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there is concern for 'impression management' (Goffman 1959), tourists have to be accountable
for their performances and they need to enact them in such a way that they will be acceptable
to the recipient audiences. In other words, the audience needs to recognize and understand what
is being performed. The way in which evaluations and satisfaction are socially constructed,
negotiated and performed within the interaction with other members forms the focus of the
fi nal section of this chapter.
The evaluative process and the social construction of satisfaction
The most recent and emergent approaches present the possibility of understanding satisfaction
as a social construction. Building on the understanding of tourists 'doing tourism' (Crouch
et al
.
2001:254) and on the importance of understanding the 'social' aspect of the experience these
approaches do not necessarily attempt to question the psychological notion of satisfaction itself,
but rather its treatment as readily accessible and measurable through quantitative approaches.
Instead an alternative frame is presented where psychological concepts are considered in
sociological terms and particular attention is placed on the social context in which people attach
meaning to experiences. This perspective aims to understand tourists as members of society and
therefore tourism experiences are not differentiated from the everyday context which shapes the
way tourists associate meaning from their experiences.
Tourists are viewed as actively constructing their experiences through interactions with other
people they encounter (Moore 2002) and these approaches seek to understand how the meaning
of satisfaction is accomplished collectively and socially through a continuous process of social
interaction. From this perspective expressing an evaluation is a social action (rather than an
internal cognitive process) with an emphasis on the construction of evaluations as interactional
practices (Wiggins 2001). Although evaluative expressions are a common feature of interaction
(Pomerantz 1984) and the process of evaluation forms the basis for understanding satisfaction,
evaluations per se have rarely been studied (Wiggins and Potter 2003).
However, drawing on ethnomethodology and discursive psychology Foster (2010) explored
tourists' evaluations of their package holiday experiences. The study highlighted the strategies
used in the accomplishment of evaluations and thus in part, how tourists negotiate the task of
being a tourist. This study demonstrated the way in which evaluations and (dis)satisfaction are
locally occasioned, managed and accomplished and highlighted the methods and procedures
through which descriptions of good and bad holiday experiences are made sensible and
understandable. In this type of approach (dis)satisfaction becomes a social accomplishment which
is achieved through evaluative practices. The study presented the possibility that (dis)satisfaction
can be treated as a culturally constructed phenomenon that cannot be separated from its social
and interactional context.
Tourists were found to use devices such as 'scenic framing' and 'breach formulations' in
evaluative talk of experiences. These devices draw on the 'known in common' spatial and social
organization of the experience and become a resource to justify positive and negative evaluations
and a way to communicate the shared meaning of good and bad experiences.
The meaning of good and bad holidays and (dis)satisfaction with such is therefore a
participants' concern that is produced, formulated and negotiated in interaction. The social and
local orientation to the meaning of evaluations and (dis)satisfaction was further demonstrated in
tourists' frequent use of 'one-up-man-ship' strategies in response to other's negative evaluations.
By responding to negative evaluations with descriptions of more extreme circumstances tourists
display an intersubjectively shared understanding of the meaning of the evaluation. However, by
positing alternative situations as being worse, the initial negative evaluation is downgraded.
