Tourism in Perspective - Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies - page 17

Geographical Approach

Geography is a wide-ranging discipline, so it is natural that geographers should be interested in
tourism and the spatial aspects of travel. The geographer specializes in the study of location,
environment, climate, landscape, and their economic aspects. The geographer's approach to tourism
sheds light on the location of tourist areas, the movements of people created by tourism locales, the
changes that tourism brings to the landscape in the form of tourism facilities, dispersion of tourism
development, physical planning, and economic, social, and cultural problems. Because tourism
touches geography at so many points, geographers have investigated the area more thoroughly
than have scholars in many other disciplines. Because the geographers ' approach is so encompassing —

dealing with land use, economic aspects, demographic impacts, and cultural problems a study of

their contributions is highly recommended. Recreational geography is a common course title used by
geographers studying this specialty. Because tourism, leisure, and recreation are so closely related, it is
necessary to search for literature under all these titles to discover the contributions of various fields.
Geographers were instrumental in starting both the Journal of Leisure Research and Leisure Sciences.
Another journal, Tourism Geographies, was launched in February 1999 with the aim of providing a
forum for the presentation and discussion of geographic perspectives on tourism and tourism-related
areas of recreation and leisure studies.

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Interdisciplinary Approaches

Tourism embraces virtually all aspects of our society. We have cultural and heritage tourism, which
calls for an anthropological approach. Because people behave in different ways and travel for different
reasons, it is necessary to use a psychological approach to determine the best way to promote and
market tourism products. Because tourists cross borders and require passports and visas from
government of ces, and because most countries have government-operated tourism development
departments, we find that political institutions are involved, thus calling for a political science
approach. Any industry that becomes an economic giant affecting the lives of many people attracts
the attention of legislative bodies (along with that of the sociologists, geographers, economists, and
anthropologists), which create the laws, regulations, and legal environment in which the tourist

industry must operate; so we also have a legal approach. The great importance of transportation

suggests passenger transportation as another approach. The fact simply is that tourism is so vast, so
complex, and so multifaceted that it is necessary to take a number of approaches to studying the field,
each geared to a somewhat different task or objective. Figure 1.3 illustrates the interdisciplinary nature
of tourism studies and their reciprocity and mutuality. The Annals of Tourism Research, an inter-
disciplinary social sciences journal, is another publication that should be on the serious tourism

student ' s reading list.

The Systems Approach

What is really needed to study tourism is a systems approach. A system is a set of interrelated
components coordinated to form a uni ed whole and organized to accomplish a set of goals. It
integrates all approaches into a comprehensive method dealing with both micro and macro-issues.
It examines the tourist rm s competitive environment, its market, its results, its linkages with other

institutions, the consumer, and the interaction of the firm with the consumer. In addition, a systems
approach takes a macro-viewpoint and examines the entire tourism system of a country, state, or area
and how it operates within and relates to other systems, such as legal, political, economic, and social
systems.

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