Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tourism in business schools with many focusing on business issues (e.g. see many of the
contributions in Coles and Hall's (2008) volume on international business and tourism),
although environment and place remain signifi cant themes. For example, in the UK, the
graduate tourism programme that used to be based in the Department of Geography at the
University of Exeter is now based in the Business School, while in Australia and New Zealand
a number of business school tourism programmes are staffed by geographers. As Hall and
Page (2006) observed, themselves both now located in business schools, the growing move-
ment of many geographers away from departments of geography may potentially serve to
weaken the fi eld of the geography of tourism in the long run, especially as institutional
pressures may mean that such individuals are not encouraged to maintain contact with the
fi eld through research and publishing.
The diffi culties encountered by tourism geographers are arguably faced by a number of
geography's sub-disciplines ( Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). As Janice Monk, then President of
the Association of American Geographers, noted, 'it seems unlikely that the movement
towards interdisciplinary and hybrid units will diminish in the near future. While remaining
vigilant in supporting geography as a distinctive fi eld, we also need to pursue efforts that will
permit geographers to thrive in new territories and to learn to build and sustain interdiscipli-
nary ties' (Monk, 2001: 4); for example, in areas such as geographical information systems
(GIS) and techniques of spatial analysis. Undoubtedly many of the main contemporary issues
with which tourism management deals (e.g. environmental change, destination management,
human mobility) are related to geography. Yet disciplinary relations and spaces are, as Monk
herself acknowledged, shaped by local academic politics and funding opportunities. Indeed,
the closing or structuring of academic space has been a signifi cant area of discussion by geog-
raphers with respect to the role of various national research assessment exercises (Coles and
Hall, 2006; Hall, 2005a; McKercher, 2005; Page, 2003, 2005a), in which tourism has usually
been 'lost' in the interdisciplinary spaces between business and social science disciplines or
ha s been ex pl icit ly t ied i n w ith busi ness d iscipl i nes. For ex a mple, i n the ca se of New Zea la nd 's
Performance Based Research Funding, tourism is assessed as part of the marketing and
tourism category within business and management. Such a situation signifi cantly problema-
tises the place of tourism geography in institutional terms. Should researchers in countries
which have national research performance assessments submit to social science or business
studies panels, or in some cases environmental science or sports? Regardless of which panels
submissions are made to, tourism historically may not have been favourably considered as an
appropriate subject of academic study and tourism journals may not be known by members
of review panels, particularly given the relatively limited numbers of tourism and even geog-
raphy journals in bibliometric analyses such as ISI (Hall, 2006a; Paasi, 2005). Indeed, such a
situation is mirrored in Gibson's (2008) comment with respect that
Tourism geography has its own geography of production and circulation, variegated
differently than for other parts of geography. It still struggles to pervade publishing
in 'global' journals, and yet, when eventually appearing elsewhere, tourism
geography appears to be on the whole more cosmopolitan. To me this seems an
important - even defi ning - contradiction of tourism in contemporary geography.
(Gibson, 2008: 418)
Table 2.1
indicates the publication of tourism-oriented articles in selected leading inter-
national geography journals from 1998 to 2007. Although
Progress in Human Geography
had
not published any tourism-specifi c papers in the time per iod exam ined it should be noted that
