Introduction to Tourism

Social Science
(MANM145)

Prof Caroline Scarles

Module Aim

This module explores the principles and concepts of

tourism from the perspective of social science
theories. More specifically, the module aims to
examine the contribution of social science disciplines
to the understanding of tourism. In doing this, it
develops an understanding of the multidisciplinary
and interdisciplinary nature of tourism studies and
provides a theoretical and analytical basis for the
understanding of the complexities of tourism both as
an industry and as a social phenomenon.
Intended Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module you will be able to:
• understand the operating principles of the tourism industry in the form of
an organising framework (K)
• understand and analyse and critique key tourism social science theories
and models (C)
• be aware of and be able to critically evaluate the contribution to the
theoretical background to tourism from the perspective of key social
science disciplines, namely of (K, P, T):
• Geography
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Economics
• Political economy and tourism development
• Anthropology
• Ethics
• recognise the practical and policy implications of the key theories and
trends (K, C, T)
Lecture Schedule
Week 1 (11 Feb) Introduction & Tourism and Geography Prof Caroline Scarles

Week 2 (18 Feb) Tourism and Sustainable Human Resources Ms Anke Winchenbach

Week 3 (25 Feb) Tourism and Gender Prof Nigel Morgan

Week 4 (3 March) Tourism Economics Prof Gang Li

Week 5 (10 March) Sociology and Tourism Prof Scott Cohen

Week 6 (17 March) Ethics in Transport and Tourism Dr Nikolas Thomopoulos

Week 7 (24 March) Big Data and Tourism Dr Alector Ribeiro

Week 8 (28 April) Mobilities and Tourism Dr Michael Humbracht

Week 9 (5 May) Social Media, Tourism and the Sharing Economy Dr Brigitte Stangl

Week 10 (12 May) Immersive Technologies in Society Prof Caroline Scarles

Week 11 (19 May) Exam preparation Prof Caroline Scarles
Assessment
• 2 hour closed book exam

• 9 essay-style questions
• One question based on each lecture in Weeks 1-9
• Choose 2 to answer

• Each lecturer will provide a mock exam question and subject specific
reading list at end of each lecture

• Week 11 devoted to exam preparation

• Mock exam given in class
• Practice writing out mock answers to 2 topics of your choice
This is not tourism……beyond stereotypes

Pile, 2017

• Is tourism a discipline, like physics or chemistry?

• What are the rules for knowledge production in tourism?
• What are the main sites of knowledge production?
• What kinds of knowledge are produced in tourism?
Broadening Our Understanding….

•A definition of the full extent of the tourism's society and world can be
attempted:

• “The sum of the phenomena and relationships arising from the

interaction in generating and host regions, of tourists, business
suppliers, economies, governments, communities and
environments.” (Tribe, 1999)

•This enables the wide tourism world and the broad tourism society of the
phenomenon of tourism to emerge in the conceptualisation of the term

• SOCIAL – PEOPLE RATHER THAN OBJECTS

• SCIENCE – RIGOUR, VALIDITY, FEASIBILITY
 Geography &
Tourism

Prof Caroline Scarles

 Intended Learning Outcomes
• To understand the role of geography in tourism

• To explore historical & traditional geographical approaches

to tourism

• To explore contemporary geographical theoretical

approaches to tourism

• To apply contemporary geographical theories to Tourism

Marketing
 What does
geography means to
you
………..?
Traditional Tourism Geographies

“geography exists to study variations in phenomena from place to place, and its
value as an academic discipline depends on the extent to which it can clarify the
spatial relations and processes that might explain the features of an area or place”
(Hold-Jensen, 1999)

• Characteristics, connectedness, systems, practices and processes of the world

TOURISM & GEOGRAPHY

• Spatial separation of the everyday self from everyday habits and practices

“…place is…an intrinsic element of tourism, as all tourism involves some form of
relationship between people and places that they call ‘home’ and ‘not
home’’”
(Lew, 1999)
Traditional Tourism Geographies

