms represents an early ex-
ample of promotional activity by a tourism industry (Pudney 1953). Glancing
through the The Tourist Gaze, one finds nothing about Henry. The title is
about the gaze of tourists, but it also alludes to the gaze of clinicians, as
discussed by Foucault (1975).
The Tourist Gaze, by John Urry from the Sociology Department in the
University of Lancaster (UK), contains lively discussions on a number of
topics. It should be interesting to anyone with a scholarly involvement in
tourism and is likely to become a standard educational reference, because
Urry has achieved a useful blend. In addition to some social theory, his book
offers perspectives on tourism drawing on a range of social science disciplines,
many examples, and brief bits of statistical data (and, a welcome feature in a
book on postmodernism, the English is readable).
Urry remarks that to be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the “modern”
experience, an idea discussed in more detail by MacCannell(l976). Modern-
ism and postmodernism, by definition, imply rapidly perishable perspectives.
Therefore, with 15 years elapsed since the appearance of MacCannell’s now
classic study, Urry’s book offers a fresh discussion on the ever-evolving links
between tourism and modernism/postmodernism. Urry has identified several
aspects of culture and society and has cleverly shown how they are linked with
trends in tourism. The topics are quite diverse, including holiday camps,
heritage, packaged tour design, sex tourism, and festivals, each accompanied
by statistical snippets. Most of the focus is tourism in England.
The book is “about how, in different societies and especially within different
social groups in diverse historical periods, the tourist gaze has changed and
developed” (p. 1). A brief overview is presented on theoretical approaches to
the study of tourism. This is restricted to approaches for studying social and
cultural phenomena associated with tourism: Nothing of the whole tourism
system approach (Getz 1986) is included. The book’s title, noted earlier,
implies an analogy between the gaze of tourists and Foucault’s (1975) clinical
gaze. Foucault’s innovative thinking on a range of topics has led to his ideas
and methods being applied to many topics in the social sciences. Urry claims
the tourist gaze is socially organized and systematized. He remarks there “is
no single tourist gaze. . It varies by society, by social group, and by histor-
ical period” (p. 1).
The scope of Chapter 2, “Mass Tourism and the Rise and Fall of the
Seaside Resort,” is limited to UK resorts, and no more than passing reference
is given to the rise of seaside resorts elsewhere, a rise that helps explain the
fall of their British counterparts. Chapter 3, “The Changing Economics of the
Tourist Industry,” begins by remarking that “the relationship between the
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tourist gaze and those industries which have been developed to meet that gaze
is extremely problematic.” A strength of the chapter is its descriptive exam-
ples. Urry emphasizes a good point often overlooked: “The economics of
tourism cannot be understood separately from the analysis of cultural and
policy developments” (p. 41).
Chapter 4, “Working Under the Tourist Gaze, ” discusses the distinctiveness
of businesses providing services. It draws on a large number of references to
and examples of service workers and their management. Perhaps it could
have been improved by drawing on a wider literature on service management
(Hesketh 1986; Lovelock 1988).
Chapter 5 deals with “Cultural Changes and the Restructuring of Tourism.”
Here, Urry discusses postmodernism and tourism, using material from sev-
eral writers and from his own recent book, The End of Organised Capitalism
(Lash and Urry 1987). He shows how, in certain ways, tourism has become
“bound up with and partly indistinguishable from all sorts of other social and
cultural practices . . . [so that] people are much of the time ‘tourists’ whether
they like it or not [and thus] the tourist gaze is intrinsically part of contempo-
rary experience” (p. 82). Urry integrates this idea with material about emerg-
ing patterns of class structures in society, applying, in particular, certain ideas
from Bourdieu (1984). Chapter 6, “Gazing on History,” deals with the heri-
tage industry, showing how and why “heritage” is becoming more prominent
in tourist destinations in Britain. An excellent discussion is presented around
the controversies generated by The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of
Decline (Hewison 1987).
The final chapter discusses “Tourism, Culture and Social Inequality.”
Here, Urry advises against contemplating the feasibility of “the theory of
tourist behaviour” (p. 135). What is required instead, he says, is “a range of
concepts and arguments which capture both what is specific to tourism and
what is common to tourist and certain non-tourist social practices. The con-
cept of the tourist gaze attempts to do this . . . [by] categorising objects of the
gaze in terms of romantic/collective, historical/modern, authentic/inauthen-
tic” (p. 135). This chapter has a detailed treatment of visual images in modern
cites, mainly Paris. The discussion might have been improved if it had used
Schivelbusch’s (1980) material on 19th-century Paris and the links between
travel, technology, and urban imagery.
The Tourist Gaze provides a number of interesting perspectives that amount
to more than an introduction to the sociology of tourism. It covers many
topics and examples in its 176 pages, which means most get only superficial
treatment. The limited depth also means that certain points are potentially
misleading. Moreover, the book sometimes gives the impression of flitting
from source to source and from field to field, missing points that deeper and
longer research may have revealed. Certain points about New Zealand, for
instance, indicate superficial knowledge, to the detriment of the arguments.
Discussing facilities for accommodation, meals, drink, and entertainment, the
book notes that “outside the four major cites [of New Zealand] there are almost
no such facilities” (p. 46). In fact, according to official surveys conducted by
A. G. B. Research, more than 70% of total tourist nights in New Zealand in
the 1980s (60 million annually) were spent outside the regions where the four
major cites are located, and not all those nights were spent sleeping under the
stars and ruminating for entertainment on homemade sandwiches. A number
of other points of discussion would have been improved with better references.
For instance, the author considers tourism as a form of deviant activity and
indicated the need to use a similar analytical approach, but the discussion
reveals no familiarity with Cohen and Taylor’s (1978) study where the ap-
proach was discussed in detail.
The Foucaultian model (the gaze) might have been used more effectively
606 PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW

