Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
participants were seen to carefully manage their stake and interest (Willig,
2003), and were able to deny responsibility. Tourism discourses are often care-
fully phrased to highlight personal and societal benefits, while ignoring
negative impacts (Becken, 2007; Gössling and Peeters, 2007), which 'legit-
imizes
tourists'
desire
to
participate
in
global
mobility'
(Becken,
2007,
p364).
In research on slow travel, people also use rhetoric to criticize modes of
transport, both to justify their choice of mode (by explaining a problem with
air or car travel), but also, and perhaps more surprisingly, to criticize the slow
travel mode used (Dickinson et al, 2010b). In the latter case, Dickinson et al
(2010b) interpret this as an attempt to defend self-concept as people raise typ-
ical criticisms of their chosen form of transport before such issues can be
raised by others. In discourse terms this is known as 'stake inoculation'
(Horton-Salway, 2001). Discursive strategies can also be adapted to suit a par-
ticular context; for example, Dickinson et al (2010b) show how discourses of
travel time and travel cost were varyingly used to justify taking more time in
a slow travel context and flying in another. Discourse analysis also provides
an avenue through which to explore travel identity that is discussed later in
this chapter. While the debate about the value of a discourse or social repre-
sentations perspective will no doubt continue in social psychology, both
perspectives potentially provide useful insight into the tourism, transport and
climate change debate.
Tourism practices
Within sociology, a social practices perspective has recently come to the fore
as a means to examine consumption (see, for example, Warde, 2005). A social
practices perspective departs from the predominantly individual perspective of
consumption which assumes that individuals, given a range of travel choices
and information on those choices, have the freedom to make appropriate
choices. The preceding discussion on travel motivations, for example, has
taken so far an individual perspective based on social psychological models
that tend to privilege the role of attitudes and values in people's environmen-
tal behaviour decisions. However, Southerton et al (2004b) argue that wider
forces stimulate consumption and that individuals have little or no alternative
to consume if they are to participate in society. They suggest that contrary to
the perspective that the consumer is sovereign, consumers are not autonomous
individuals but:
most consumption is collectively and normatively derived, and
conducted routinely in the context of socially differentiated con-
ventions of practice. Strategies for changing patterns of
consumption depend ultimately on the transformation of prac-
tices. (Southerton et al, 2004b, p33)
Several recent studies highlight the inertia within the individualized
actor/agent perspective (Becken, 2007; Bickerstaff et al, 2008; Randles and
