Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry

Tim Coles
Centre for Tourism Studies, School of Business and Economics, University
of Exeter, UK

C. Michael Hall
Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, Uni-
versity of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

David Timothy Duval

Department of Tourism, School of Business, University of Otago, Dunedin,
New Zealand
In recent times there has been discussion about whether studies of tourism are
variously a disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary pursuit and how
these relate to the institutional landscapes and practices of higher education. For some
academics, these discourses are somewhat arid, but we would contend they are vital as
they serve to set the epistemological terms of references for tourism scholars and play
a not insignificant role in orchestrating knowledge production about tourism. This
paper revisits some of these concerns relating to disciplinarity, and it suggests that
disciplines as we understand them today are an artefact of previous academic divisions of
labour which still dominate current institutional regulatory regimes. The purpose of the
paper is to suggest that tourism studies would benefit greatly from a post-disciplinary
outlook, i.e. a direction ‘beyond disciplines’ which is more problem-focused, based
on more flexible modes of knowledge production, plurality, synthesis and synergy.
Three possible approaches to the post-disciplinary study of tourism are identified by
drawing on lessons from studies of political economy. While post-disciplinary studies
of tourism have considerable potential to further our understanding of several major
contemporary research themes, their introduction may be frustrated by the tourism
academy and frameworks of academic governance.

doi: 10.2167/cit327.0

Keywords: post-disciplinary, tourism studies, institutionalisation, academic

disciplines, social sciences

Introduction: Tourism, Complexity and Institutionalisation

Despite nearly a century of serious academic attention (Hall, 2005a), the study
of tourism sits curiously within the contrived academic division of labour. On
the one hand, tourism is identified as one of the major features of everyday
life in the era of globalisation, central to contemporary patterns of produc-
tion and consumption (Shaw & Williams, 2004), yet on the other it struggles
to obtain greater institutional legitimacy in higher education notwithstanding
the growth in scholarly and pedagogic interest (Hall, 2005a). Tourism’s cause is

1466-4208/06/04 0293-27 $20.00/0 © 2006 T. Coles et al.

Current Issues in Tourism Vol. 9, No. 4&5, 2006

293
294 Current Issues in Tourism

not aided by a culture of research which is alleged variously to favour quantity

over quality (Page, 2005); to be spread across, and practically hidden in, the
social sciences (Page, 2003); a perceived reluctance by its scholars to develop
theory (Franklin & Crang, 2001; McKercher, 1999); tactical approaches to publi-
cation within and outside ‘tourism’ (McKercher, 2005; Page, 2005; Xiao & Smith,
2006); a lack of agreement over the quality of publication channels (Jogratnam
et al., 2005; Pechlaner et al., 2004; Ryan, 2005); and systematic disadvantage in
research assessments that favour mainstream ‘subject’ contributions over sector
specific applications (Geary et al., 2004; Hall, 2005b).
While these issues point to some of the corresponding difficulties of locating
the subject in a sea of academic territoriality and competing constituencies, the
problematic institutionalisation of tourism, not least through contemporary
performance management regimes, has significant implications for the viability
and vitality of its future study (Hall et al., 2004; Page, 2003; Tribe, 2003). In the
United Kingdom, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC – govern-
ment agency supporting research in the social sciences) conducted a recognition
exercise of advanced research training provision leading to the award of a
doctorate in 2005. Initially at least, the guidance failed to identify tourism as
a discipline in its own right or a priority subject specialism within other disci-
plines worthy of ESRC studentships in accredited programmes (ESRC, 2005).
Similarly, the managers of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have
struggled with where and how to assess intellectual endeavours in tourism in
light of their existing structure of subject panels (Tribe, 2004a). Similar issues
have been encountered in New Zealand under the Performance Based Research
Funding scheme (PBRF) and are just beginning to emerge in Australia under the
Research Quality Framework. In New Zealand, the Tertiary Education Com-
mission (TEC, 2003: 2), which is responsible for PBRF, under the heading of
‘research that extends beyond the boundaries of one panel’ noted,
Some research areas naturally traverse, or draw upon, components from
a number of academic disciplines. For example, tourism may logically fit
into the ‘Management, Commerce, Business Administration, Marketing’
panel (e.g. tourism management), the ‘Physical Sciences panel – Other
Natural and Physical Sciences’ Panel (e.g. eco-tourism), or the ‘Social
Sciences’ panel (e.g. cultural tourism).
And then it promptly placed tourism within the business panel for purposes
of review, and combined tourism with marketing for purposes of describing
a ‘subject area’ without any reference to those people who would come under
its jurisdiction. Following the initial quality assessment, the Business and
Economics PBRF panel noted the strong performance of tourism in research
quality as an area that ‘received a disproportionately high share of the “A”s and
“B”s in the marketing and tourism subject area (where 6% of [Evidence Portfo-
lios] were assigned an “A” and 21% a “B”)’ (TEC, 2004: 14). Nevertheless, the
second quality review round (2006) still places tourism together with marketing
and as part of the business panel although change was considered. TEC con-
sidered making tourism a separate category; however, it decided that there
was not enough tourism staff in New Zealand (less than 50 were identified) to
undertake such a measure (White, 2005). Given that six of the eight universi-
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 295

ties and the majority of polytechnics have courses in tourism and hospitality
this situation is ironic, and it indicates that many tourism researchers and staff
in tourism programmes self-nominated themselves into categories other than
‘marketing and tourism’. In some cases this appears to have been to maximise
financial return to the institution; for instance, income for research quality in
science subjects is twice that of the social sciences.
In a wide-ranging historiographic critique of social science method, Law
(2004: 2) reminds us that the social world is a messy place where ‘simple clear
descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent’.
Precision and clarity may be desirable and comforting for some academics and
research managers, but realities are fluid, dynamic, vague, socially constructed
and multiply constituted. Rather than disadvantageous and inhibiting, the rec-
ognition of complexity is vital to the future organisation of social enquiry; single
disciplines in their current constitution are rarely capable alone of delivering
the contrasting and multiple perspectives that are so necessary to unravelling
social life (Law, 2004: 156) and dealing with ‘wicked’ and ‘messy’ problems so
characteristic of environmental and transboundary issues (Keast et al., 2004).
The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of so-called ‘post-disciplinary’
approaches to further our understanding of tourism. In comparison with inter-
disciplinarity, post-disciplinarity develops (even) more flexible and creative
approaches to investigating and defining objects through its insistence on over-
coming the intellectual inhibitions associated with disciplinary parochialism
(Rosamond, 2005; Smith, 1998: 311). In the view of Jessop and Sum (2001: 89), a
post-disciplinary approach rejects ‘the discursive and organisational construc-
tion (and worse, the fetishisation) of disciplinary boundaries’.
Elsewhere we have argued for new approaches to tourism studies that are more
flexible and fluid (Coles et al., 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Hall, 2005a, 2005c, 2005d), and
which are able to recognise the complexities, ambiguities and overlaps associated
with contemporary forms of (temporary/semi-permanent) mobility at different
scales. Our purpose here is to develop these arguments further and more widely,
and hence to explore the possible shape and function that future post-disciplinary
studies of tourism may take. While perhaps not entirely unlike Urry’s call for new
rules for sociology (2000; see also McLennan, 2003), we draw on recent contri-
butions surrounding the future of studies of political economy (Goodwin, 2004;
Hay & Marsh, 1999; Jessop, 2004; Jessop & Sum, 2001), which extol the virtues of
greater scholarly adaptability and reasonableness, to derive lessons from the dis-
ciplinary ‘angst’ with which other subjects/areas of enquiry have been grappling.
In the main, we argue that alternative circuits of knowledge that are free, or at
least relatively free, from rationalising assumptions of dominant methods and
paradigms may usefully augment the rich heritage of knowledges derived from
single, multi- or inter-disciplinary sources.
The paper unfolds in five main sections. The policing of tourism as a subject
through academic disciplines is explored in the next section as a prelude to
a critical discussion of inter-disciplinary enquiry in the social sciences. The
existence of tourism studies as a discipline is contested (Hall et al., 2004; Leiper,
2000; Tribe, 1997, 2000) but there is a general consensus that the development of
tourism knowledges should not occur through scholars working in disciplinary
isolation. Our intention is not to reignite the debate over disciplinary status
296 Current Issues in Tourism

but to contend that inter-disciplinary enquiry should not be read as given.

Rather, discussion in the social sciences would suggest that the construct of
disciplines and hence inter-disciplinary study is far from unproblematic and is
influenced from without as much as from within. Epistemological space clearly
exists in the social sciences for post-disciplinary approaches (Goodwin, 2004;
Law, 2004; Massey, 1999), the principles and potentials of which are introduced
in the fourth section prior to an examination of how they have catalysed new
approaches to political economy. In the final section we sketch out the potentials
of three approaches to tourism studies inspired by post-disciplinary thinking.