Emphasis on:
• PLACE: exchange and alternation
“Tourism is essentially about people and places, the places that one group
of people leave, visit and pass through, the other groups who make their
trip possible and those that they encounter along the way. In a more
technical sense, tourism may be thought of as the relationships and
phenomena arising out of the journeys and temporary stays of people
travelling primarily for leave or recreation purposes” (Holden, 2006)

• RELATIONSHIPS: creating and maintaining connections between places

• SYSTEM: not just individuals, but “the sum of the phenomena and
relationships arising form the interaction in generating and (maintaining)
host regions, tourists, business suppliers, governments, communities and
environments” (Tribe, 1997).
Stepping Back in Time…….
Classical Civilisations
•Difficulties of travel
•Religious dimension to tourism
•776BC – first Olympic Games
•Roman Empire – infrastructure
improvements
•‘Escape the heat’ & ‘moral laxity’
Medieval Tourism
•Difficult and dangerous
•Religious pilgrimage
•Unfavourable practices!
•‘holy days’
Stepping Back in Time: The Grand Tour
“(the Grand Tour) has begun during Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, as a refined form of education,
a school to ‘finish’ participants by giving them
first-hand experience of classical lands”
(Brendon, 1991)

•Prestige, knowledge via first-hand experience

•Measuring, controlling, ownership
•Journals & Memoirs
• Smith, Adam: “An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations”
• Johann Joachim Winckelmann: pioneer of art
history
•But, by 1825……increase in ‘mass’
transportation & tourism as ‘site of hedonism’
Stepping Back in Time: The Grand Tour

• ‘picturesque’ & ‘sublime’

• Measuring replaced with aesthetic value
• ‘see’ rather than ‘study’
• Picturesque: “a certain way of selecting,
framing and representing views” (Löfgren,
1999)
• William Gilpin (1782): travel guides of Lake
District
• Desire to imitate nature through art
• Language of aesthetics & daydreaming
• Spectator-orientation
• First step in developing the tourist gaze
Stepping Back in Time: The Grand Tour

Like the dew on the mountain,

  Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
  Thou art gone, and forever!
Sir Walter Scott. Lady of the Lake. Canto iii. Stanza 16 .

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Wordsworth. "Daffodils" (1804)
Stepping Back in Time: Industrial Revolution

• 80% increase in urban population

• only 20% in 1801
• 1870 – 9hr working day ‘norm’
• ‘work’ & ‘leisure’ times
• Move away from the ‘land’
• Greater disposable income
• Regulated ‘bank holidays’ & 1938
‘Holiday with Pay’ Act & 12 days annual
leave
• Transport Revolution

http://sun.menloschool.org/~sportman/modernworld/chapter8/2004/ablock/cbullock/
Stepping Back in Time: Emergence of Mass
Tourism
• Thomas Cook
• 1841 – Leicester to Loughborough
• 1860’s: in first 9 years over 1million
tourists to Europe & America
• 1900’s: widening tourism throughout
the world
• Relatively recent phenomena
• Significant developments since 1950’s
Stepping Back in Time: Emergence of Mass Tourism

“mass tourism has a character and impact which

is different to most other forms of more selective
tourism. This stems from it being a form of mass
consumption” (Shaw & Williams, 2005)

Social & Economic Implications:

• Mass fordist consumption
• spatially polarised
• Constraints on supplies of key environments
• Concentrated economies of scale
• Diseconomies of scale, segmented markets
• Highly seasonal
Class Exercise 1: Holidays of the Past?
Contemporary Geographies of Tourism

Franklin & Crang (2001): “The Trouble With Travel and

Tourism Theory”:

• Tourism research dependent on small set of ‘core’ theorists

• Tourism fetishized as a ‘thing’: a product/behaviour
• Concentration on economic and environment aspects of
tourism
• Tourism restricted to a series of discrete, localised events
• Measured and defined through:
• typologies, sub-typologies, classifications, models, etc
Contemporary Geographies of Tourism

