Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 287

10 Towards a New Political

Economy of Global Tourism
Revisited

Raoul V. Bianchi

Development must start from the actual conditions and social practices of
each people.
Barratt Brown, 1995

Introduction

Despite the continued expansion and diversification of international
tourism worldwide and its consolidation as one of the world's leading eco-
nomic sectors, the international political economy of tourism has yet to
achieve the prominence it (arguably) did during an earlier epoch of tourism
development studies and continues to remain conspicuous by its absence in
the wider development literature, with one or two noteworthy exceptions
(Chin, 2008; Clancy, 1998, 2008; Ferguson, 2010). As argued elsewhere (see
Bianchi, 2009), this deficit can be attributed to a number of factors, includ-
ing, the fact that tourism has predominantly been observed from applied,
business-oriented perspectives, as well as, more recently, the turn away from
what are loosely described as 'structuralist' analyses of tourism, towards
those which tend to foreground the analysis of discourse and culture over
that of conflict and inequality rooted in economic and political relations of
power, otherwise referred to as the 'critical turn' in tourism studies (see
Ateljevic et al. , 2007).
Whilst the preponderance of prescriptive and technical studies into tour-
ism's economic impact upon host societies provided some insight into the
overall quantitative value of tourism to host economies, during an earlier
period of tourism development research (Bryden, 1973; Cleverdon, 1979),
they did little to reveal the complex articulations between technological
change and the social relations of power woven into historically specific

287