Tourism, the Subject and Disciplinarity: Some Historiographical

Considerations
From an historiographical synthesis of recent reviews, three trends are evident
surrounding the production of tourism knowledges. The first is the considerable
variation in the time taken by academics within different disciplines to embrace
tourism as a field of enquiry. Holden (2005: 1) contends that ‘perhaps with the
exception of economics, the application of the social sciences to the investiga-
tion of tourism is relatively weak compared to other areas of social enquiry’,
although this charge would almost certainly be refuted by those in geography
which has a protracted record of published tourism scholarship dating back to
the 1920s (Butler, 2004; Hall & Page, 2006; Kreisl, 2004). Semmens (2005: 2–3), a
historian, notes that ‘unlike economists, ecologists, anthropologists, sociologists,
semioticians and geographers, historians have only recently turned to tourism’
but a ‘lack of carefully researched, genuinely academic syntheses is keenly felt’
(cf. Baranowksi & Furlough, 2001; Koshar, 2002a, 2002b). Second, and somewhat
allied to the first, is that some scholars exhibit a selective awareness of, and an
apparent unwillingness to engage with, studies of tourism beyond their disci-
plinary purview. For instance, in a recent collection on architecture and tourism
(Lasansky, 2004: 2), relevant progress in tourism studies with respect to art and
architectural history was reduced to practically name-checking the contributions
of eight key authors and their contributions. According to Holden (2005: 2), this
sort of trend is somewhat suspicious and it appears to be emblematic of a more
cynical process in operation. Certain members of the various social science disci-
plines have vested (institutional, and thus financial) interests in their disciplines
being perceived as the authoritative discipline of investigation for tourism.
Such an insular view limits the production of tourism knowledge and,
indeed, the artificially constructed and associated knowledge ‘truthes’ that sub-
sequently emerge (Botterill, 2001; Tribe, 2006). As such, the third trend has been
the enduring and still largely unresolved debate about the most appropriate
manner/s in which to advance knowledges of tourism: for instance, through
a loose bricolage of self-contained disciplinary readings (Holden, 2005); via
trans-disciplinary collaborations (Echtner & Jamal, 1997; Tribe, 1997, 2000); or
through the existence of an academic discipline concerned with tourism (Hall et
al., 2004; Leiper, 2000). The appropriateness is of course one which is questioned
beyond a textual foundation for how tourism is presented. For Hall (2005a) the
development of the discipline of tourism studies is as much a pragmatic issue
of the role of structure and resourcing in advancing research and knowledge as
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 297

it is a philosophical question of theoretical and empirical advancement. Never-

theless, others take a more conceptual approach. For Graburn and Jafari’s (1991:
7–8) the situation is quite clear: ‘no single discipline alone can accommodate,
treat or understand tourism; it can be studied only if disciplinary boundaries
are crossed and if multidisciplinary perspectives are sought and formed’.
Plural modes of analysis offer the opportunity to overcome the contrived
practice of exclusively attributing tourism or particular tourism research
questions to single social sciences silos. As Holden (2005: 1) argues:
different social science disciplines can lay claim to being the correct inves-
tigative approach to understanding tourism . . . [but] a narrow and rigid
approach negates the richness that different disciplines can give to a wider
and more comprehensive understanding of tourism.
Echtner and Jamal (1997: 878) support the possibilities related to moving
away from false divisions but distinguish precisely between multi-disciplinary
and inter-disciplinary approaches and their respective potentialities (see also
Jamal & Kim, 2005). The former implies the investigation of a subject which
acknowledges and includes information derived in other disciplinary arenas
without the investigator stepping outside his or her disciplinary boundary. In
short, such an instrumental approach concedes that knowledge derived from
other disciplines has a certain value and a purpose, but there is little point in
the research worker making an excursion beyond the boundaries of the disci-
plinary comfort zone. Echtner and Jamal (1997) approach inter-disciplinarity by
means of Leiper’s (1981: 72) early definition, which argues that it involves:
working between the disciplines, blending various philosophies and tech-
niques so that the particular disciplines do not stand apart but are brought
together intentionally and explicitly to seek a synthesis. (in Echtner &
Jamal, 1997: 878–9, emphasis original)
Proponents of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives as
practices for knowledge production advocate that they offer notable potentials
in principle, but critics argue that the outcomes rarely match the prospects.
For instance, Franklin and Crang (2001: 5) used the inaugural editorial of the
journal Tourist Studies as a platform to allege that the research community has
attempted to keep pace with the growth of tourism but this has been at the cost
of developing theory. Somewhat condescendingly they claimed that:
tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored
work so the analysis tends to internaliz industry led priorities and perspec-
tives . . . This effort has been made by people whose disciplinary origins
do not include the tools necessary to analyse and theorize the complex
cultural and social processes that unfolded.
All of which begs the question of whether theory has to be the ultimate goal
of all knowledge producers? This is an entirely different debate, notwithstand-
ing. If we assume that it is indeed the case, they point to the troubling situation
whereby there has been – and continues to be – a failure to adequately theorise,
situate and model recent developments in tourism (Franklin & Crang, 2001;
cf. Hall, 2005a). Instead, tourism theory building has been relegated in favour
298 Current Issues in Tourism

of a propensity to chart, document and audit. Here, though, the charge sheet
does not stop; for them, there are further indictments in what they call the fet-
ishisation of the economic, the presence of a relatively small core of tourism
‘theorists’, the presence in ‘schools of tourism’ of few with the specialist skills of
social and cultural theory, and moreover fewer still willing to equip themselves
in these areas (see also Coles & Church, 2006; Hollinshead, 2004).
In contrast to the enthusiastic supporters of multi- and inter-disciplinary
perspectives, there are others who have identified ‘tourism studies’ as an
academic discipline in its own right. Audiences of potential students, sponsors
and clients, funding councils, colleagues and higher education managers have
been presented with the view that ‘tourism studies’ or ‘tourism management’
is an institutionally coherent and textually defined area of knowledge produc-
tion (Hall et al., 2004; Hall & Page, 2006; Leiper, 1981, 2000; Tribe, 2003, 2004).
For Leiper (2000: 5), this is necessary because ‘tourism-related phenomena are
too complicated, with too many implications, for knowledge to be adequately
developed by specialists favouring one discipline’. This position is not incon-
sistent with earlier arguments that were advanced with respect to fields of study
in the ‘environment’, the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ (Bastian, 2001; Beggs, 1999), or
what has come to be known as the discipline of ‘geography’ (Skole, 2004). There
are, though, two more structured approaches to establishing the credentials of a
field of enquiry as an academic discipline. Institutional features and managerial
solutions offer one approach (Hall, 2005a; Hall et al., 2004). Rooted in Toulmin’s
(2001) view that disciplines are contrived intellectual and institutional divisions
of academic labour, Hall et al. (2004) argue that Johnston’s (1991) three criteria
for the assessment of geography as a discipline in Anglo-American Universities
would legitimate the existence of tourism studies. They are: a well established
presence in universities and colleges, including professorial positions; formal
institutional structures of academic associations and university departments;
and avenues for academic publications (books and journals) (also see Hall &
Page, 2006). Tourism and ‘the tourist’ form the central theme behind which
relevant bodies of knowledge are produced and the discipline is defined almost
by consensus based on its internal characteristics. Self-disciplining serves to con-
solidate scholarly status and practices (Tribe, 2003) and in some cases voluntary
codes of practice to which supporters are prepared to subscribe, function to add
further shape to and regulate the discipline. For instance, the ATLAS Body of
Tourism Knowledge (Hall, 2005a) or the World Tourism Organisation’s TedQual
programme (UNWTO, 2006) are schemes which effectively act as blueprints for
the content and concerns of tourism studies programmes.
A similar case could be made by applying to tourism the principles from
Baron’s (2005) analysis of the emergence of sociolinguistics arising from both
linguistics and sociology. She argues that disciplines are formed under two cir-
cumstances: first, where there is a substantial argument to be made that the
subject matter would benefit from new examinations or, second, where there is
a fiscal argument that would benefit the organisation housing the new ‘disci-
pline’ in terms of a positive return on investment (usually through enrolments
and external research funding). A compelling case can be argued that there
is an identifiable discipline of tourism studies that has emerged for the most
part from both. The emphasis on hospitality and/or tourism management
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 299

in higher education worldwide is driven by commercial demand for skilled

labour as a result of increases in both international and domestic temporary
mobility. For example, in Australia and New Zealand the growth of tourism
programmes in the late 1980s and early 1990s was clearly associated with a
rapid increase in international tourism, particularly from Asian and European
markets with which local tourism firms had not previously engaged to a great
degree. Government supported the development of tourism as a field of study
via the provision of student places at state-funded tertiary institutions with the
support of the tourism sector (e.g. Hall, 1995; Weiler & Hall, 1991). However, it
is important not to over-emphasise commercialisation as a driver. By combining
the multiple dimensions of production and consumption into a single subject
area new research priorities have emerged over the past two decades which
are only satisfactorily approached by a fuller understanding of tourism and the
tourist (Hall, 2005a; Hall & Page, 2006).
Tribe (1997, 2000) argues that disciplines should not be defined on the basis
of such pragmatic reductions. Rather, disciplinary status should be assessed
through the dual lenses of the philosophy and sociology of scholarly enquiry. If
this is the case, ‘tourism studies’ would not pass muster (Echtner & Jamal, 1997;
Tribe, 1997, 2000) because,
to legitimate tourism studies by packaging it up as a discipline not only fails
on logical grounds (i.e. tourism studies does not pass the test), but [it –the
test] is also an empty and fruitless one (i.e. disciplines are not the sine qua
non of knowledge production). (Tribe, 1997: 646)
While this assessment does not preclude future reconsideration (Hall, 2005a),
at the present time Tribe’s (2004b: 49) analysis suggests that tourism is better
understood as a field of study. Tourism studies does not conform to the desiderata
necessary of a discipline (Tribe, 1997, 2004b: 47–8) and there is not a single entity
that can be called ‘tourism studies’. Instead, he argues that relevant and meaning-
ful knowledges about tourism are produced through two tourism-related fields
of study: one which in a later contribution he terms [Tourism] ‘business inter-dis-
ciplinarity’, and the other, ‘non-business-related tourism’ which is more difficult
to label because of its diverse concerns and origins (Tribe, 2004b: 50). Adopting
the framework of Gibbons et al. (1994), Tribe (2004a: 51) identifies two modes
of knowledge production in the fields of tourism: briefly put, Mode 1 includes
multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches where ‘knowledge is generated within
a disciplinary, primarily cognitive context’ (Gibbons et al., 1994: 1); and Mode 2,
which he describes as ‘extra-disciplinary’ (cf. Tribe, 2004b: 51) where knowledge
emerges from the ‘context of application with its own distinct theoretical struc-
tures, research methods and modes of practice which may not be locatable on the
prevailing disciplinary map’ (Gibbons et al., 1994: 168).
Mode 1 appears to be the dominant type in contemporary higher education,
‘the traditional centre for knowledge production’ (Tribe, 2004b: 51). Through
an apparent commitment to inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives, Mode 1
approaches almost take as read the probity of disciplines. In agreeing to make
transgressions into other disciplinary terrains we assume that these other dis-
ciplines are appropriate, meaningful and capable of delivering coherent bodies
of knowledge (as is our own disciplinary ‘home’). However, as we shall argue
300 Current Issues in Tourism

below, cross-disciplinary inquiry is far from straightforward to conduct, not

least because disciplines, as foundation stones, are contentious constructs. Thus,
because inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches can be subject to notable limi-
tations, this prompts questions of the possibilities for, and potential manner
of, knowledge production ‘beyond disciplines’; that is, alongside, not replacing
other modes of inquiry. After all, the pursuit of disciplinarity should be not
considered as a panacea as Tribe (1997) notes. Although Gibbons et al. (1994: vii)
originally anticipated the production of Mode 2 knowledge outside university
structures, criticisms of the assumptions of Mode 1 raise the prospect that the
basic tenets of Mode 2 may have increasing relevance to tourism studies within
higher education in a manner that, as yet, has not been identified.

