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the analysis of tourism's relationship to the economic and political relations of power in the
contemporary global (dis)order. It is the belief of this author that, in order to engage with
issues related to critical scholarship and social justice, tourism research needs to engage with
the major themes and theoretical debates related to processes of globalisation, capitalism and
structural power.
A new paradigm of 'critical' enquiry in Tourism Studies?
There is little doubt that many of those working within this notionally 'critical' paradigm of
tourism scholarship have enlarged the scope of social scientifi c enquiry in Tourism Studies
and indeed challenged much of the reductive, business-driven thinking that has stifl ed it (see
Franklin and Crang, 2001). Nevertheless, although it has avoided many of the (postmod-
ernist) excesses of the 'cultural turn' in sociology and geography (Aitchison, 2006: 420), the
predominant emphasis on the discursive, symbolic and cultural realms of tourism signifi es a
retreat from political economy and substantive engagement with economic and political rela-
tions of power that are shaping twenty-fi rst century tourism. Elsewhere, writers such as the
activist-author Naomi Klein (2001) and Thomas Frank (2001) have been heavily critical of
the increasing preoccupation with popular culture and identity politics as arenas of empow-
ered agency at precisely the time when an aggressive neoliberal economics and corporate
power was in the ascendancy. Klein skilfully dissects how their preoccupation with identity
politics led to the failure amongst 'postmodern leftists' to challenge the restructuring of class
power which lay behind this apparent consumerist revolution, arguing that 'we were too busy
analysing the pictures on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold' (2001: 124).
There are parallels here with the preoccupation amongst many 'critical' tourism scholars
with the discursive, symbolic and cultural realms of tourism. A narrow focus on the latter has
largely been undertaken at the expense of sustained analysis of the unfolding relations of
power in tourism associated with globalisation and neoliberal capitalism. Thus, despite their
avowed political orientation, advocates of the 'critical turn' appear largely concerned with the
analysis of culture, discourse and representation
within
the confi nes of a globalising free
market system, which remains largely external to critical scrutiny. In addition, the tendency
to emphasise the 'transactional' and 'cultural' basis of economic relations in tourism (Milne
and Ateljevic, 2001) renders invisible the material inequalities of income and exploitative
working conditions that have been documented in numerous destinations and tourism work-
places worldwide (Akama, 2002; Belau, 2003; Beddoe, 2004; Hawley, 2006; Hernández
Navarro, 2006).
Advocates of the 'critical turn' are keen to emphasise the heightened signifi cance of culture
in postmodern societies (Aitchison, 2006: 417), and thus urge analysts to explore tourism as
a predominantly cultural phenomenon. Whilst the 'marketisation' of culture and consum-
erism have reached new heights in postmodern societies (see Barber, 2008; Klein, 2001), and
tourism itself has played a key part in this, this should not blind us to the continuing constraints
on peoples' livelihoods imposed by the organisation of production and their differential rela-
tionship to the labour market. Indeed, Marx himself alerted us to the fact that, beneath the
veneer of free and equal exchange in market economies, a veil is cast over 'the peculiar social
character of the labour which produces commodities' and the inequalities reproduced by
capitalist production, which he famously described as the 'fetishism of commodities' (Marx,
1974 [1877]: 77).
The fact that the symbolic properties of a commodity are shaped by the interaction
between consumer desires and the marketing interventions of the tourism industry, or,
