Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In view of its great and increasing economic import, the probable
significance of tourism in diffusing information and attitudes, and its even
greater future potential for modifying patterns of migration, balance of
payments, land use, and general socio-economic structure with the
introduction of third-generation jet transport and other innovations in
travel, it is startling to discover how little attention the circulation of
tourists has been accorded by geographers, demographers, and other
social scientists.
(Williams and Zelinsky 1970:549)
Similarly, Mercer (1970:261) commented: 'Until recently geographers have had
surprisingly little to say about the implications of growing leisure time in the affluent
countries of the world. Even now, leisure still remains a sadly neglected area of study in
geography.' Nevertheless, there were, and to some extent still are, significant regional
variations in the focus on leisure, recreation and tourism. For example, Butler (2004:146)
noted that a large body of research on recreation and leisure was undertaken in North
America by geographers and non-geographers alike, although 'Until the 1980s it was
hard to find much research on tourism conducted in North America by geographers,
except for the work of British ex-patriots (Butler, Marsh, Murphy and Wall, for example)
and their students'.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of influential texts and monographs
appeared in the geography literature (e.g. Lavery 1971c; Cosgrove and Jackson 1972;
Coppock and Duffield 1975; Matley 1976; H.Robinson 1976; Coppock 1977a;
D.G.Pearce 1981, 1987a; Mathieson and Wall 1982; Patmore 1983; Pigram 1983;
S.L.J.Smith 1983a), giving the appearance of a healthy area of research. Indeed, a
number of extremely significant concepts in the tourism literature, such as a tourism area
life cycle (Butler 1980) and the notion of a tourism system (Board et al. 1978) emerged
from geographers during this period. For example, in their 1972 study of leisure
behaviour in the Dartmoor National Park, Board et al. commented:
The tourism system then consists of concentrations of visitors (nodes) and
road networks (links) set within areas of varying character: the
relationships between them are expressed in terms of flows of people.
Researchers set out to examine a tourist system in inner Dartmoor…by
making observations at all major nodes, several minor nodes and three
sets of links in the network, here called circuits.
The information collected related to three basic properties of the
system—the characteristics of the visitors, the activities they carry out at
these various places and between various places within it.
(Board et al. 1978:46)
However, despite the growth in publications by geographers on tourism and recreation,
concerns were being expressed about the geography of tourism. In the introduction to a
special issue of
Annals of Tourism Research
on the geography of tourism, L.S.Mitchell
(1979:235) observed that 'the geography of tourism is limited by a dearth of published
research in geographical journals, the relatively few individuals who actively participate