Inter-disciplinary Studies: On Legacies, Limits and Dangers

Although inter-disciplinary inquiry is both valuable and relatively common-
place in the social sciences, rationalising assumptions and notable limitations
are conspicuously present in all such dialogues (Law, 2004), also in studies of
tourism (Jamal & Kim, 2005). In fact, the nature of disciplinary organisation
functions as a major hindrance to truly inter-disciplinary collaboration. Histori-
cally sensitive readings, which Crozier (2001) argues are more appropriate for
analysis, would suggest that several disciplines in the form we largely know and
understand them today are manifestations of 19th- and 20th-century rationali-
sations of intellectual enquiry (Jessop & Sum, 2001; Massey, 1999; Pielke, 2004;
Sayer, 1999; Toulmin, 2001). Where once it may have made sense to package
theory, concept and method under particular disciplinary monikers, the jus-
tification may no longer exist. Simply put, disciplines have failed to keep up
with changes in society (Bainbridge, 2003; Carp, 2001; Klein, 1996). For instance,
Jessop and Sum (2001) chart the changing organisation of political economy
thought from its pre-disciplinary period to the present day. Their rejection of
inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches lies in their inability to advance under-
standing of the complex interconnections within and across the natural and
social worlds. Several retrospectives have recently questioned the stability and
sustainability of social science enquiry. Bainbridge (2003) complains that many
disciplinary labels are little more than convenient devices to aid in the bureauc-
ratisation of the social sciences. As discussed above, this resonates clearly with
the criticisms of disciplinary categorisations within various national research
assessment exercises. Pielke (2004) proposes that certain intellectual ‘traditions’
in the social sciences are associated with seminal thinkers and the growth of
‘the subject’ is directly related to them and the influence of those they trained.
He attributes the emergence of ‘Policy Sciences’ to Harold Laswell and Myres
McDougal in the 1950s but perceives that generational turnover will challenge
the durability of the field as the last of their students leaves academia (cf. Pelletier,
2004). For Harman (2003), disciplinary survival is not necessarily a function of
the strength of the academic community nor the relevance to society, but rather
a return on investment is vital to the long-term health of a discipline.
Beyond the bureaucratisation of disciplines in higher education, inter-disciplinary
studies are destabilised by the inherent imperialism and parochialism associ-
ated with much disciplinary activity. Markham (2005) suggests that, while some
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 301

administrative conveniences associated with disciplinary construction can be

tolerated, such an approach runs the not insignificant risk of normative devel-
opments where research practices ‘in the norm’ are privileged at the expense of
new (more radical) means of knowledge production (and consumption). Instead,
some of the most innovative and creative spaces of knowledge generation are
to be found at disciplinary intersections (Klein, 1996), a notion that Dogan and
Pahre (1990) have described as ‘creative marginality’. All too often, though, as
Massey (1999) points out, disciplinary policing serves to frustrate knowledge
production in these liminal scholarly spaces (see also Rosamond, 2005). She
contends that, by definition, disciplines have to be policed and they function
not only to include but also, more importantly, to exclude particular subjects,
modes of investigation and critical research questions. For Massey (1999: 7),
scholars are willing to concede that there are areas beyond the purview of their
discipline. Rather than recognise that they may have an alternative, interrelated
angle to a subject, they may act to defend their ‘intellectual turf’, with the result
that opposing views from different disciplines may not be reconciled (Keyfitz,
1995). Turner (2002) offers a conspicuous illustration of this. He notes how
possessive tendencies characterise the dialogue between economists and geog-
raphers over ‘economic geography’ (Martin & Sunley, 1996). At face value there
should be potential for dialogue across the disciplinary divide to advance a
common understanding of the spatialities of economies (Lee, 2002). The reality
is somewhat different (Martin, 1999). Both sets of protagonists have their own
interpretations of the term as well as important intra-disciplinary differences to
contend with; they are convinced of the greater relevance of their approaches
over the others’; and they are intolerant of the perceived weaknesses in the
opposing side’s positions (Turner, 2002). In the case of geographers, the stakes
are high. The emergence of new, distinctive ways of looking at economies since
the ‘cultural turn’ is perceived as emblematic of the way in which geographical
enquiry should develop (Goodwin, 2004; Lee, 2002; Wrigley & Lowe, 1996) and
therefore define the appropriateness, or not, of publication subject matter, theo-
retical approach, research grants, teaching matter and hiring of staff.
The tendency for scholars to restrict themselves to the boundaries of their
own disciplines is also reflective of a common ignorance of what lies beyond the
disciplinary divide. Sayer (1999) notes that problems exist when members of a
discipline attempt to appropriate subject terrains beyond ‘their own’ (Gregson,
2003), and where they attempt to address questions beyond their usual disci-
plinary parameters. If scholars are committed to inter-disciplinary approaches,
they should be conversant with the traditions and tensions in the other disci-
plines where they propose to co-transact; they should be aware of, and have the
skills to, overcome fragmentation and difference; and they should be willing to
reconcile differences in epistemology and ontology as ‘it is the vices of each style
of thought . . . that makes possible the virtues of the other’ (Toulmin, 2001: 140).
In the case of the tourism academy, and consistent with Franklin and Crang’s
(2001) somewhat damning characterisation, it has to be questioned whether
there are really enough scholars capable of, or committed to, truly bridging the
gaps? For instance, the Tourist Area Life Cycle Model (Butler, 1980, 2006) is one
of the most widely used and commented upon ideas in tourism studies, but
very few scholars appreciate its background in human geography, the distinc-
302 Current Issues in Tourism

tive disciplinary conditions in geography when it emerged and afterwards, or

the alternative potentials which models in other areas of enquiry may have con-
tributed to resort trajectories (Coles, 2006; Hall, 2006). Indeed, it is not only the
(un)willingness of members of the tourism academy to step outside their intel-
lectual comfort zones that should be questioned. Historians, art historians and
anthropologists may be correct to argue that little research has been conducted
within their disciplines on tourism and leisure (Baranowski & Furlough, 2001;
Koshar, 2002a, 2002b; Lasansky, 2004; Semmens, 2005), but simple on-line
database searches would reveal that understanding of tourism and tourists has
advanced elsewhere which are in multiple ways meaningful to their work.
To summarise the argument to this point, the scholarly pursuit of tourism
has progressed significantly through a rich blend of insights emerging from an
array of disciplines, often in inter- or multi-disciplinary settings. Indeed, because
of the diversity of intellectual and institutional backgrounds of scholars, it is
problematic to identify an academic discipline in its own right called ‘tourism
studies’. This position is contested and the current situation does not preclude
a future reassessment of this status. Debates on the disciplinary credentials of
tourism have obscured that the terms ‘inter-’ or ‘multi-disciplinarity’ are for
the most part taken as read in the tourism studies community, as they are in
the social sciences more widely. Despite the obvious and potential contribu-
tions through these approaches, both – in particular inter-disciplinarity – are
problematic in their own right (Klein, 1996). For this reason, we would contend
that an assessment of the potentials of post-disciplinary approaches to tourism
should be critically discussed. In the next section we outline the basic principles
of post-disciplinary approaches to social science.

Post-Disciplinarity: An Introduction
If existing academic divisions of labour are unable to deal with the contempo-
rary world by virtue of their apparently artificial parcelling of scholarly duties,
according to Law (2004: 156) the question becomes one of how to organise our
intellectual endeavours. Toulmin (2001) has argued for a return to reasonable-
ness rather than focusing on rationality. Hellström et al. (2003: 251–2) note that
disciplinarity and paradigmatic policing within disciplines have traditionally
guided researchers towards particular problems, especially in science. They
argue that new modes of knowledge production are necessary that challenge,
‘received understandings of disciplinarity (for instance, a hardcore of interre-
lated common concepts and questions that guide problem choice together with
a corresponding social organisation)’.
Two sets of reasons are advanced by Hellström et al. (2003: 251) to challenge
the traditional formation of knowledge and understanding in disciplines: first,
the legitimate sphere of academic involvement is widening as a result of contem-
porary relevance-driven agenda; and second, and perhaps more importantly,
most current research problems are inherently trans-disciplinary in nature and
they span social boundaries. Instead, they endorse knowledge production that
is elaborated in the ‘context of application’ or in an ‘extended peer community’
and that seeks to challenge and destabilise received understandings of discipli-
narity (see also Beier & Arnold, 2005; Cohen, 2002).
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 303