had its original style been followed. The Tourist Gate’s adaption of the model
could be seen as a weak analogy. First, it is likely to be confusing, to some
readers at least, because in every chapter, the phrase “the [sic] tourist gaze”
recurs, inevitably tending to convey a stereotyped notion of tourism, despite
an introductory point against that implication. Another point is that Fou-
cault’s Birth of the Clinic saw the clinical gaze as about power and scientific
knowledge, and Harvey (1987) has discussed a tourist gaze of the same sort.
This book cites Harvey’s article, but it does not take up the power issue in the
same way.
There is also a possibility of using the Foucaultian notion more dramati-
cally, to suggest something about the origins of mass tourism. Foucault’s
discussion hinges on an argument that in the 18th century, diagnosis and
treatment radically changed because of new ways of looking at symptoms, in
clinics-“gazing” to gain real knowledge, a departure from the abstract diag-
nostic methods of traditional physicians. The first page of The Tourist Gaze,
where this Foucaultian notion is introduced, led this reader to anticipate that
Urry would show how a similar radical change occurred in the sociocultural
environment to shift the focus or scale of tourism. The anticipation remained
unsatisfied by this book. Elsewhere, however, an explanation in the Foucaul-
tian style has been suggested. Traveling for pleasure, as a form of leisure, did
not become a social practice, followed by members of a social class, until the
middle of the 18th century. Before then, for all but exceptional individuals,
traveling was perceived as travail. Why and how did a sociocultural change
occur, altering perceptions such that the activity came to be seen as potentially
pleasurable? Why, in other words, did travail give way to the beginnings of
mass tourism? No satisfactory explanation can be found in the specialist litera-
ture, but a plausible argument has been offered by Colin Wilson (1975). He
described how, in the 174Os, the best-selling novel Pamela stimulated a cultural
change in the leisured classes of English society. The heroine, Pamela, “made
a discovery that living is not necessarily a matter of physical experiences, but
that the imagination is also capable of voyages . . of daydreams. Today,
this sounds banal; in the 1740s it was as startling as discovering that you
could fly by flapping your arms” (Wilson 1975:36). The consequence was that
the English leisured classes “learnt the art of long-distance travel” (1975:7);
they learned that traveling and visiting places was a potentially pleasurable
art. This can be seen as the beginning of tourism as a social (rather than
individualistic) phenomenon. It was a perceptual shift in cultural environ-
ments, which dramatically changed tourism. 0 0

Neil Leiper: Department of Management Systems, Massey University, Palmenston North, New
Zealand.

REFERENCES

Bourdieu, Pierre
1984 Distinction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cohen, Stanley, and Laurie Taylor
1978 Escape Attempts: Theory and Practice of Resistence to Everyday Life. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel -
1975 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York:
Vintage Books.
Getz, Donald
1986 Models of Tourism Planning. Tourism Management 7:21-32.
Harvey, D.
1987 Flexible Accumulation through Urbanisation: Reflections on “Postmodernism”
in the American City. Antipode 19:260-286.
Hesketh, James L.
1986 Managing in the Service Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.