Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
appeared in
Annals
that could only be of interest and value to those in the specifi c discipline
of the author, rather than to the more general audience of tourism scholars at large. Perhaps
the same comment can be made of some articles in
Tour ism G eographies
but at least that journal
has a specifi c disciplinary focus, as does
Tour ism E conomic s
, for example.
The title of this chapter was picked before I had paid much attention to the theme of the
Council for Australian University Tourism and Hospitality Education (CAUTHE) confer-
ence held in Surfers Paradise in 2008, which also used the controversial, and therefore prob-
ably successful, advertising slogan of 'Where the bloody hell are you?' The fact that there
were sessions at that conference on where tourism (and hospitality) research was going
suggests that insecurity in this fi eld is global. On the subject of the relationship and impor-
tance of applied versus industry-related research to academic research there was also consider-
able concern. I agreed ver y much with the comments of one panellist (Moscardo, 2008), who
argued that despite the major funding of tourism research by industry in Australia, the
industry relevance of tourism research should not drive the focus of that research. She argued
that it was the academic content and value that should be of primary concern and focus and I
agree very much that if good research is produced but then not used by industry, that is the
industry's loss. While published academic work can be written in such a way that it is indeci-
pherable even to most other academics, let alone industry employees, to ignore most if not all
academic work because this sometimes happens is a poor and unacceptable excuse. Drug
companies do not expect a medical researcher to reduce innovative research results to 'I have
a new pill that makes people better', which is the level that some elements in the tourism
industry appear to want academic research to be reduced to. Tourism is a real industry, but
that does not mean that all research produced by academics has to have applied value to that
industry; otherwise we should stop supervising PhDs and go to DBAs. On the other hand, if
we do not produce anything that has potential value to industry and government, then we
should not be surprised if they do not come to our meetings nor fund our research.
Part of the problem of tourism research in general perhaps lies in the multidisciplinary
nature of the subject and the lack of clear direction in research. It is a little like the situation
outlined by Tim Burton (1977) at a meeting of the Canadian Association of Leisure Studies,
when, in a keynote address, he discussed the past and present direction of leisure research in
Canada. He likened it to the situation of a well-known traveller, Christopher Columbus, and
his fi rst voyage. When he left, he was not sure where he was going, when he got there he
thought he was somewhere else, and when he got back he did not know where he had been.
And he did it all on someone else's money. We are much the same. What big questions have we
answered? What things do all tourism researchers, even all tourism geographies researchers,
agree on? What should we be looking at in the future, in the sense of what are the big questions
remaining to be studied? I doubt if we would agree on any of these three questions, but as I am
writing this chapter, I will try to answer them by way of conclusion to this personal polemic.
Past and future issues and topics
What have we achieved through our research over the past four decades or so? I think we have
dealt very well with impacts and, particularly, resident attitudes to tourism. The superb and -
at its publication - highly innovative book by Mathieson and Wall (1982) provided not only a
sound conceptual base for impact studies but also documented the literature comprehensively
up to 1982 and stood the test of time for two decades. To me, it is still the best thing written
on the impacts of tourism and provides a sound basis for integrating the various types of
impacts. Perhaps unfortunately, it also provides apparent justifi cation for segregating impacts