According to Sayer (1999: 5), ‘post-disciplinary studies emerge when scholars

forget about disciplines and whether ideas can be identified with any particular
one; they identify with learning rather than with disciplines’. For example, Beier
and Arnold (2005) write of the development of what they term a ‘supradiscipli-
nary’ approach to security that provides for the study of security that allows
for engagement in the subject matter without giving rise to an interdiscipli-
nary hybrid or sui generis discipline. For Painter (2003), one of the appeals of
post-disciplinarity is the prospect of new and fresh insights by being able to
remove the inhibitions of one’s disciplinary regulation. It allows for the rec-
ognition of the value and legitimacy of progress in other areas of academic
endeavour (Jessop & Sum, 2001). Post-disciplinary perspectives allow ideas and
connections to be pursued to their logical conclusion not to some contrived end
point determined by artificial disciplinary boundaries. Learning takes outside
of established pan-disciplinary agendas, even those which find their way into
inter- or multi-disciplinary projects. Thus, in Massey’s view (1999: 6), academic
identities should be defined in a relational sense which highlights particularity
within a complex network of interrelations. Herein lies a major advantage over
inter-disciplinary approaches which are little more than a pretence in many
cases (see Sayer, 1999: 5). Members of different disciplines come together in a
quite instrumental manner to work as part of inter-disciplinary collaborations
but ultimately they retreat to their disciplinary ‘homes’. Outside the life-time of
the collaboration there is little commitment to knowledge production outside
their disciplines.
This view of knowledge formation as developed through relationality is
not an especially new or radical departure; rather, according to Hellström et
al. (2003), there has been a shift in the relative willingness among academics
to consider their participation in more flexible approaches to knowledge
formation. They report a much earlier study by Law (1973) who explored the
development of X-ray protein crystallography. Academics tend to develop spe-
cialities in one of three areas, according to Law (1973): technique, methods and
instrumentation; theory development; or subject matter knowledge. From a
strictly disciplinary perspective, we may have been correct to anticipate that
academics would develop competence in each of the three areas within their
disciplinary purview. Instead, academics tend to modularise themselves into
one of the three areas. The consequences are that an individual’s specialisation
is furthered by garnering knowledge outside his/her disciplinary home and
‘such modularisation of disciplinary competence makes team formation more
fluid and the single researcher more able to contribute in a variety of contexts’
(Hellström et al., 2003: 254).
Indeed, disciplinary ‘homes’ may furthermore be far from secure sanctuaries
because of the problematic nature of their constituent paradigms. Hellström et
al. (2003: 254) believe that post-disciplinary approaches overcome some of the
fundamental weaknesses introduced into academic enquiry by particular dis-
ciplinary or paradigmatic dogma. Like Toulmin (2001), they argue that Kuhn’s
(1969) view of the paradigm is unduly valorised. As Hughes’ (1990: 73) notes,
this includes, necessarily, values and beliefs that accompany those who are
acculturated into its dominance. A paradigm is therefore often an impractical
device through which to shape academic enquiry in two respects: ‘either it is
304 Current Issues in Tourism

so unspecific to function as an analytical tool in its own right, or it is too suf-

focating in its specificity and discrimination that it leaves nothing to analyse
in the first place’ (Hellström et al., 2003: 254 after Shapere, 1964). Histories of
intellectual developments within the social sciences demonstrate that abrupt
paradigm shifts are often accompanied by dramatic shifts as to what represents
knowledge production and consumption (cf. Johnston, 1991 and geography).
New acceptable ontological and epistemological canons replace allegedly old,
tired and limited theory, concept and method which progressively fall by the
wayside as disciplines march on unabated to the beat of a new paradigmatic
drum. New paradigms are not, though, beyond reproach and without the
potential for producing stylised knowledges which are often exclusionary in
nature. Journal editors and referees act as sentinels demarcating and watching
over the proper extent of disciplinary boundaries. Recently, the eminent geog-
rapher, Peter Taylor (2004) noted that the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences
is supposed to celebrate plurality and diversity of approach as a means of
progressing our understanding of the social world. However, his recent experi-
ences of attempting to publish his work led him to believe that the advocates of
intellectual liberalism and tolerance rarely practice what they preach. His more
empirical – though not empiricist – approach curried little favour with referees
and journal editors. Biagioli (2002: 13–14) argues that the nature of disciplines is
a consequence of peer review, where referees cannot always be expected to offer
value-free advice on a submission’s suitability for publication:
Independently from their competence or probity, the referees’ expertise is
necessarily tied to the present (not future) state of knowledge and entails
discipline-specific notions of relevance. This has resulted in documentable
conservative biases in the system – biases that have tended to penalize
innovative and interdisciplinary projects, including some that eventually
led to Nobel prizes.
Hall (2004) finds evidence of similar processes at work with respect to tourism.
Some journals find certain research methods or approaches more acceptable
than others either because of conscious editorial policy; a certain journal style
developed over the years; or, alternatively, the selection of editorial boards and
the particular breadth of views represented. Such considerations may affect
not only the selection of journal to publish in but even the choice of method,
and these issues over knowledge production are compounded by the perceived
academic ranking of journals and the pressures to publish in them for research
assessment purposes (Hall, 2005b). Hall (2004) describes how Britton’s (1991)
seminal paper on ‘tourism, capital and place’ came to be published in Environ-
ment and Planning D: Society and Space rather than Annals of Tourism Research in
which he had previously published. Britton ‘didn’t believe’ that it would be
accepted there. As Hall (2004: 142–3) concludes:
It does not make a difference whether he was right or wrong in this
assertion, the important thing was that it reflected a perception regarding
the matching of what was being produced and where it would be accepted
and this influenced both the write up of the ideas behind the article and
where it was published.
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 305

Arguably, journals and other publications media exert substantial influence

on the ‘tourism academic fashion cycle, which plays out through a particular
industrial actor-network of academic knowledge production, circulation and
reception’ (Gibson & Klocker, 2004: 425). For example, Coles et al. (2005a) note
that early work time-space by Hägerstrand (1965, 1967) offers considerable
potential for advancing our understanding of tourism as a form of contempo-
rary human movement (cf. Hall, 2005a). These ideas were originally discussed
in early perspectives on time geography in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Thrift,
1977), as well as in some research undertaken in tourism in the same period
(Hall & Page, 2006), only to be almost completely abandoned for a number of
years as enquiry moved to different intellectual terrains, and then to be redis-
covered again, partly as a result of changes in spatial information technology
and the efforts of intellectual ‘champions’. This is not to suggest that papers on
tourism time-geography were deliberately rejected. Rather it is indicative that
journals are like any other media in that there is an ecology of issues. As a result,
over time certain research foci (or paradigms) come to dominate at the expense
of others in the selection of ‘appropriate’ manuscripts for publication without
ever meaning that the research problems under investigation have ever been
‘solved’.
Enter post-disciplinarity. Post-disciplinary approaches result in the produc-
tion of new hybrid forms of knowledge production (Hellström et al., 2003:
253) which reject the unwarranted parochialism and artificiality introduced
by paradigms and disciplinary policing. It is important to note, though, that
post-disciplinary approaches do not descend into an intellectual ‘free for all’.
Rather, the production of post-disciplinary knowledges is framed by two sets
of guiding principles. The first is perhaps somewhat ironic given the preceding
discussion. Although the concept of the paradigm may be readily criticised as
oppressive to academic enquiry in several respects, the four components which
are usually used in the identification of paradigms can be utilised to frame
post-disciplinary enquiries of particular subjects. These are: (shared) interests;
competencies; worldview (i.e. general assumptions about reality); and outlook,
or the assumptions of what should be involved in the field, not least conceptu-
ally and methodologically (see Hellström et al., 2003: 255, based on Törnebohm,
1983, 1985). Traditional views of paradigms are different from post-disciplinary
approaches in the latter’s view shared commitment to transgress disciplinary
obstacles actively; greater strategic and tactically flexibility in the approach
to enquiry; the non-insistence on the search for grand narratives as academic
holy grails; and instead the development of knowledge practically by what
Levi-Strauss (1966) might call ‘bricoleur’. Post-disciplinary approaches have,
therefore, a disciplining of their own, albeit the intellectual terms of reference
are subject to a much lighter touch of regulation. Even though they reject the
desiderata of disciplines, they are not lacking a certain degree of regulation and
form.
As a second set of guiding principles, post-disciplinary studies are framed by
reference to what preceded them. The need for post-disciplinary studies of a par-
ticular object of study is only revealed after there has been critical consideration
of the merits of pre-disciplinary and disciplinary-based approaches (Jessop &
Sum, 2001). Although there are some superficial similarities with pre-disciplinary
306 Current Issues in Tourism

approaches, post-disciplinary approaches are notably different. Not least among

the differences is the lack of agreement in pre-disciplinary studies about funda-
mentals in the absence of intellectual precedents, records and historiographies.
Moreover, because of a lack of coordination and order imposed by disciplinar-
ity, research is often disorganised, haphazard and marked by diversity (Echtner
& Jamal, 1997; Kuhn, 1969). Furthermore, pre-disciplinarity, like disciplinarity,
is an essential precursory state before post-disciplinarity may be consider or
achieved (Sayer, 1999). An object of study, such as tourism, cannot be considered
as applicable to post-disciplinary enquiry unless one considers the intellectual
and institutional structures that disciplines comprise and introduce (Toulmin,
2001: 140–1).

