Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE ISSUE OF SCALE: EMPIRICISM, PARADIGMS AND
TRANSFORMATIONS
The geographer's preoccupation with place, space and environment, all of which feature
in many of the seminal studies of geography (e.g. Haggett 1979), reveals a preoccupation
with one fundamental concept—namely scale (Del Casino and Hanna 2000). For the
geographer, it is the scale at which phenomena are studied, analysed and explained which
differentiates it from many other areas of social science. The ability to recognise
phenomena at different geographical scales ranging from global, national, regional
through to local scales and the interactions of processes and change at each scale have
traditionally been the hallmark of a positivist-empiricist geography (see Johnston 1991
for more detail). In many of the classic studies reviewed in the next section, it is clear that
Aitchison's (1999) critique of geographical contributions to leisure and recreation
research has been overwhelmingly modelled on the empiricist-positivist mode of
analysis, where the route to scientific explanation closely follows the positivist models
developed in Anglo-American geography in the period 1945 to 1970. The preoccupation
with building and testing models in human geography and their application to tourism
and recreation (see D.G.Pearce 1995a for a review) has largely mirrored trends in the
main discipline, while new developments in behavioural geography, humanistic
geography and, more recently, cultural geography have only belatedly begun to permeate
the consciousness of tourism and recreation geographers.
What began to develop during the 1990s and has now gathered momentum in tourism
and recreation geography is the evolution of new paradigms (i.e. ways of thinking about
and conceptualising research problems). As a result, developments in the 'new cultural
geography' have begun to permeate, transform and redefine the way in which
geographers approach tourism and recreation. Crouch (1999a) conceptualises leisure and
tourism as an encounter, in the anthropological tradition, noting the geographer's
contribution to this perspective, where the concern is between people, between people
and space and the contexts of leisure/tourism. However, what is a fundamental
redefinition of geographers' concern with space is the manner in which space is viewed
and contextualised. Crouch (1999a) argued that space may be something material,
concrete, metaphorical or imagined questioning the traditional notion of location and
space, where activity is located. This new conceptualisation is reflected in that The
country and the city, the garden, the beach, the desert island, and the street hold powerful
metaphorical attention in significant areas of leisure/tourism' (Crouch 1999a:4).
This concern with conceptions from cultural geography, where space is something
metaphorical, whereby it is something that shapes people's enjoyment of leisure/tourism,
derives much of its origins from humanistic geography (Relph 1976, 1981) and cultural
studies. For example, Squire (1994) argued that leisure and recreation practices are a
reflection of the way in which people make maps of meaning of their everyday word.
This concern with the individual or group, the human experience and the symbolic
meaning of leisure and tourism in space has opened a wide range of geographical avenues
for research in tourism and recreation. For example, Cloke and Perkins (1999) examined
representations of adventure tourism, exploring many of the issues of meaning and
symbols.
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