Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Such resea rch cont a i ns the potent ia l to em a ncipate m a rg i na l g roups i n societ y f rom ex ploi-
tation and oppression, by giving them a 'voice' and supporting their position (cf. critical
theory).
Shades of post-structuralist thinking may be discerned in the various contributions to a
special issue of
Tourism Recreation Research
(Vol. 30, No. 2), on 'new tourism research'. These
promote the idea of 'entanglement' (with both authors and subjects), qualitative methods (e.g.
action anthropology, post-structuralist discourse analysis), and a 'post-disciplinary outlook'
that embraces fl exible, problem-focused approaches to studying tourism that are not derivative
of disciplines (Tribe, 2005; see also Ateljevic
et al.
, 2005; Cole, 2005; Coles
et al.
, 2005;
Hannam and Knox, 2005). However, perhaps the most explicit statement of post-structuralism
as a philosophy of/for tourism research may be found in the introduction to Hannam and
Knox's (2010) textbook,
Understanding Tourism
, which embodies much of the above:
Our account of tourism draws on many aspects of post-structuralist philosophy, not
because it may be fashionable but because we do fi nd it helps us to understand
contemporary tourism as a set of complex, negotiated, contingent, blurred and
incomplete practices and ideas. We also draw on the politicised aspects of tourism
and tourism development to highlight how some views of tourism become normal-
ised, legitimised and dominant as the result of their repeated use by governments,
practitioners and tourists themselves . . . [this] is always at the expense of other more
marginal and marginalised viewpoints.
(Hannam and Knox, 2010: 4)
It is pertinent to note that the chapter in which this extract may be found starts with an intro-
duction to its authors and their particular 'take' on tourism studies, which sets the tone for the
remainder of the topic. Indeed, it would appear that they have made a conscious decision
not
to write themselves out of their explanations, unlike others who construct a (false) position
of value-neutrality by making absolutely no reference to their own point of view (cf. 'the god
trick'). These refl exive accounts are, themselves, symptomatic of the post-structuralist
approach to studying tourism, and we are likely to see more of them in the future - in this
particular fi eld, at least.
Whether by accident or design, Hannam and Knox (2010) invoke two distinct research
agendas in their bipartite description of post-structuralism and what it means for the study of
tourism. The fi rst views tourism as a form of temporary mobility alongside and interwoven
with other forms and mobilities (e.g. daily commuting, permanent migration), and the second
draws attention to the role of the state, the tourism industry, the media and, indeed, academia
in enabling and limiting certain interpretations of the people and places implicated in the act
of leisure travel. This invites a brief discussion of the NMP and CTS (as promised in the
introduction to this chapter), but fi rst it is necessary to illustrate just how far the fi eld has
moved towards post-structuralism - which will be achieved by contrasting two models that
depict how and why destinations change over time, namely the Tourist Area Life Cycle
(Butler, 1980) and a Model of Tourism Transformations (Dietvorst and Ashworth, 1995). At
the risk of reading too much into them, each model will be treated as a product of the
prevailing way of seeing tourism at the time of its publication which, it is argued, was aligned
with structuralism in the early 1980s and post-structuralism by the mid-1990s (naturally, this
is a rather crude distinction and some would contend that it has taken longer for the latter to
be established as the orthodoxy in tourism studies). Therefore, it is not so much the value of