A Blueprint for the Future? Insights from a ‘New Political Economy’

While scholars of tourism have been grappling with the nature and necessity
of disciplinary transgressions, in some subject areas debate has progressed
further as to the nature post-disciplinary studies should or indeed are likely to
take. Foremost among these have been discussions concerning political economy
(Goodwin, 2004; Hay & Marsh, 1999; Jessop & Sum, 2001; Lee, 2002). Jessop and
Sum (2001) consider a future for political economy in which there is a simulta-
neous return to pre-disciplinary interests matched by a burgeoning interest in
post-disciplinary concerns. Goodwin (2004: 65ff.) outlines a post-disciplinary
vision where human geography and political economy are not separated by
artificial divisions of academic labour. He desires a situation where political
economy is influenced by thought in human geography and similarly human
geography is influenced by political economy. At the heart of his argument is
that the day-to-day concerns of political economy are intrinsically spatial. Hay
and Marsh (1999) explore the future of studies of International Political Economy
(IPE) as a distinctive sub-discipline and its implications for political economy
more widely (cf. Goodwin, 2004). They identify clear divisions in the way IPE
has been studied, with particular theoretical positions established as orthodox
and certain conceptual positions privileged at the expense of others. As these
perspectives exemplify, interest in new political economy has been underway
in several areas of the social sciences over the past few years. The principal
challenge is how to integrate these knowledges and to reconcile the ontological
and epistemological settings of their production to introduce coherence to the
future study of political economy.
In this respect, Hay and Marsh (1999) identify three among many new
approaches to the study of IPE. Goodwin (2004) notes that these are differentiated
on the basis of the manner in which they assess both the novelty of the contem-
porary social, political and economic processes under consideration, and the
adequacy of current theory and method to be able to study them (see Table 1). The
first approaches consider new approaches to essentially old problems; that is, it
implies there has been no qualitative shift in the nature of political and economic
processes in recent years. Rather, the essence is that a fresh perspective is required
to analyse these (historical) problems because the ‘cumulative process of critique,
counter-critique and attrition has, over the years, served to discredit many of the
assumptions upon which classical international political economy was premised’
 Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry
Table 1 Three new approaches to political economy
Shorthand Qualitatively new Obsolescence of old PE in Limitations and distortions Purpose of new PE
environment? a changed environment? of the old PE?
NPE 1 ‘Old problems, No or not necessarily No Yes – invalid assumptions To present improved analysis
new approaches’ of past, present and process of
transformation
NPE 2 ‘New problems, Yes – ‘new times’ No (some modification No, or these are acceptable To adapt old PE so that it may
old approaches’ required) illuminate an analysis of ‘new
times’
NPE 3 ‘New times, Yes – ‘new times’ Yes – ‘new times’ require Not necessarily (old PE was To develop a new PE for ‘new
new political a new PE adequate to a different task) times’, a PE that may illuminate
economy’ the present
Source: Adapted from Hay and Marsh (1999: 15ff.) and Goodwin (2004). NB. Original table deals with IPE.

307
308 Current Issues in Tourism

(Hay & Marsh, 1999: 15). In effect, the current state of knowledge is the result of
a series of sedimentary and erosional episodes. A new IPE is necessary that will
be capable of explaining the old and the new but to do this there must be an ana-
lytical and methodological break with old approaches (Goodwin, 2004) which
requires ‘new, more interdisciplinary, analysis of political and economic processes’
(Hay & Marsh, 1999: 15–16, our emphasis). Such new approaches must be flexible
and capable enough of explaining both unfolding situations as well as offering
assessments of historical processes of development.
A second new approach to political economy originates among those who
argue that contemporary conditions of capitalism are qualitatively different
from those in the past. Notwithstanding these differences, old modes of inquiry
are still analytically and methodologically valid. Rather, the challenge is ‘to
redeploy the existing (and appropriately modified) techniques’ to explain con-
temporary conditions of political economy (Hay & Marsh, 1999: 17). The final
approach also shares the premise that new times are qualitatively different, but
it takes the argument a step further. Drawing on the work of Gamble et al. (1996:
5), Hay and Marsh (1999: 18) note that some commentators would argue that a
new stage in the world economic and political order has commenced and this
stage of development is defined by its highly distinctive characteristics. As con-
temporary conditions vary so dramatically from those that went before them,
existing modes of analysis and bodies of theory are alone incapable of further-
ing our understanding of them.
Hay and Marsh’s (1999) contribution was designed to stimulate debate
about the shape of new political economy. As a discussion piece, it is provoca-
tive but two subtle points emerge from it regarding the potential formulation
of new, contemporary approaches to social science enquiry. The first is, as
Goodwin (2004: 72) points out, that the approaches which identify limitations
to the ‘old’ political economy, ‘include a call to dismantle academic partitions
and pursue more work across disciplinary boundaries’. In effect, the first
and third new approach concede that understanding in political economy
cannot merely be advanced by those describing themselves as political econo-
mists. Academics can no longer stake a claim to the treatment of particular
objects as theirs to study at the exclusion of others (cf. Sayer, 1999). There
are common interests in academic practice that require enduring dialogues
of an often unexpected and highly instrumental manner where the protago-
nists are prepared to set aside their disciplinary canons in order to advance
their common understandings (Goodwin, 2004; Pielke, 2004). Similarly, with
respect to security studies, Beier and Arnold (2005) noted that various pockets
of research had been undertaken in almost complete isolation from one another
and with little apparent awareness of relevant developments in one area of
research compared to another. Therefore, they argued that ‘security cannot
be satisfactorily theorized with the confines of disciplinary boundaries – any
disciplinary boundaries’ (Beier & Arnold, 2005: 41). Second, none of the three
approaches is privileged at the expense of the others as the proposed single
‘meta-approach’ to new political economy. There are important possibilities to
advance political economy associated with all three approaches. In his discus-
sion of the relevance of this schematic for future dialogue between political
economy and human geography, Goodwin (2004) advocates that elements of
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 309

all three approaches are taken on board, although Hay and Marsh (1999) warn
that the third approach is the most problematic. This is because the initial
premises may be contested and, more importantly, such an approach offers
a static analysis because new times say little about how the current situation
emerged.

Toward New Post-Disciplinary Studies of/in/about Tourism

Restructuring in the global system of capitalism has encouraged the emergence
of a wider array of new forms of tourism where there are frequent, routine and
complex connections with other forms of human movement and mobilities (Coles
et al., 2005; Hall, 2005c; Hall & Williams, 2002; Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry,
2004). These demand intellectual exploration that shed rather ‘siloed’ units of
information acquisition and processing in favour of deriving logical conclusions of
meaning by way of multiple approaches. For example, diaspora tourism (Coles &
Timothy, 2004) and medical tourism in whatever guise – irrespective of whether it
is combining surgery and vacation or short-term medical work abroad by Western
health care workers (Grennan, 2003) – are new forms of short-term, temporary
mobility which may legitimately be considered by ‘tourism scholars’, but which
are usefully and of necessity informed by theory, concept and method developed
in a wide variety of scholarly locations, sometimes with no immediately obvious
connections with ‘tourism’. Recent discussions about so-called ‘xenotourism’ in
the medical sciences are further indicative of this trend (Cooke et al., 2005; Pierson,
2004) as are discussions of ‘reproductive tourism’ and ‘birthright tourism’. The
former refers to the travel overseas for medically assisted reproduction (Pennings,
2002), while the latter refers to the tactical travel of mothers-to-be to ensure their
children are delivered in countries where more favourable rights of citizenship
exist. Examples exist of Korean women travelling to the United States so that
their newborns receive US passports, their offspring can be enrolled in American
schools, and they can avoid South Korean military service. ‘Benefits tourism’ is
a similar concept that made its way into policy circles in the United Kingdom at
the time of EU Enlargement in 2004. Also called ‘welfare shopping’, it refers to
the short-term mobility of individuals who enter countries to take advantage of
more generous social benefits available in the welfare system compared to their
home countries. To take advantage of these benefits, visitors have to share (or
in some cases circumvent) the same rights of access as local residents. Davies
(2004) reports the case of temporary mobility being used to secure job seeker’s
allowance (a form of unemployment benefit) and the measures taken to close the
loophole.
Somewhat jocularly, one journalist noted that ‘benefit tourism’ was disliked
because, ‘those people come over here (and wearing those awful Bermuda
shorts, too) and go round taking photographs of all our best-looking benefits’
(Treneman, 2004). A generation ago, tourism scholars may have dismissed these
as somewhat frivolous concerns beyond the remit of mainstream modernist
tourism studies (Jamal & Kim, 2005), but to repeat this would be narrow-minded
and unfounded. These forms of mobility do not conform to stereotypical views
of vacations or business trips, they challenge existing definitions and estab-
lished, orthodox conceptualisations of tourism, but their existence, the increased
310 Current Issues in Tourism

volume of such trips, and their greater visibility are indicative that we live in
qualitatively new environments that require tourism scholars to widen their
range of concept and theory. As these examples indicate, analyses of tourism
have be introduced to and more fully integrated within discourses variously
about ethics, citizenship and social responsibility (Coles & Timothy, 2004;
Fennell, 2006; Macbeth, 2005; Smith & Duffy, 2003). While in the past tourism
scholars may have started to grapple with these ideas with respect to issues
such as sex tourism and community tourism, these new and growing forms of
mobility help to define the contemporary condition, tourism’s role within it,
and new sets of outcomes and impacts associated with tourism. In one crude
assessment of the likely impact of welfare tourism on the United Kingdom, the
journalist James Chapman (2004b: 8) warned:
There is growing concern that looking after asylum-seekers, refugees and
so-called ‘health tourists’ is costing the NHS [National Health Service]
billions of pounds a year. An HIV-positive patient typically costs the
NHS £15,000 a year. If full-blown AIDS develops, the bill soars to around
£40,000.
Indeed, it is perhaps in the third approach that we may identify the greatest
need for flexibility in knowledge production precisely because of the increasing
mobility of some segments of society, including multiple places of residence. For
instance, while there may have been early, seminal work on the rise of the second
homes phenomenon (Coppock, 1977), in the last decade there has been global
expansion in this phenomenon that requires new understandings of the benefits
and costs of second homes for the owners as well as the communities in which
they are situated (Hall & Müller, 2004). In order to develop our knowledges of
this phenomenon, we require contributions not just from tourism and leisure
studies but also from rural studies, housing and regional planning. Another
contemporary topic that presents new challenges for analysis is the relationship
between tourism and global environmental change (GEC) (e.g. Gössling, 2002;
Gössling & Hall, 2006; Hall & Higham, 2005). Unprecedented levels of human
mobility manifested in both domestic and international tourism contribute to
the environmental impacts of tourism that, in turn, contribute to anthropogeni-
cally induced GEC, including climate change (Gössling, 2002; Gössling & Hall,
2006). As Haas (2004) noted, the complexity of GEC exceeds the mastery of
any individual disciplinary approach. Although fields such as transport and
migration provide accounts of the implications of human movement, tourism
occupies much of the intellectual space that examines voluntary temporary
movement and is therefore well qualified to contribute to an understanding of
the social, economic and environmental implications of movement in concert
with other fields of study. Moreover, the complexity and scope of GEC demand
a commitment from both physical and social scientists. This has been recog-
nised in the establishment of new publishing outlets as well as in government
policies that are trying to mitigate GEC but such intellectual emancipation is
not readily evident in or respected by research assessment exercises. Indeed,
such contemporary imperatives as GEC clearly require free dialogues between
academics and researchers in order to understand the interaction of human and
natural systems (cf. Kinzig, 2001; Redman et al., 2004; Roux et al., 2006).
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 311

