INTRODUCTION - The Geography of Tourism and Recreation - page 35

disciplines currently in existence are contained within boundaries
established by earlier communities of scholars. The boundaries are porous
so that disciplines interact. Occasionally the boundaries are changed,
usually through the establishment of a new discipline that occupies an
enclave within the preexisting division of academic space.
(Johnston 1991:9)

However, to borrow the title of a leading geography textbook of the 1980s, Geography
Matters! (Massey and Allen 1984), it matters because concepts at the heart of geography
such as spatiality, place, identity, landscape and region are critical, not only to the
geography of tourism and recreation but also to tourism and recreation studies as a whole.
Indeed, the growing interest in the concept of mobility among the social sciences (e.g.
Bell and Ward 2000; Urry 2000) is testimony to the long focus that tourism and
recreation geographers have had on leisure mobility (Hall 2005a). In commenting on
work undertaken by geographers in the tourism field, Britton (1991) noted that they have

been reluctant to recognise explicitly the capitalistic nature of the
phenomenon they are researching…. This problem is of fundamental
importance as it has meant an absence of an adequate theoretical
foundation for our understanding of the dynamics of the industry and the
social activities it involves.

(Britton 1991:451)

However, such a criticism may be made of tourism and recreation studies overall (Hall
1994).

INSIGHT: The geography of tourism and recreation outside the Anglo-American
tradition
While this topic concentrates on the geography of tourism and recreation within the
Englishspeaking world, it is important to note that the growing interest of geographers in
tourism and recreation is also occurring within other geographical traditions. The
internationalisation of the tourism and recreation academic community through such
organisations as the IGU Study Group on Tourism, the growth of student and academic
exchanges within the European Union and the use of English as the international
language of scholarship has also meant a growing interchange between native English-
speaking and English as a second language scholars. Academic journals in English are
now increasingly being produced in countries where English is not the native tongue, for
example, Anatolia in Turkey and Tourism Today in Cyprus. In addition, several tourism
geographers, most notably Doug Pearce, who undertook his doctoral studies in France,
have had the capacity to bring non-English literature to the attention of Englishspeaking
geographers (most significantly his topics Tourism Development (1981, 1989) and
Tourism Today (1995a)).
In examining the tourism and recreation literature of a number of languages and
countries, it may be noted that the growth of publishing on tourism and recreation in
English is mirrored in these other traditions along with some of the disciplinary