Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
7
AND SPACE
Kevin Meethan
Introduction
Writing as a sociologist, one of the more interesting features of tourism studies over recent
years has been the way in which social theory has fi ltered through the social sciences, art and
humanities and been adapted by both geographers and tourism analysts; and while they were
beginning to grapple with culture, other social scientists were similarly beginning to grapple
with the conceptualisation and uses of space in social thought. All were seeking to account
for the rapid changes in the global political economy and the consequent reordering of the
spatial hierarchy resulting from globalisation.
Of course, social theory is not static and both refl ects and seeks to explain the broader
social context in which it is located, and indeed, borrowing between disciplines (even if disci-
plinary boundaries are maintained) has a long history. Sociology is no exception and like all
cognate disciplines has undergone many changes of its own, from the shift into language and
discourse of the 1970s and 1980s (Lloyd and Thacker, 1997) and the development of feminist
theory (Marshall and Witz, 2004), the shift into postmodernism and the emergence of culture
as a central concern, through to globalisation and, consequently, a focus on transnationalism
and for ms of mobilit y (Ur r y, 2007). This list is by no means defi nitive, but another signifi cant
change has been a long-term shift away from theoretical models and modes of analysis based
solely on the principles of positivistic enquiry towards a variety of approaches that, generally
speaking, can be labelled as constructivist. Such approaches not only acknowledge the impor-
tance of context, meaning and interpretation in shaping the social world but also, and as a
necessary consequence, place more of an emphasis on the role of human agency, and the
capacity of people to actively engage with the social world.
The individual has never been wholly absent from sociology, although some theoretical
paradigms, such as those derived from Marx and Durkheim, did not regard the individual as the
object of enquiry, while those derived from Weber and later G.H. Mead and the symbolic
interactionists certainly did. More recently sociological concerns with the body and processes
of embodiment lead us away from the grand narratives of theory to an examination of the
detailed minutiae of social and personal life (Crossley, 2006; Howson, 2004; Shilling, 2005; see
also Edensor and Falconer,
Chapter 9
and Larsen,
Chapter 8
of this volume). Even in terms of
research methods we can see parallel developments with the individual assuming a more