The importance of developing Hay and Marsh’s schema is not just in the
identification of distinctive contemporary conditions and new forms of tourism
which demand fresh modes of analysis and new bodies of theory. Rather the
application of their work also points to the need to rethink some of the more
established, long-term concerns of tourism research. The development of our
understanding of crisis management in tourism would appear to be a clear
instance of the potential in the first approach. The relationship between tourism
and crises, disasters, terrorism and other forms of political events has been a
long-standing concern (Matthews, 1978; Richter, 1991). While it is possible to
map the magnitude and frequency of events such as terrorist atrocities (Sönmez,
1998), recent work has emphasised that more detailed insights are required
regarding the internal and external nature of such events; the research methods
which are necessary to examine and assess episodic impacts; strategy and plan
making to cope with contingencies; and the ways in which organisations cope
with and learn from such events (Faulkner, 2001; Faulkner & Vikulov, 2001;
Ritchie, 2004; Russell & Faulkner, 1999). The subject of crisis management in
tourism will not continue to develop merely through convenient forays across
disciplinary borders. As Ritchie (2004: 681) argues, critical discussion would
benefit from a more systematic and sustained consideration of perspectives from
business and management; public relations, journalism and communication
studies; geography (physical and applied); environmental (science) manage-
ment; planning; and political science. Far from mere rhetoric, the justification
for this position is in the demonstrable progress in the field of study associated
with the integration of complexity theory and chaos theory, both of which are
more commonly associated with the natural sciences (McKercher, 1999; Russell
& Faulkner, 1999). Others have looked at the emerging arena of (inter-discipli-
nary?) crisis management studies for inspirations. For McKercher (1999: 425) the
necessity in looking outside tourism for relevant method, concept and theory is
‘much critical thought about tourism remains entrenched in an intellectual time
warp that is up to 30 years old’.
There are instances where the second new approach is clearly necessary
and perhaps most conspicuously these focus on the connected and networked
nature of production and consumption in tourism. For some time, scholars have
been sympathetic to the view that tourism encounters are negotiated via often
intricate webs of interaction through which labour, capital, and information
flow (Urry, 2002). This is not least because tourism requires the coordination of
a complex constellation of stakeholders (both commercial and social) to deliver
and mediate the tourist experience. Connectedness may be a hallmark of the
contemporary condition but we would contend that more and greater trans-
gressions into fields with longer and richer heritages of exploring networks will
widen and deepen our knowledges of the ‘multiple truths’ (Tribe, 2006) pertain-
ing to such themes as tourism flows and the organisation of production which
is currently popularly conceptualised as taking place in clusters and networks
(Goodman, 2006; Michael et al., 2007). For several decades, networks have been
the subject of extensive academic attention in sociology, anthropology, human
geography, migration studies and political science culminating in the devel-
opment of theory and concept, methods and techniques that have as yet only
312 Current Issues in Tourism

partially made their way into studies of tourism (cf. Goodman, 2006; Kilduff &
Tsai, 2003).
Thus, the major difference between this and the other post-disciplinary
approaches articulated above is that extant ideas developed and refined
elsewhere, but as yet largely untested and under-developed in tourism discourse
may deliver significant advantages in addressing some of the key issues in
major contemporary research problems. For instance, the intricate aeropolitics
of international air service agreements can have enormous implications for the
direction and intensity of transnational flows. A quite different view would
be formed if we were to restrict ourselves solely to the domain or context of
social-psychological variables as in much of the tourism marketing literature
than if we were to embrace alternative knowledges of politico-geographical
and regulatory environments derived from basic concepts and techniques in
critical geopolitics, political science and international relations. The United
States requires all travellers to disembark aircraft and clear US customs upon
arrival, even if passengers are on-flying to non-US destinations. Another mani-
festation is the restrictive nature of entry visas worldwide and the tit-for-tat
reciprocal arrangements between governments. Visa requirements are often put
in place not solely for reasons of security but rather for balanced reciprocity. For
instance, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri in April 2003 indicated
by Presidential Decree (which was put on hold in October that same year) that a
proposed short-term visa for Australian residents to visit Bali was implemented
for reasons of ‘reciprocity and national security’ (Bali Discovery, 2003).

Conclusion: Towards Dismantling of Institutional Barriers

Tourism has frequently been described as a ‘multi-’ or ‘inter-disciplinary’
field of study, and the potential of inter-disciplinary perspectives to tourism has
been enthusiastically championed. In some cases the terms ‘multi-’ and ‘inter-
disciplinary’ have been used conveniently without due recognition of their
implications. The acknowledgement of the potential of such perspectives has
not necessarily been matched by a fuller consideration of their limitations. In
this paper we have argued that an epistemological space exists within studies
of tourism for post-disciplinary approaches based on even greater flexibility,
plurality, synthesis and synergy by abandoning the shackles of disciplinary
policing. We would endorse the view of Visnovsky and Bianchi (2005: no pages),
the editors of Human Affairs: A Postdisciplinary Journal for Humanities & Social
Sciences, who argue:
Postdisciplinarity in our understanding does not mean that the traditional
disciplines have disappeared or indeed should disappear, but rather that
they are changing and should change in order to solve complex issues of
human affairs. It is not sufficient to approach such complex issues from
any single discipline.
Were we to adopt this direction, this does not necessarily mean that we must
entirely abandon the position that there is an identifiable and worthwhile set
of institutionalised academic practices called ‘tourism studies’ centred on the
duality of tourism and the tourist (Hall, 2005a; Hall et al., 2004). Neither does
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 313

it mean that knowledges of tourism and tourists are not produced, stimulated
and situated in established and multiple networks within and between the
social sciences and the humanities (Coles et al., 2005a). Rather, post-disciplinary
approaches offer considerable additional and as yet unrecognised potentials
for studies of tourism ‘beyond disciplines’ particularly with respect to many
of the complex, multi-scalar issues, such as security, sustainability, mobilities
and networks. We argue that the advantage of the post-disciplinary outlook
is that it encourages more flexible modes of knowledge production and con-
sumption that are able to deal with the current issues and challenges of tourism;
that is, the complexity, messiness, unpredictability, hybridity of the contempo-
rary world in which tourism takes place and which tourism reflexively helps
to mediate. As the three possible approaches to post-disciplinary investigation
indicate, this is far from the ‘predictable and aimless eclecticism’ that some
commentators associate with post-disciplinarity (Menand, 2005), and it is
instead clearly concerned with relevance in terms of the problems examined,
methods used, and the outcomes secured (Dicken, 2004). It should not be sur-
prising that our conceptualisations of new approaches to tourism are more
upper-level in theory construction and awareness. Nevertheless, they have
clear implications for research method and praxis, and the definition of what
constitutes tourism research problems. However, irrespective of the invalu-
able contribution post-disciplinary approaches will be able to make to current
societal issues and environmental problems, there is a basic tension between the
emergence of this more flexible, problem-focused outlook and what we might
term conservative ‘old problem, old outlook’ discipline-bound straitjackets
of the political institutions that now evaluate and rank research performance
across numerous national jurisdictions. The challenge for post-disciplinary per-
spectives on tourism (as well as for other subject areas seeking to be relevant
and responsive to the shifting and fluid problems of contemporary human and
natural systems such as geography (Harrison et al., 2004)) is therefore not just
that they are received and recognised within the academy: rather, they should
also be acknowledged by those who seek to maintain disciplinary boundaries
(Menand, 2005), and by those who seek to impose them on the academy in order
to satisfy some neo-liberal notion of research excellence and competitiveness or
just to keep a job and attract research grants (Downing, 2004). Such issues lie at
the heart of debates over the relevance of universities and the knowledges that
they generate (e.g. Baert & Shipman, 2005; Harpham, 2005; Kivenen & Ristelä,
2002) and, as ‘tourism studies’ is embedded in the intersections and fluid spaces
of knowledge, they are ones to which the subject area has enormous potential
to contribute.

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Tim Coles, University of Exeter,
School of Business and Economics, Dept of Management, Streatham Court,
Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4PU (t.e.coles@exeter.ac.uk).