‘The Alternative’?.........
• No longer a specialist consumer product or mode of consumption
• Tourism is a central part of understanding social-(dis)organisation. Not a
discrete, bounded entity
• Tourism can no longer be conceived as what happens at ‘self-styled’
tourists sites when tourists travel away from ‘home’

Need to:
“view vacationing as a cultural laboratory where people have been able
to experiment with new aspects of identities, their social relations or their
interactions with nature and also to use the important cultural skills o
daydreaming and mind-travelling. Here is an arena in which fantasy ha
become an important social practice” (Löfgren, 1999: 6-7)
Contemporary Geographies of Tourism

• TOURISM AS……
• Everyday practice
• Mobilities, fluxes and flows
• Multisensual, embodied practice
• Performance
• Becoming
 Tourism as Everyday Practice

• Tendency to privilege the exotic and play down

banality
• To be a tourist is to adopt a whole new set of habits,
behaviours and practices
• “touristas vulgaris” (Franklin & Crang, 2001)

But…….
 Tourism as Everyday Practice

• “we are all tourists most of the time

whether we like it or not” (Urry, 1990)
• No longer required to leave behind
everyday practices
• Fluidity of tourism
 Tourism as Everyday Practice

The Extraordinary Everyday

“tourism of everyday life might be seen rather like

the expansion of flanerie….most people are now
alerted to , and routinely excited by, the flows of
global cultural materials all around them in a
range of locations and settings” (Franklin & Crang,
2001: 8)

• “the distinction between the everyday and holiday

(is) entirely blurred” (ibid.: 8)

•
 Tourism as Everyday Practice

• The Everyday in the Extraordinary

• Fusion of habitual and non-habitual
practices and behaviours
• Tourists use everyday practices to explore
and make sense of place

“much of our lives are spend doing what

tourists do, alongside tourists, and in what
we might call a touristic manner” (Franklin,
2003)
Tourism Mobilities and Flows

• Mind travel / couch travel

• Highly flexible and routinely
mobile
• Travel as commonplace
• ‘waiting spaces’ of tourism
• New social relations / ways
of living / affinities to
places / new forms of
consumption
• Virtual mobilities!
• Mobilities in marketing
 Multisensual, Embodied Practices
• Occularcentrism: Tourists as ‘all-
seeing authorities’

• Domination of the ‘tourist gaze’:

“visualisation of the travel
experience” (Adler, 1989, Craik,
1997, Urry, 2000)

• The ‘Tourist Gaze’ - Collective

view / Romantic view

• Tourists as semioticians in a
closed, self-perpetuating system
• Guided & signposted

But………
 Multisensual, Embodied Practices
• Cannot confine tourism to “(the)
visual repertoires of consumption”
(Franklin & Crang, 2001: 12)

• Sensuous geographies and NRT

• wholly multisensual encounters that
access lay and popular knowledges of
the tourist experience (Crouch, 2000a/b,
Crang, 1999)

• Bodies are central to tourism:

• Intensities of bodily encounters (Cloke &
Perkins, 1998)
• Jumping in with two feet rather than two eyes
(Veijola & Jokinen, 1994, 2002)
 Tourism as Performance

• Knowledge as a series of active doings (Coleman & Crang, 2002)

• Means of expressing identity (Goffman, 1971, 1993)
• Multiplicity of individualities & collective encounters
• Process of identity formation
• tourism as a series of “crumbled spaces” (Coleman & Crang, 2002: 10)
• Situating the self in a complex system of production and
consumption
Tourism as Performance

• Not one ‘staged’ experience, but practices

and process as creating places
“while dominant rules and principles often
hold sway, performances vary enormously
and depend upon the regulation of the stage
and the players and the relationship between
the players” (Edensor, 2000)

“we have to see performances of local identity

not simply as repetition of a given form, but
opening up the possibility (though not
inevitability) of an ‘emergent authenticity’”
(Coleman & Crang, 2002)
 Tourism as Performance
Homogenous:
Key, iconic sites, tourist focused
Heterogeneous stages:
mixed purpose, overlap between
local/tourist

