Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
expectation becomes - as artifi cial as it might seem to some - a legitimate visit to the Dominican
Republic and it will be recounted over and over again as (socially constructed) reality. This
is equally true for third and fourth generation Ashkenazi Jews visiting the Auschwitz
concentration camp as they will re-live the suffering of their parents and grandparents in their
minds throughout the mediated construction of regimes of pity (Boltanski 1999) which lead to
solidarity and empathy (by now many descendants of Ashkenazi Jews have only heard the stories
of the Holocaust through the media, their schools and third parties). This is applicable too to the
relatives and descendants of The Great War (World War I) soldiers killed at the Battle of
the Somme or for Australians in Gallipoli or those descended from World War II soldiers who
perished in the battle of Ardennes - all re-tracing their steps, paying homage, identifying with a
past era or with nationalism. While presented as historical tours, there are also deeper
anthropological and cultural issues in relation to ancestor worship and national neuroses (of lost
global infl uence) to which public relations studies need to pay more attention.
Indeed, these examples illustrate the deeper meaning making with which public relations is
entailed in the articulation of tourism-reputation systems and particularly about its ability to
produce and re-create 'special events' that can evoke past, present and future among potential
tourism fl ows. This is because tourism itself has never been only about geography but also about
time as a socially constructed reality. Public relations as a political activity is able to bring together
cultural references, relational networks and mediated realities in order to build an expectation-
experience for the tourism fl ows in terms of particular event-places. Some of the event-places
are very special, singular in their global scope; for example, places marked by the tourist systems
as genocide-holocaust experiences. In these cases, PR sets tourist experiences by means of
media-created expectations that refer directly or indirectly to the event-place, while promoting
tourist fl ows globally in relation to the tourism-reputation system. This guarantees both that
the tourism fl ow is not exclusively limited to those who directly are related to the event-place
(hence safeguarding its commercial viability) and that the resources to mobilize those fl ows are
more abundant as they come therefore from a diversity of sources.
For us a quintessential example of the former is the Martin Luther King Memorial in Atlanta
(USA), where the set of distinctive landmarks such as the memorial, Reverend King's house and
the Ebenezer Baptist Church are all brought together by a connected imagery articulated by a
complexity of factors that operate individually but in an orchestrated manner to attract tourism
fl ows. There is no tangible-centralized PR machinery in operation to bring all this together,
rather it happens in terms of orchestrated complexity, allowing for tourist fl ows to visit
the places despite vicissitudes and apparent disconnections among the different elements of the
tourism-reputation system that encompasses the whole of the Martin Luther King Memorial.
What does bring people to this place? Well a reputation system that allows among many other
things African Americans to re-live the struggle of civil rights and white Americans and
Europeans to exculpate their perceived sins by performing this pilgrimage. Such historical cases
are particularly fascinating for public relations scholars because they are simultaneously part of
public relations history (for example in terms of social movements or propaganda) so there is a
double-layered meaning to this type of tourism and its rhetorical presentation.
This is why we do not think that what is often referred to as organized and disorganized
complexity is able to explain wholly the way public relations as a communicative action tends to
set in motion the different dynamics that allow tourism-reputation systems to promote tourism
fl ows and adapt to challenges in changes. We suggest instead the concept of 'orchestrated
complexity' - or 'concerted complexity' - is more useful here as an explanatory framework. We
do acknowledge of course the risks and potential pitfalls when one translates these types of
concepts into the sociology of public relations, but we fi nd it relevant to the discussion that takes