References
Baert, P. and Shipman, A. (2005) University under siege? European Societies 7 (1), 157–85.
Bainbridge, W.S. (2003) The future of the social sciences. Futures 35, 633–50.
314 Current Issues in Tourism

Bali Discovery (2003) Breaking news: Visa free facility revoked, 14 April 2003. On WWW
at http://www.balidiscovery.com/update/update344.asp. Accessed 09.04.06.
Bastian, O. (2001) Landscape ecology – towards a unified discipline? Landscape Ecology
16 (8), 757–66.
Baranowski, S. and Furlough, E. (2001) Being Elsewhere. Tourism, Consumer Culture and
Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press.
Baron, N.S. (2005) Who wants to be a discipline? Information Society 21, 269–71.
Beggs, D. (1999) Liberating ecological reason through interdisciplinarity. Metaphilosophy
30 (3), 186–208.
Beier, J.M. and Arnold, S.L. (2005) Becoming undisciplined: Towards the supradiscipli-
nary study of security. International Studies Review 7 (1), 41–62.
Biagioli, M. (2002) From book censorship to academic peer review. Emergences: Journal for
the Study of Media and Composite Cultures 12 (1), 11–45.
Botterill, D. (2001) The epistemology of a set of tourism studies. Leisure Studies 20,
199–214.
Britton, S.G. (1991) Tourism, capital and place: Towards a critical geography of tourism.
Environment and Planning D 9 (4), 451–78.
Butler, R.W. (1980) The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: Implications for man-
agement of resources. Canadian Geographer 24, 5–12.
Butler, R.W. (2004) Geographical research on tourism, recreation and leisure: Origins,
eras and directions. Tourism Geographies 6 (2), 143–62.
Butler, R.W. (ed.) (2006) The Tourism Life Cycle. Clevedon. Channel View Publications.
Carp, R. (2001) Integrative praxes: Learning from multiple knowledge formations. Issues
in Integrative Studies 19, 27–42.
Chapman, J. (2004) Britain is warned over the migrants with HIV. Daily Mail (18
February), 8.
Cohen, S. (2002) The academic ‘thing’: An introduction to the special issue on ‘academic
culture – disciplines and disjunctions’. Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and
Composite Cultures 12 (1), 5–9.
Coles, T.E. (2006) Enigma variations? The TALC, marketing models and the descendants
of the product life cycle. In R.W. Butler (ed.) The Tourism Area Life Cycle. Volume 2. Con-
ceptual and Theoretical Issues (pp. 49–66). Clevedon: Channel View Publications.
Coles, T.E. and Church, A. (2006) Tourism and the forgotten entanglements of power. In
A. Church and T.E. Coles Tourism, Power and Space. London: Routledge.
Coles, T.E. and Timothy, D.J. (eds) (2004) Tourism, Diasporas and Space. London.
Routledge.
Coles, T.E., Duval, D.T. and Hall, C.M. (2004) Tourism, mobility and global communities:
New approaches to theorising tourism and tourist spaces. In W. Theobold (ed.) Global
Tourism (pp. 463–81). Oxford. Butterworth Heinemann.
Coles, T.E., Hall, C.M. and Duval, D.T. (2005a) Mobiling tourism: A post-disicplinary
critique. Tourism Recreation Research 30 (2), 53–63.
Coles, T.E., Duval, D.T. and Hall, C.M. (2005b) Turismo y movilidad en la actual
coyuntura de movimientos y conjeturas post-disciplinarias [On tourism and mobility
at moments of post-disciplinary movement and conjecture]. Politica y Sociologica 42
(1), 85–99.
Cooke, D.T., Caffarelli, A.D. and Robbins, R.C. (2005) The road to clinical xenotransplan-
tation: A worthwhile journey. Transplantation 78 (8), 1108–9.
Coppock, J.T. (ed.) (1977) Second Homes: Curse or Blessing? Oxford: Pergamon.
Crozier, M. (2001) A problematic discipline: The identity of Australian political studies.
Australian Journal of Political Science 36 (1), 7–26.
Davies, G. (2004) The high water point of Free Movement of Persons: Ending benefit
tourism and rescuing welfare. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 26 (2), 211–22.
Dicken, P. (2004) Geographers and ‘globalization’: (Yet) another missed boat? Transac-
tions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (1), 5–26.
Dogan, M. and Pahre, R. (1990) Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersection of Social
Science. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 315

Downing, D.B. (2004) Progressive alliance or disciplinary bondage. Symploke 12 (1–2),

248–53.
Echtner, C. and Jamal, T. (1997) The disciplinary dilemma of tourism studies. Annals of
Tourism Research 24 (4), 868–83.
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (2005) Postgraduate Training Guidelines
(4th edn). Swindon: ESRC.
Faulkner, B. (2001) Towards a framework for tourism disaster management. Tourism
Management 22, 135–47.
Faulkner, B. and Vikulov, S. (2001) Katherine, washed out one day, back on track the next:
A post-mortem of a tourism disaster. Tourism Management 22, 331–44.
Fennell, D.A. (2006) Tourism Ethics. Clevedon: Channel View Publications.
Franklin, A. and Crang, M. (2001) The trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist
Studies 1 (1), 5–22.
Gamble, A., Payne, A., Hoogevelt, A., Dietrich, M. and Kenny, M. (1996) Editorial: New
political economy. New Political Economy 1 (1), 5–11.
Geary, J., Marriott, L. and Rowlinson, M. (2004) Journal rankings in business and man-
agement and the 2001 Research Assessment in the UK. British Journal of Management
15 (2), 95–141.
Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzmann, C., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994)
The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary
Society. London: Sage.
Gibson, C. and Klocker, N. (2004) Academic publishing as ‘creative’ industry, and recent
discourse of ‘creative economies’: Some critical reflections. Area 36 (4), 423–34.
Gössling, S. (2002) Global environmental consequences of tourism. Global Environmental
Change 12, 283–302.
Gössling, S. and Hall, C.M. (eds) (2006) Tourism and Global Environmental Change. London.
Routledge.
Goodman (2006) Tourism development on the island of Koh Chang, Thailand: The
applications and limitations of a social network theory perspective. Unpublished PhD
Thesis, University of Exeter.
Goodwin, M. (2004) Recovering the future: A post-disciplinary perspective on geography
and political economy (pp. 65–80). In P. Cloke, M. Goodwin and P. Crang (eds) Envi-
sioning Human Geography. London: Arnold.
Graburn, N. and Jafari, J. (1991) Introduction. Tourism social science. Annals of Tourism
Research 18, 1–11.
Gregson, N. (2003) Discipline games, disciplinary games and the need for a post-disci-
plinary practice: Responses to Nigel Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’. Geoforum 34,
5–7.
Grennan, T. (2003) A wolf in sheep’s clothing? A closer look at medical tourism. Medical
Ethics 1 (1), 50–54.
Haas, P.M. (2004) When does power listen to truth? A constructivist approach to the
policy process. Journal of European Public Policy 11 (4), 569–92.
Hägerstrand, T. (1965) A Monte Carlo approach to diffusion. European Journal of Sociology
6, 43–67.
Hägerstrand, T. (1967) Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (trans. A. Pred). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hall, C.M. (1995) Introduction to Tourism in Australia: Impacts, Planning and Development
(2nd edn). South Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Hall, C.M. (2004) Reflexivity and tourism research: Situating myself and/with others. In
J. Phillimore and L. Goodson (eds) Qualitative Research in Tourism: Ontologies, Episte-
mologies and Methodologies (pp. 137–55). London. Routledge.
Hall, C.M. (2005a) Tourism: Rethinking the Social Science of Mobility. Harlow: Pearson
Education.
Hall, C.M. (2005b) Systems of surveillance and control: Commentary on ‘An analysis
of institutional contributors to three major academic tourism journals: 1992–2001’.
Tourism Management 26 (5), 653–6.
316 Current Issues in Tourism

Hall, C.M. (2005c) Reconsidering the geography of tourism and contemporary mobility.
Geographical Research 43 (2), 125–39.
Hall, C.M. (2005d) Time, space, tourism and social physics. Tourism Recreation Research
30 (1), 93–8.
Hall, C.M. (2006) Space-time accessibility and the tourist area cycle of evolution: The
role of geographies of spatial interaction and mobility in contributing to an improved
understanding of tourism. In R. Butler (ed.) The Tourism Life Cycle. Volume 2: Conceptual
and Theoretical Issues (pp. 83–100). Clevedon. Channel View Publications.
Hall, C.M. and Higham, J. (eds) (2005) Tourism, Recreation and Climate Change. Clevedon.
Channel View Publications.
Hall, C.M. and Müller, D. (eds) (2004) Tourism, Mobility and Second Homes: Between Elite
Landscape and Common Ground. Clevedon. Channel View Publications.
Hall, C.M. and Page, S.J. (2006) The Geography of Tourism and Recreation (3rd edn). London:
Routledge.
Hall, C.M and Williams, A. (eds) (2002) Tourism and Migration: New Relationships between
Production and Consumption. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hall, C.M., Williams, A.M. and Lew, A. (2004) Tourism: Conceptualisations, institutions
and issues. In A. Lew, C.M. Hall and A.M. Williams (eds) Companion to Tourism (pp.
3–21). Oxford: Blackwell.
Hannam, K., Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and
moorings. Mobilities 1 (1), 1–22.
Harman, J.R. (2003) Whither geography? Professional Geographer 55 (4), 415–21.
Harpham, G.G. (2005) Beneath and beyond the ‘Crisis in the humanities’. New Literary
History 36 (1), 21–36.
Harrison, S., Massey, D., Richards, K., Magilligan, F.J., Thrift, N. and Bender, B. (2004)
Thinking across the divide: Perspectives on the conversations between physical and
human geography. Area 36 (4), 435–42.
Hay, C. and Marsh, D. (1999) Introduction: Towards a new (international) political
economy. New Political Economy 4 (1), 5–22.
Hellström, T., Jacob, M. and Wenneberg, S. (2003) The ‘discipline’ of post-academic
science: Reconstructing paradigmatic foundations of a virtual research institute.
Science and Public Policy 30 (4), 251–60.
Holden, A. (2005) Tourism Studies and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.
Hollinshead, K. (2004) Tourism and third space populations: The restless motion of
diaspora peoples (pp. 33–49). In T.E. Coles and D.J. Timothy (eds) Tourism, Diasporas
and Space. London: Routledge.
Hughes, J. (1990) The Philosophy of Social Research (2nd edn). London: Longman.
Jamal, T. and Kim, H. (2005) Bridging the interdisciplinary divide: Towards an integrated
framework for heritage tourism research. Tourist Studies 5 (1), 55–83.
Jessop, B. (2004) Critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy. Critical
Discourse Studies 1 (2), 159–74.
Jessop, B. and Sum, N-L. (2001) Pre-disciplinary and post-disciplinary perspectives. New
Political Economy 6 (1), 89–101.
Jogaratnam, G., Chon, K., McCleary, K., Mena, M. and Yoo, J. (2005) An analysis of insti-
tutional contributors to three major academic tourism journals: 1992–2001. Tourism
Management 26, 641–8.
Johnston, R.J. (1991) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since
1945 (4th edn). London: Edward Arnold.
Keast, R., Mandell, M.P., Brown, K. and Woolcock, G. (2004) Network structures: Working
differently and changing expectations. Public Administration Review 64 (3), 363–71.
Keyfitz, N. (1995) Inter-disciplinary contradictions and the influence of science on policy.
Policy Sciences 28, 21–38.
Kilduff, M. and Tsai, W. (2003) Social Networks and Organizations. London: Sage.
Kinzig, A.P. (2001) Bridging disciplinary divides to address environmental and intellec-
tual challenges. Ecosystems 4 (8), 709–15.
Kivinen, O. and Ristelä, P. (2002) Even higher learning takes place by doing: From post-
modern critique to pragmatic action. Studies in Higher Education 27 (4), 419–30.
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 317

