Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Another tension exists between the disciplinary drives inherent in research assessment
exercises (via the subject scope given to panels) and the increasingly multiple disciplinary
nature of the academic units within which geographers are located. For example, in Australia
and New Zealand universities as of the beginning of 2008 there are now only two depart-
ments of geography remaining as separate units. All other departments have been combined
with environmental studies or sciences, anthropology, development studies, natural resource
management, planning or geology. Similar pressures exist in Europe and North America as
university administrations seek greater management effi ciencies. Such structural change may
well have long-term effects on the skill mix sought by such departments. The multidiscipli-
nary nature of many tourism departments, especially in business schools, may also downplay
spatial skills, with only Nordic business schools tending to have departments, sections of or
strong linkages to economic and social geography as part of their academic structures. Add to
this the debates in universities over the critical mass necessary for a discipline to function
academically (and fi nancially), and geography per se is more inclined to give way to more
multidisciplinary groupings.
Therefore, it is not surprising to fi nd that much of the mobility and migration of spatially
trained geographers to business school settings has been accompanied by a growth in the
subject of tourism studies outside of the normal boundaries of what was identifi ed institution-
ally as geography. Ironically, at a time when geography has seen challenges to its position as
a subject, there has been a relative failure to embrace an opportunity available to grow its
signifi cant role in academic portfolios of universities. The perceptions of geography depart-
ments in the 1980s and 1990s of tourism as a vocational and applied area devoid of theory and
scholarly pursuits are a misnomer as this chapter indicates. Geographers have provided one
of the principal subjects and several of the pillars supporting the intellectual development of
tourism since the 1970s, but especially in the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s, refl ected in
the research outputs reviewed here.
The loss of spatiality in some areas is interestingly matched by its adoption by others. As
noted above, the 'mobile turn' in sociology has been substantially infl uenced by time
geography while spatial systems approaches such as GIS now often have their own depart-
ments or units separate to that of a geography department. Indeed, it could be argued that
there is increased convergence between some areas of tourism geography and the sociology
and anthropology of tourism as well as cultural and postcolonial studies. In contrast, the
increasingly substantial contribution of geographers to understanding tourism's role in
regional development, entrepreneurship and innovation is arguably still retaining a strong
emphasis on place and space.
Tourism geography is therefore caught within some of the broader tensions that exist
within the fi eld of tourism studies as a whole with respect to the reasons why not only
research is conducted but also that the academic institution of tourism exists at all (Coles and
Hall, 2006; Hall and Page, 2006). We can conclude that a shift has occurred from Pearce's
(1979) geography of tourism to geographies of tourism but with an important caveat: that the
defi nition of what constitutes the geographical focus of tourism has been expanded substan-
tially with the wider contributions from other social science subjects, especially sociology and
cultural studies.
The geography of tourism is therefore at a crossroads. On the one hand, a number of the
research areas exist within the subject which depict it at its strongest, such as human mobility,
crisis management, conservation and biosecurity, destination planning and management,
regional development, international business, poverty reduction and PPT, and GEC. These
are all regarded as key issues for the future of international tourism management in the next
