Travel Reference
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this perspective acknowledges a conceptual link between language, knowledge and social
practices - of which tourism is one discursive domain. In a Foucauldian vein, how we know/
interpret/conceptualize social subjects (tourists) and social practices (tourism) is organized in
discourse. Discourse is able to do this because it is more than just a technical device - i.e. it is
not just a collection of words that carry practical instructions. Discourse carries, conceals and
(re)constitutes socio-cultural and ideological conventions which frame not only how a certain
social practice is organized but who is involved, what roles they can take up as well as what
actions can be done by and to them. Taking marketing communications as constitutive of social
knowledge about tourism raises a number of pertinent questions;
how
does tourism discourse
'operate' in marketing communications? Through what social mechanisms does this occur?
What role do marketers assume in this process? What are the (un)intended outcomes of this?
This chapter will attempt to engage with these questions, pointing to potential research agendas
for tourism scholars. A sensible starting point is to consider marketing communications as a
tourism discourse.
Marketing communications as tourism discourse
Tourism is not an a priori category. The form that tourism takes, how tourists conceptualize
different types of holiday and how they interpret themselves as subjects of them, is fundamentally
entangled in
tourism discourse
(Matthews 2009; Norton
1996). Tourism discourse doesn't 'refl ect'
this process. It
is
this process. It is actively constitutive of the possible types of tourism available,
the spaces where it can (and can't) occur, the categories of people who can (and can't) take part
and the kinds of relations through which tourism is practised. In this sense, marketing
communications doesn't merely point to the menu of available holiday choices. It is a social
practice that plays an active, formative role in
defi ning
and mediating choices for tourists in the
fi rst place. As Caruana and Crane (2008) illustrate, marketing communications actively construct,
organize and manage 'choice arenas' for the tourist, providing socially meaningful forms of
knowledge that helps tourists adopt identity-positions in the tourism market. So what exactly is
discourse then? What discursive properties enable interpretations of tourism choice? And where
does discourse occur?
It is probably best to think of discourse as the process of 'meaning-making' - or knowledge-
construction - that occurs in tourism text(s). This conceptualizes marketing communications -
not as fl ows of information but as a socially constituting 'cultural text'. This textual process of
meaning-making happens through the interaction of linguistic, discursive and socio-ideological
practices (Fairclough 1995), in which tourists and marketers are both involved. At the
linguistic
level, we observe the role of formal textual features such as tourism metaphors, narratives,
juxtapositions and myths (Johns and Clarke 2001) that make up the 'texture' of marketing
communications. It is the operation of these textual features of tourism discourse that, in turn,
organize
discursive
processes that create subjects (identities), practices and relations that might be
adopted by tourists. Much of this dimension of discourse involves creating identity positions,
practices and relationships that tourists can (dis)identify with (e.g. defi ning the category
'independent traveller' as someone who acts autonomously, engaging in tourist relations that
appear authentic, whilst avoiding ostensibly 'commercial' ones). Finally, that tourism discourse
contains
socio
-
ideological
features acknowledges that discourse doesn't occur in isolation from
wider social conventions.
Discourse doesn't just appear either in an advert or in the tourist's own mind. Crucially, the
process of producing and interpreting tourism discourse is facilitated by its '
interdiscursive
' nature
(Fairclough 1995). Tourism discourse is woven into local tourism texts (e.g. travel guidebooks,
