Tourism and Socio-cultural Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 206

of social conditions have evolved from economically developed nations or
the Western school of thought, and the social and cultural impact of tourism
development is measured against these rather biased indices.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the nature of the relationship
between tourism development and socio-cultural change. It will also
comment on the extent to which tourism development can contribute in a
positive manner to improving the well-being of host populations as well as
learning from the negative aspects of tourism development. To do this, the
chapter will first examine the context of broader development theories and
major indices used to measure development. By understanding some of the
shortcomings of development theories, the reader will begin to grasp how
development measurement indices are influenced by biases that underlie
Western development theories. The chapter will then consider positive and
negative examples of perceived social and cultural development in host com-
munities from the tourism literature.
Relationship of Development Theories to Tourism
As has been discussed earlier in this topic, many of the predominant
development theories have emerged from a Western school of thought and
they do not consider alternative or traditional methods of development (Said,
1978, 1993; see Chapter 2). The idea of 'modernisation' started in Europe
about 500 years ago and it placed Europe at the centre of a world system
(Dussel, 1988). Later, the centre became Euro-America, or, the West, and it
developed its own ideas and systems that the rest of the world was expected
to embrace (Peet, 1999) in order to undergo the 'civilisation process' (Dussel,
1988). This expectation implies that there can be only one set of fundamen-
tal values and that others are, to an extent, derivatives of these. This set of
fundamental values serves as a single universal measure of rationality for the
absolute superiority of one standard (Calhoun, 1995). One of the major char-
acteristics of the ideologies of this Western school of thought is that there is
always a 'them versus us' contrast when discussing a concern over differ-
ences (Calhoun, 1995).
Concepts of development and the modernisation of a nation have evolved
from the study of Euro-American history (Peet, 1999; Rostow, 1967).
According to the above-mentioned fundamental index, the message of devel-
opment and modernisation theories can be translated as 'our' (the 'developed
nations') value standard being superior to 'their' (the 'developing nations')
value standard and, therefore, 'they' should follow the course of development
that 'we' have taken. Modernisation theories presume that the causes of
under-development or poverty reside in the 'traditions' of a nation. Rather
than considering the role of developed nations and multinational enterprises
(MNEs) in the creation of the gap between rich and poor (see Chapter 10),