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as well as with respect to concepts of destination or place competitiveness (Hall, 2007a).
Concepts of political ecology have also been utilised to examine tourism and development
processes in island destinations (Gössling, 2003a, 2003b). However, while issues of politics
and power have formed a signifi cant backdrop to resource management and policy and
planning debates in tourism there has perhaps not been as much overt critical connection
between theoretically grounded studies of power and tourism planning as might be expected.
Tourism planning and places
Tourism planning, along with associated research on the impacts of tourism, has long been a
major applied contribution of geographers to the study of tourism (e.g. Murphy, 1985).
Recent years have witnessed not only new editions or at least versions of a number of signifi -
cant textbooks (e.g. Hall, 2008a; Murphy and Murphy, 2004) but also the development of
new fi elds of tourism planning which in themselves have been infl uenced by theoretical
developments in urban and regional planning (e.g. Berke, 2002; Healey, 1997) as well as by
the business planning literature (e.g. Bramwell and Lane, 2000; Faulkner, 2003). Long-
standing planning debates, such as issues of participation and community-based tourism
(Blackstock, 2005) and growth management (Gill, 2004), continue to be featured in the
literature (Bramwell, 2004b; Dredge and Jenkins, 2007; Singh
et al.
, 2003; Tosun, 2005;
Tosun and Timothy, 2003), even if the discourse at times utilises that of business and focuses
on 'stakeholders' and 'visions' rather than 'public' or 'interests' (Caffyn and Jobbins, 2003;
Murphy and Murphy, 2004; Smith, 2003). Such a change in discourse is a refl ection not only
of the exchange of different disciplinary languages as tourism geographers locate in business
schools but is also refl ective of some of the multidisciplinary approaches that occur within
tourism, which often regard organisational and public interests as being one and the same
thing without adequate appreciation of issues of scale or relevance.
The mix of business and regional studies discourses can be seen, for example, in areas
such as knowledge management (Ruhanen and Cooper, 2004), networks, clustering (Michael
et al.
, 2007), competitiveness (Hall, 2007a), and innovation (Hall and Williams, 2008), as
well as the wider fi eld of tourism and entrepreneurship (Ateljevic and Page, 2009). Much of
tourism studies has tended to utilise rather narrow economic or business approaches towards
such subjects without adequately recognising the conceptual diffi culties in transferring
concepts from an organisational or commercial setting to a spatial and social context (Hall,
2007a). This is not to suggest that geographers cannot contribute to understanding tourism
businesses, rather it is to suggest that they tend to emphasise the embeddedness of business and
entrepreneurial behaviour in place and context (Getz and Carlsen, 2000; Getz and Nilsson,
2004; Getz and Petersen, 2005; Hall, 2004; Hall and Rusher, 2004; Ioannides and Petersen,
2003; Page
et al.
, 1999; Rogerson, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c) rather than see the fi rm or entrepre-
neur acting in isolation. Indeed it can be argued that tourism geographers take issues of busi-
ness location and the production of space far more seriously than business and management as
they regard location as far more than a mere factor if production with an economic value is
attached to it (Connell and Page, 2005).
In some instances, ongoing research studies of the same locale (e.g. Page and Thorn, 1997,
2002) highlight the continuity in problems associated with sustainable tourism planning
where national tourism growth objectives may not be congruent with the impacts this causes
in spite of rhetoric associated with a sustainable tourism development (however it is inter-
preted): here the key questions are: sustainable for who, and sustainable for the resource base
or the economy? Similarly, geographers have also contributed to a better understanding of the
