Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Encouragement of the tourism sector might overwhelm the small-scale nature
of development in their localities, especially in relation to their heritage and
gastronomy. Nevertheless, authors argue that there is a place for tourism in
Cittáslow towns; there are linkages that can be progressed to good effect.
The authors translate a paragraph of the work of Frykman to capture the
essence of time and spatial distance, central to what he termed slow tourism,
as being:
An indicator of a wider process - a reaction in that time and
space is compressed in the fast society. The hunting of seconds
tends to wipe out the peculiarities of place and persons …
Therefore, places in contemporary Europe have put their conti-
nuity and history to the front. Slowness has become one of the
many ways to express such peculiarity. (Frykman, 2000, p37)
The word 'fast' is recurrent in the tourism and hospitality literature. The
analysis of the fast food concept by Ritzer (1993) explains why the quest for
rationality, efficiency, control and predictability in the hospitality sector may
not necessarily be beneficial for society. Ritzer's book, more importantly,
offers a reflection on the cultural drift towards fast as the dominant way of
life in North American society. The approach, exemplified by the McDonald's
organization, is symbolic of several wider dehumanizing processes pervading
society:
McDonaldization refers to the process by which the principles
of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and
more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world.
(Ritzer, 1993, p3)
This influential work has spawned a literature on the word 'fast' that focuses
on the cultural processes which ensue in tourism (Bryman, 1999; Weaver,
2005). It presents a vision of tourism which is increasingly disengaged from
its roots in education, religion and exploration (Walton, 2009). It is sympto-
matic, it is argued, of a tourism that is 'sucking the difference out of the
difference' (MacCannell, 1989). In the context of travel, Høyer (2009) argues
that conference tourism is a classic example; in his view, it is a corridor of
nothingness that results in little meaning and heavy environmental impact.
The outcome, he notes, is part of the process of 'grobalization', a term first
introduced by Ritzer (2004). This refers to the organizational need to increase
sales and profits without recourse to factors such as local culture in produc-
tion and environmental externalities in costing structures. It has an affiliation
with the concept of McDonaldization:
Grobalization leads to an increasing dominance of nothing in
the form of non-places, non-things, non-people, and non-service,
all at the expense of something on a nothing-something contin-
uum … Non-places of late-modernity are, for example, major
