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underpinnings and a tendency to dismiss materialist (structuralist) theorising as 'essentialist'.
Its eschewal of political economy disables its claims to be able to interrogate, let alone chal-
lenge, the economic and political relations of power within the manifold settings of tourism.
Thus, contrary to its stated aims, the 'critical turn' is in danger of leaving the study of the
working of markets, state power and labour conditions in tourism to the very industry-led
institutions and analysts it professes to challenge.
It is clear, therefore, that the renewed waves of capital accumulation stimulated by neolib-
eral globalisation, and the recent 2008 fi nancial/sovereign debt crisis, are reconfi guring
tourism in ways that cultural analyses have failed to engage with, let alone explain or attempt
to challenge. This is not an argument against cultural analysis per se, nor does it imply that
the interrogation of tourist consumption, discourses and representations is unimportant,
merely that the world of work and associated organisation of production appear to be of
marginal concern within 'critical turn' scholarship at precisely the time it is arguably most
needed. If it is to constitute a radical departure from the status quo in Tourism Studies,
cultural analyses must fi nd ways of integrating the study of tourism discourses with agency,
and at the very least recognise the need to account for the structures of state power and capital
accumulation in tourism. Marxist theory alone is insuffi cient, although not inadequate,
for this. However, recent developments in international political economy combining
Foucauldian, (neo)-Gramscian and Marxist approaches (see de Angelis, 2007; Farrands and
Worth, 2005; Gill, 1995; Lukes, 2005) may offer possible routes out of the impasse between
cultural analyses and political economy. With this in mind, any genuinely progressive tourism
research agenda should be simultaneously sensitive to (ethnographically informed accounts
of ) the pluralism and diversity of contemporary societies, yet informed by a structural
analysis of the tourism political economy in its diverse historical-geographical settings.
