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incorporated into the 'mainstream of enlightened liberalism' (Therborn, 2007: 79). Similarly,
challenging the increasing marketisation of academia in general, and Tourism Studies in
particular, requires more than the encouragement of 'socially meaningful and morally
responsible' scholarship (Pritchard and Morgan, 2007: 25). Rather it involves challenging the
structural reorganisation and harnessing of educational institutions to the priorities of profi t,
productivity and competitiveness (Callinicos, 2006).
Despite noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Bramwell and Meyer, 2007; Chin, 2008; Clancy,
1998; Duffy, 2002; Wood, 2000), at precisely the moment at which the nexus of economic
and political forces has begun to promote an aggressive economic liberalism in tourism, the
'critical turn' appears to have retreated into a preoccupation with discourse and representa-
tion, leaving the study of the economic and political relations of power in tourism to those
who whole-heartedly embrace neoliberal globalisation and free market economics. Thus, for
all the talk of a '
critical
turn' in Tourism Studies and its claims with regard to the ability to
provide more nuanced analyses of the 'nexus of circuits operating within production-
consumption dialects' (Ateljevic, 2000: 371), we are actually left with little or no under-
standing of the relationship between discourses and the diverse forms of capitalist development
and the logics of state power out of which diverse tourism formations emerge.
Arguably, the critique of 'structuralist theorising' amongst advocates of the 'critical turn'
owes much to the infl uence of
neo
-Marxist theories of dependency, a paradigm which has
received substantial critique - much of it warranted - in the tourism literature (see Harrison,
2001a, 2001b; Bianchi, 2002) as well as the development studies literature as a whole (see
Booth, 1985; Kiely, 1995). Furthermore, the preponderance of research carried out in periph-
eral or 'less developed' parts of the world may perhaps lead scholars to underplay the extent
of linkages that
do
in fact exist to international capital and transnational corporate actors (see
Duffy, 2002, 2006). Even in societies where capitalist social relations are relatively underde-
veloped, the capacity of human beings to act upon and shape their social environment is
determined by a combination of cultural norms mediating the intra-household division of
labour and access to the labour market (see Din, 1982; Tucker, 2007b) and the constraints
imposed by the progressive integration of tourist destinations into the wider capitalist
economy (see Kousis, 1989).
There is no doubt, however, that tourism has increasingly come to be seen as a system of
consumption
rather than production, thus overshadowing analyses of tourism's political
economy ( Judd, 2006). Terms such as 'productive consumption' (Aitchison, 2001: 144) or
'production-consumption dialects' (Ateljevic, 2000: 371) suggest a profound ambiguity with
regard to the determining forces of change, infl uenced perhaps by a fear of being labelled
'determinist'! However, 'multiplying the sources of determination does nothing to lessen the
fact of determination' (Graaff, 2006: 1391)! That is not to say that studies of consumption are
unimportant, rather that 'one person's consumption is another person's production' (Perrons,
1999: 102). Indeed, there is nothing to suggest that the interactions between the discourses
which provide legitimacy to the current predominance of neoliberal market conditions and
consumerist ideologies could not be addressed by the kind of historical materialist analysis
pioneered by Marx.
Tourism, capital and power: a 'return' to political economy
As evidenced in tourism growth fi gures (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2008), there can
be little doubt that tourism has become a major avenue of capital accumulation worldwide,
driven by free market forms of enterprise of varying scales and organisational complexity
