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(Britton, 1991, Clancy, 1998; Ioannides and Debbage, 1998b; Travel Mole, 2007). In addition,
privatisation and trade liberalisation associated with a 'globalising neo-liberalism' (Gill, 1995),
have opened up manifold avenues of investment into the tourism, heritage and cultural indus-
tries, often from new (fi nancial, corporate and geographical) sources (see Daher, 1999; Bianchi,
2005; Duffy, 2006; Levy and Scott-Clark, 2008). Accordingly, tourism has been described as
a 'hyper-globalising' activity (Hjalager, 2007), and in many respects it epitomises the material
processes and values which underpin 'neoliberal market civilisation' (Gill, 1995: 399).
The constant expansion of the realms of consumption via the relentless expansion of new
tourist products and destinations epitomises the logics of capitalist development and indeed
globalisation as identifi ed by Marx and Engels in this celebrated passage:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of
the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in
every country.
(1985 [1888]: 83)
To argue that consumption is shaped by, but not reducible to, material conditions, is neither
essentialist nor determinist. Moreover, it avoids the postmodernist fallacy that markets and
consumerism 'allow people to make their own choices in the consumption of goods and shape
their own lives' (O'Neill, 1998: 84). The claim that we should envisage the 'cultural practice
of tourism as an arena wherein individuals create their identities based on power and knowl-
edge' (Ateljevic, 2000: 381) exaggerates the opportunities for autonomous self-actualisation
provided for by commodity markets in tourism and ignores the basic determinants of social
differentiation and material inequalities that determine peoples' ability to consume, and of
course travel. In addition, despite attempts to dress neoliberal globalisation up in humane
clothes, artfully expressed in the phrase 'tourism liberalisation with a human face' (Secretary
General UNWTO, 2003), the 'freedom' to consume tourism is not only unevenly distrib-
uted, but it also may occur to the detriment of destination populations and the intensifi ed
exploitation of labour, across the tourism commodity spectrum.
In contrast, Bauman, whose work on consumerism is often invoked by cultural analysts
(see Franklin, 2007: 136), weds his analysis of postmodern consumerism to the material
inequalities between 'tourists' and 'vagabonds' (i.e. those excluded from participation in
tourism). The latter, he states, 'do not lubricate the wheels of the consumer society, they add
nothing to the prosperity of the economy turned into a tourist industry' (Bauman, 1998: 96).
As de Angelis rightly argues, 'Capital does not have any problem in acknowledging difference
and diversity, as long as it is diversity that fi nds the
common centre
of articulation within capi-
talist markets' (2007: 173). Such diversity has proliferated in the form of seemingly 'alterna-
tive' and 'niche' tourisms. For example, surfi ng, once a marginal sub-culture, is now worth
around $US10 billion per annum to the surf tourism and merchandising providers (Dolnicar
and Fluker, 2003: 188).
The 'critical turn' has put forward a paradigmatic shift in Tourism Studies based on its
ability to inspect hegemonic tourism discourses and thus interrogate the social and cultural
relations of power in tourism in a manner that has been lacking in 'structuralist' accounts.
However, as Callinicos (2001: 82-5) and Sivanandan (1990) argue, material and cultural
inequality are deeply intertwined. Thus, any attempt to address questions of cultural injustice
must also deal with issues of distributive justice and economic power. This much is evident in