Tourism as a fragmentary process –

continually unfolding, exploring and
encountering no absolute knowledges

“tourist places and performances are about

admitting the incompleteness of experience and
places…(the) performativity of place rather
than just performance in place”
(Coleman & Crang, 2002: 10)
 Tourism As Becoming

• Tourism as fluid and mobile process of becoming (Coleman &

Crang, 2002)

• No longer a set of identifiable experiences within concrete

boundaries
• Stakeholders in continual state of transition
• It is about tourists “constructing their own meaning of
tourism instead of fixing it as a defined or real entity” (Holden,
2006)

• Complex, open to change, holistic, infused with the

complexities of everyday life and real-life situations (Holden,
2006)
Marketing Peru

Understanding the complexities of

marketing practice, constructing &
‘filling in’ invisible spaces:

“(place is not) somehow just waiting

passively to be discovered and
mapped, but is something created in a
whole series of forms and at a whole
series of scales by social individuals”
(Halfacree, 2008)
Marketing Peru

• complex & active performances

• ‘staging’ destinations
• Producers as ‘directors’
• Process of enframing & enworlding
place
• Complex political power relationships
• Fusion of producers and tourists: active
performances
Negative Place Perceptions?
• Safety and security
• Poverty
• Ground infrastructure
• Penetration of internet access
• Sanitation facilities
• Price competitiveness
• Environmental sustainability
• Terrorism (El Sendor
Illuminoso)
• Drugs
• Language (Spanish, Quechuan)
The Classic Icon: Machu Picchu
Secondary Icons
An embodied, multisensual campaign
• History & Archaeological sites • Culture & Heritage
• Landscapes • Flora & Fauna

A Completely Sensual Experience……

• you need more than five senses to experience
Peru in its entirety. It goes beyond words!

• Encouraging tourists to actively, emotionally

imagine and connect themselves to the
destination

• Triggering emotions of the vibrant, rich and

sensually engaging experiences that await only
in Peru
Imagining Places – Anticipating Performances

• Imagined actors – embodied imaginings

• Outline clues to potential encounters
• Convey a set of habits, practices and behaviours to tourists
• Importance of human engagement
Imagining Places – Anticipating Performances

“she is looking at the person taking the

photograph who sees this perspective and
shes looking back at you, so you are now
taking the photos, you are there, so you are
sited in it, you are right there”… “you see
people and you think…yeah I love walking
along…in my shorts and a t-shirt with just a
light pack on my back…you know that would
be brilliant, smelling all the fresh flowers
and…no traffic” …“you know how good it
feels when you have said we are going to
take a break when we get to there, terrific
view and you are sat there and you are just
having your tea…you feel good because you
have exercised your body and it’s a pleasant
day, the view is good and you are in good
company…cant think of anything better” (Sarah)
Imagining Places – Anticipating Performances

• ‘3-D
effect’ through imagined
embodied, sensual engagement
• Imaginings experiences rather than
just waiting to go

“it’s a fairly instant feel for the place, a feel for the
colours, the culture”… “they (tourists) can almost
smell the place…almost hear it, feel it, touch it, the
whole thing, that’s the point”… “people…look in
brochures in different ways…some….have an interest
in…textiles and say ‘cor, wouldn’t it be amazing to
go and sit with these local women and…see what they
do….you want to smell the llama wool, you want to
feel the llama wool. Its all very touchy feely….this
little llama, you want to sort of cuddle it…you can
sort of transpose yourself…what they do in Star
Trek…beam me up” Tom, TO9)
Imagining Places – Anticipating Performances

• Series of active negotiations

• Anticipation as PREPARATION
• Construct and Enliven ‘phantom
landscapes’ (Travlou, 2002)
• Embrace alternative possibilities of
self
Imagining Places – Anticipating Performances

Mobilising place through marketing:

• Tangibility of promotional material: you can ‘touch’ places,
greater ownership and ‘taming’ of place
• Revisiting anticipations: Place becomes real and achievable

“I like the whole thing about travel brochures…its that…notion

of…daydreaming and being at home and being there and…you
can take it in the bath”… “(you) flick to the pictures and then you
know you are away and then you are (clicks fingers) and you are
at home”
Showing
experiences: It could
be you?

