Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
between disciplines. For example, a key point of debate in relation to the TALC is the relative
importance of marketing and geographical/spatial ideas regarding life cycles, with several
chapters arguing that the spatial dimensions of the TALC have not been suffi ciently appreci-
ated in the majority of writing on the TALC (Coles, 2006; Hall, 2006b; Papatheodorou,
2006) nor the wider debates that occurred within geography as to the signifi cance of model
building and the philosophy of knowledge in which the TALC should be seen. These are
signifi cant issues, as a case can be argued that its relative lack of predictive capacity without
an understanding of its spatial dimension may mean that it does not function as a model that
can contribute to theory development in an orthodox sense.
In fact, the TALC is much more widely cited in tourism journals than it is in geography
journals, even though it was originally published in the
Canadian Geographer
. Also of signifi -
cance for the present chapter is the wide range of applications and contexts in which the
TALC has been placed in the Butler volumes, including authenticity, coastal resorts, economic
geography, entrepreneurship, heritage, island states, national parks, natural areas, resort
restructuring, retailing, rural areas, spatial interaction, sustainable tourism and urban tourism.
To an extent, they also refl ect many of the major themes of geographical research in tourism
overall (see also Hall and Page, 2006; Shaw and Williams, 2002; Williams, 1998) and link to
a long-standing interest of geographers on explaining and describing why, how and where
people move to engage in leisure, tourism and other forms of voluntary movement.
One of the more interesting and theoretically informed developments in tourism has been
the engagement of geographers in the development of concepts of mobility (e.g. Bell and
Ward, 2000; Burns and Novelli, 2008; Coles
et al.
, 2004, 2005; Coles and Hall, 2006;
Frändberg and Vilhelmson, 2003; Hall, 2005b, 2005c), which, although often associated
with the work of sociologists such as Urry (2000), also has a substantial spatial dimensions and
academic legacy dating back to the 1950s (Hall, 2005d; see also Gale,
Chapter 4
and Duncan,
Chapter 14
of this volume). Indeed, both the sociological and spatial traditions of mobility
studies have drawn upon time geography (Carlstein
et al.
, 1978) as both method and inspira-
tion (e.g. Bærenholdt
et al.
, 2004). Time geography (see Shoval,
Chapter 22
of this volume)
examines 'the ways in which the production and reproduction of social life depend upon
knowledgeable human subjects tracing out routinised paths over space and through time,
fulfi lling particular projects whose realisations are bounded by inter-locking capability,
coupling and steering constraints' (Gregory, 1985: 297), and has been infl uential in the devel-
opment of ideas of structuration (Giddens, 1984) as well as in understanding travel and
economic fl ows and patterns.
The 'mobile turn' (or 'mobilities turn') in sociology has been likened by Urry (2004) to a
'new social physics'. However, Hall (2005d) argued that in developing a new social physics
the contributions of 'old' social physics should not be ignored (see Stewart, 1950), suggesting
that there were ways of integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches to human mobility,
as well as reiterating the suggestions of Coles
et al.
(2004, 2005) that there was a need to
develop a coherent approach to understanding the range of mobilities undertaken by indi-
viduals, not just the category of tourists. From such a position tourism and associated mobili-
ties need to be understood over an individual's and co-decision-maker's lifecourse as well as
over the totality of a trip. 'Without such an approach . . . we are forever doomed to see tour-
ism's effects only at the destination scale rather than as part of a broader understanding of
mobility' (Hall, 2008a: 15).
Indeed, Hall (2005c) argues that if the analogue with physics is to be maintained then
macro-level quantitative accounts of patterns of human mobility can be regarded as classical
Newtonian physics, in which the description and prediction of travel fl ows and patterns can
