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Actor network theory and the 'relational turn': implications for tourism
Responding to Judd's (2006) position, d'Hauteserre (2006) believes actor network theory
(ANT) is theoretically superior to commodity chains for disentangling the complexities of
tourism as a production system. For her, the commodity chain framework unnecessarily
prioritises productionist relationships while ANT is best suited for understanding how
production and consumption are mediated in creating tourism experiences.
Johanesson (2005) was one of the fi rst tourism geographers to highlight the utility of ANT
in an analysis of Iceland's cultural heritage tourism. He argues that ANT's focus on relational
materiality and its ability to accommodate multiple relational orderings and diverse forms of
spatialities into the analysis make it ideally suited for analysing tourism's economic and mate-
rial aspects. According to Johanesson (2005: 139), 'we cannot know if the tourists are more
important in shaping the tourist place than the fi rms and local people promoting it or what
role natural attractions play in the particular networks until we have traced the specifi c
network practices and the relations out of which tourism emerges.' Additionally, van der
Duim (2007) utilises ANT to re-conceptualise tourism through 'tourismscapes' to improve
understanding of human-spatial relations.
ANT constitutes part of a larger 'relational turn' in economic geography, placing
its analytical focus 'on the complex nexus of relations among actors and structures that
effect dynamic changes in the spatial organisation of economic activities' (Yeung, 2005: 37).
Given the complex tourism commodity chain, the variegated institutional structures
and the multiplicity of individual interactions shaping the tourism experience, evidently
relational economic geography has some application in this context. Yeung (2005)
stresses that relational geography contributes to a better understanding of industrial
districts, clusters and learning regions by focusing on key relational assets in local and
regional development. Additionally he suggests that relational geography improves our
comprehension of the global-local nexus, the differentiated production of organisational
space and path dependency by focusing on relational embeddedness, ANT and global
production chains. Three basic components of the relational approach, namely contextuality,
path-dependency and contingency (Bathelt, 2006), can be introduced to consider their
effects on policy implementation relating to tourism. Examples include policies affecting
the built environment (what gets built; in what form and function; where; for what
purpose?) and the physical environment (what is preserved, re-shaped, or destroyed; for
what purposes?).
Cynics suggest that a relational economic geography of tourism yields nothing more than
descriptive categories reeking of anti-essentialism and, therefore, lacks explanatory power.
Despite such caveats, relational geography offers tourism geographers a fruitful approach for
negotiating the endless dilemma of whether tourism is forged by production or consumption
processes. Ateljevic and Doorne (2004: 298) suggest a broader analysis of cultural circuits of
tourism, regarding 'producers as “consumers” and consumers as “producers” who “feed off ”
each other in endless cycles of re-consumption'. Such an approach might lend itself well to the
broader theoretic provided by relational economic geography.
Tourism industry clusters, innovation and labour: a return to
work and production?
Although the 'critical turn' in tourist studies has elevated our understanding of the economic
geography of tourism, a considerable body of work also exists, focusing on tourism from a