Putting the tourist

imagination into
practice
•human engagement
•subjective reflection
Peru: Land of Hidden Treasures
• The New Tourist: The Experience Seeker
• “we are trying to escape the ordinary, in order to
experience something different” (US tourist)
• “what moves us is the wish to discover a country on our
own and experience something authentic, impressive and
wonderful which surprises us with the unexpected”
(Japanese tourist)

Personal development Awareness of world

Acting not observing & self-realisation issues

Seeks challenges Educated, open minded

Curious, cheerful, positive
Ethical and social spirit
Cultural kudos
Wants the authentic
Aware of impacts
Class Exercise 2:
Peru - Land of Hidden Treasures

The Legacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7yKBwsN5ZlQ#t=34

What do you think are the key embodied messages that PromPeru are trying to convey to potential
tourists in this campaign?
• Social Media
• Virtual mobilities
• In 1 year
increase to over
441,308 likes.
• Now, 1.9m
followers
• Links to twitter
Does everyone “Live The Legend”?
• Competing Discourses of:
• Selling
• Politics of representation
• Newspaper articles
• Magazine articles
• TV documentaries and travel shows
• Tour operator promotional material:
– Brochures
– Websites
– Pamphlets
– Newspapers/magazines
http://www.kuoni.co.uk
Model Answer for Exam

Drawing upon contemporary geographical theories of

tourism, discuss the ways in which tourism can be
considered as a directed staging of destinations.

Marking Criteria  
Understanding of contemporary geographical theory in tourism /45
Critical analysis of contemporary geographical theory as a framework for /35
understanding tourism
Conclusions /10
Structure/Presentation /10
Total 100
Some Final Thoughts……

• Contemporary geographies of tourism help us

understand tourism as a series of complex
practices and processes
• Interplays of agency and power arise throughout
the tourist experience
• Politics infiltrate the production and
consumption of tourism products
Reading
Essential Reading
•Franklin, A. & Crang, M. (2001): “The Trouble With Travel and Tourism Theory”, in Tourist Studies, Vol.1(1):
5-22.
Recommended and Further Reading
•Cloke, P. & Perkins, H. (2005). “Cetacean Performance and Tourism In Kaikoura, New Zealand”
Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 23: 903-924.
•Coleman, S & Crang, M. (2002): Tourism: Between Place and Performance, Blackwells Publishing, Oxford.
•Crang, M. (1997a). "Picturing Practices: research through the tourist gaze." Progress in Human Geography
21(3): 359-373.
•Crang, M & Travlou, P (2001): “The city and topologies of memory.” Environment and planning D: Society
and Space, 19: 161-177.
•Crouch, D. (2000a). “Introduction: Encounters in Leisure/Tourism”, in Crouch, D (ed). Leisure/Tourism
Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, Routledge Publishing, London: 1-15.
•Crouch, D. (2000b). “Places Around Us: Embodied Lay Geographies in Leisure and Tourism.” Leisure
Studies 19: 63-76.
•Edensor, T. (1998). “Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site”, Routledge: London.
•Edensor, T. (2000). “Staging tourism: tourists as performers'‘. Annals of Tourism Research 27: 322-344
•Jokinen, E. & Veijola, S. (2003). “Mountains and landscapes: towards embodied visualities'', in Visual
Culture and Tourism (eds). D Crouch & N Lubbren (Berg, Oxford: 259-278
•Perkins, H & Thorns, D C. (2001). “Gazing or performing?: Reflections on Urry's Tourist Gaze in the context
of contemporary experience in the Antipodes'‘. International Sociology 16: 185-204.
•Scarles, C. (2009). Becoming Tourist: Renegotiating the visual in the tourist experience”. Environment and
Planning D 27: 465-488.