Klein, J.T. (1996) Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities and Interdisciplinarities.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Koshar, R. (2002a) German Travel Cultures. Oxford: Berg.
Koshar, R. (ed.) (2002b) Histories of Leisure. Oxford: Berg.
Kreisel, W. (2004) Geography of leisure and tourism in the German-speaking world:
Three pillars to progress. Tourism Geographies 6 (2), 163–85.
Kuhn, T. (1969) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edn). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lasansky, D.M. (2004) Introduction. In D.M. Lasansky and B. McLaren (eds) Architecture
and Tourism. Perception, Performance and Place (pp. 1–14). Oxford: Berg.
Law, J. (1973) The development of specialities in science: The case of X-ray protein crys-
tallography. Science Studies 3, 275–303.
Law, J. (2004) After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.
Lee, R. (2002) ‘Nice maps, shame about the theory’? Thinking geographically about the
economic. Progress in Human Geography 26 (3), 333–55.
Leiper, N. (1981) Towards a cohesive curriculum in tourism: The case for a distinct disci-
pline. Annals of Tourism Research 8, 69–83.
Leiper, N. (2000) An emerging discipline. Annals of Tourism Research 27 (3), 805–9.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Macbeth, J. (2005) Towards an ethics platform for tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 32
(4), 962–84.
Markham, A.N. (2005) Disciplining the future: A critical organization of analysis of
internet studies. The Information Society 21, 257–67.
Martin, R. and Sunley, P. (1996) Paul Krugman’s geographical economics and its implica-
tions for regional development theory. Economic Geography 72 (3), 259–92.
Martin, R. (1999) The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics: Some critical reflections.
Cambridge Journal of Economics 23, 65–91.
Massey, D. (1999) Negotiating disciplinary boundaries. Current Sociology 47 (4), 5–12.
Matthews, H.G. (1978) International Tourism: A Social and Political Analysis. Cambridge:
Schenkman.
McKercher, B. (1999) A chaos approach to tourism. Tourism Management 20, 425–34.
McKercher, B. (2005) A case for ranking tourism journals. Tourism Management 26,
649–51.
McLennan, G. (2003) Sociology’s complexity. Sociology 37 (3), 547–64.
Menand, L. (2005) Dangers within and without. Profession 2005 (1), 10–17.
Michael, E. with Gibson, L., Hall, C.M., Lynch, P., Mitchell, R., Morrison, A. and Schreiber,
C. (2007) Micro-clusters and Networks: The Growth of Tourism. London: Elsevier.
Page, S.J. (2003) Evaluating research performance in tourism: The UK experience. Tourism
Management 24, 607–22.
Page, S.J. (2005) Academic ranking exercises: Do they achieve anything meaningful?
Tourism Management 26, 663–6.
Painter, J. (2003) Towards a post-disciplinary political geography. Political Geography 22,
637–9.
Pechlaner, H., Zehrer, A., Matzler, K. and Abfalter, D. (2004) A ranking of international
tourism and hospitality journals. Journal of Travel Research 42, 328–32.
Pielke, R.A. (2004) What future for the policy sciences? Policy Sciences 37, 209–25.
Pierson, R.N. (2004) Xenotransplantation at the crossroads. Xenotransplantation 11 (5),
391–3.
Pelletier, D. (2004) Sustainability of the policy sciences: Alternatives and strategies. Policy
Sciences 34, 237–45.
Pennings, G. (2002) Reproductive tourism as moral pluralism in motion. Journal of
Medical Ethics 28, 337–41.
Redman, C.L., Grove, J.M. and Kuby, L.H. (2004) Integrating social science into the long-
term ecological research (LTER) network: Social dimensions of ecological change and
ecological dimensions of social change. Ecosystems 7 (2), 161–71.
Ritchie, B.W. (2004) Chaos, crises and disasters: A strategic approach to crisis manage-
ment in the tourism industry. Tourism Management 25, 669–83.
318 Current Issues in Tourism

Rosamond, B. (2005) Globalization, the ambivalence of European integration and the

possibilities for a post-disciplinary EU studies. Innovation 18 (1), 23–43.
Roux, D.J., Rogers, K.H., Biggs, H.C., Ashton, P.J. and Sergeant, A. (2006) Bridging the
science-management divide: Moving from unidirectional knowledge transfer to
knowledge interfacing and sharing. Ecology and Society 11 (1), 4. On WWW at http://
www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art4. Accessed 22.05.06.
Russell, R. and Faulkner, B. (1999) Movers and shakers: Chaos makers in tourism devel-
opment. Tourism Management 20, 411–23.
Ryan, C. (2005) The ranking and rating of academics and journals in tourism research.
Tourism Management 26, 657–62.
Sayer, A. (1999) Long live postdisciplinary studies! Sociology and the curse of discipli-
nary parochialism / imperialism. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. On
WWW at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Sayer-Long-Live-Post-
disciplinary-Studies.pdf . Accessed 15.04.04.
Semmens, K. (2005) Seeing Hitler’s Germany. Tourism in the Third Reich. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Shapere, D. (1964) The structure of scientific revolutions. Philosophical Review 73, 383–94.
Shaw, G. and Williams, A.M. (2004) Tourism and Tourism Spaces. London. Sage.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2004) Mobile transformations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life’.
Theory, Culture and Society 20 (3), 107–25.
Skole, D.L. (2004) Geography as a great intellectual melting pot and the pre-eminent
interdisciplinary environmental discipline. Annals of the Association of American Geog-
raphers 94 (4), 739–43.
Smith, M.J. (1998) Social Science in Question. Towards a Post-Disciplinary Framework.
London: Sage.
Smith, M. and Duffy, R. (2003) The Ethics of Tourism Development. London: Routledge.
Sönmez, S. (1998) Tourism, terrorism and political instability. Annals of Tourism Research
25 (2), 416–56.
Taylor, P.R. (2004) World City Network. London: Routledge.
Tertiary Education Commission (2003) Performance-Based Research Fund – Quality Evalu-
ation: Guidelines for Assigning Evidence Portfolios to Panels and Interdisciplinary Research,
PBRF-Consultation -03-03-1, Consultation Draft 4. Wellington: Tertiary Education
Commission.
Tertiary Education Commission (2004) Performance-Based Research Fund Quality Evalua-
tion: Business and Economics Panel – The 2003 Assessment. Wellington: Tertiary Education
Commission.
Thrift, N. (1977) An Introduction to Time Geography. Norwich: Catmog 13.
Törnebohm, H. (1983) Studies in Knowledge Development. Uppsala: Doxa.
Törnebohm, H. (1985) What is Theory of Science? Report 145, Department of Theory of
Science and Research, Gothenburg University, Sweden.
Toulmin, S. (2001) Return to Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Treneman, A. (2004) Panic? There’s no need to frighten the horses. Times (24 February),
2.
Tribe, J. (1997) The indiscipline of tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 24 (3), 638–57.
Tribe, J. (2000) Indisciplined and unsubstantiated. Annals of Tourism Research 27 (3),
809–13.
Tribe, J. (2003) The RAE-ification of tourism research in the UK. International Journal of
Tourism Research 5, 225–34.
Tribe, J. (2004a) Extracts from the ATHE Response to the Consultation Document ‘RAE
02/2004: Panel Configuration and Recruitment’ for the UK Research Assessment
Exercise 2008. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education 3 (1), 71–4.
Tribe, J. (2004b) Knowing about tourism: Epistemological issues. In J. Phillimore and L.
Goodson (eds) Qualitative Research in Tourism. Ontologies, Epistemologies and Methodolo-
gies (pp. 46–62). London: Routledge.
Tribe, J. (2006) The truth about tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 33 (2), 360–81.
Turner, B. II (2002) Response to Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’. Geoforum 33 (4),
427–9.
Tourism and Post-Disciplinary Enquiry 319

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) (2006) TedQual Certified Insti-
tutions. On WWW at http://www.world-tourism.org/education/tedqual.htm.
Accessed 22.05.06.
Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London:
Routledge.
Urry, J. (2002) Social networks, travel and talk. British Journal of Sociology 54 (2), 155–75.
Visnovsky, E. and Bianchi, G. (2005) Editorial. Human Affairs 15/2005. On WWW at
http://www.humanaffairs.sk/editorial.htm. Accessed 15.04.06.
Weiler, B. and Hall, C.M. (1991) Meeting the needs of the recreation and tourism partner-
ship: A comparative study of tertiary education programmes in Australia and Canada.
Leisure Options: Australian Journal of Leisure and Recreation 1 (2), 7–14.
White, G. (2005) University of Otago Deputy Vice Chancellor Research, meeting with
respect to PBRF. Personal communication to C.M. Hall (28 September).
Wrigley, N. and Lowe, M. (eds) (1996) Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New
Retail Geography. Harlow: Longman.
Xiao, H. and Smith, S.J. (2006) The making of tourism research. Insights from a social
sciences journal. Annals of Tourism Research 33 (2), 490–507.