Taking Tourism to the Limits

Michelle Aicken, Stephen J. Page, Chris Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136360275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Financial Accounting
• Index: Business

The concept of margins and limits is often referred to within the tourism academic literature and includes subjects as diverse as carrying capacities, peripheral economies, technological advancement, adventure tourism, dark tourism and socially marginalized communities. After identifying a number of ways in which 'limits' might be defined Taking Tourism to the Limits explores concepts and challenges facing contemporary tourism in five main sections, namely in tourism planning and management, nature based tourism, dark tourism, adventure and sport tourism and the accommodation industry.Drawing upon case studies, current research and conceptualizations these different facets of the 'limits' are each introduced by the editors with commentaries that seek to identify themes and current practice and thinking in the respective domains. The picture that emerges is of an industry that reinvents itself in response to changing market parameters even while core issues of stakeholder equities and political processes remain problematic.International in scale, the book links with its companion piece Indigenous Tourism – the commodification and management of culture (also published by Elsevier) as an outcome of the very highly successful conference, Taking Tourism to the Limits hosted by the University of Waikato' Department of Tourism Management in 2003.

Chapter 1

Introduction — Conceptualising “the Limit”

Chris Ryan and Michelle Aicken

This book emerged from the conference Taking Tourism to the Limits that was hosted by the Department of Tourism Management at Waikato University in December 2003. The theme was an ambitious one and delegates were invited to consider it from a number of perspectives. The potential range of approaches that might be adopted is illustrated by Table 1.1 which lists twelve possible interpretations of the theme. At least two immediate impressions emerge from this list, and they are 1) the apparent paradoxical ones of both how disparate they appear, and 2) just how much they are linked in a dialogic process of questioning and answer. From the perspective of the practical site owner or destination planner, concepts of liminality or the marginal might appear interesting, but abstract, and of limited applicability. Planning is, arguably, to a large degree based upon a modernist, deductive approach derived from the rationalism of the eighteenth century enlightment, and much of the tourism planning literature is still premised within the paradigm, as is illustrated by the work of Gunn (1988, 1993). Deductiveness has maintained its own boundaries, one of which is the distinction between theory and practice; and if there exists any form of duality it is that the purpose of theory is to inform, define and subsequently shape “good practice.” The ghost of Bentham and J. S. Mill’s utilitarianism survives into the early 21st century even if the advocates of modernism are more reticent about the construction of universal theories.

Yet the issues of social, technological and political change evident in the early twenty-first century cannot be denied and contemporary management texts are no longer those of scientific management but, as evidenced by Gilson et al. (2000) in Peak Performance, they are redolent with phrases of creativity, imagination, product champions, human empowerment, team work, excellence and even “love marks” (Roberts & Lafley 2004). Empiricism has to meet the challenge that so much of deductive theorising has failed to work at the level of the specific. Tourism has been criticised for its failure to develop well defined paradigms or theoretical structures and what few it has are often found wanting (see, for example Jones 1996; Ryan 1997). Butler’s destination life cycle theory is the subject matter of a rich literature which highlights exceptions, problems and differential practices (for example, see Butler 2001). Pearce’s tourism career ladder is much cited but is arguably lacking in hard evidence (for example, see Ryan 1998). One response is to develop increasingly complex theorisations and the literature portrays this movement from the general to the more particular, perhaps best exemplified by an emergent consideration of chaos and complexity theory in tourism as developed by authors like Faulkner & Russell (2001) and McKercher (1999), or by the increasing use of techniques based upon Artificial Neural Networks software (e.g. Law 2000). As the theories become more sophisticated, so their general applicability becomes more constrained. Even those theorisations that initially challenged the modernist, deductivist and arguably management led tourism literature such as appeals to Foucault and the “gaze” as argued by Urry (2002) have in their turn been found lacking. Examples of critiques include the praise of the corporeal by Veijola & Jokinnen (1994), and Ryan (2001), and Urry’s own subsequent work on the processes of globalisation and space-time compression (e.g. see Urry 2000). Consequently, as Pearce (2004) highlights there has been an increasing stress upon the role of qualitative research, even to the extent of perhaps, so he argues, undervaluing the nature of the positivist tradition.

Table 1.1: Taking Tourism to the Limits — Conceptualising the Limit.

Concepts of margins, liminalities and ritual in social processes.

Spatial margins and changing physical nature of resorts.

The Pleasure Periphery – the changing social classes and composition of tourist typologies over time in specific tourist destinations.

New products and the use of new technologies as illustrated by space tourism and theme parks.

New definitions of self and discovery of self in succeeding ages and the changing role of tourism – e.g. adventure tourism, extreme sports tourism, the search for adrenalin.

Evolving understandings of stakeholders and political processes – the role of communities, “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” planning, and new understandings of planning approaches.

New “gazes” and processes of globalization, cosmopolitanism, fordism and post-fordism, and the processes of limit dissolution in post-modernistic de-differentiation. The questioning of modernity.

Limits of acceptable change – environmental and social sustainability, site planning, and eco-tourism.

Marginal peoples, indigenous peoples, tourism as a means of legitimizing cultural, social and political aspiration.

Marginal economies, the urban vs. the rural, the status quo vs. new emergent power/economic centres. The changing economic structures of service and experiential industries. Small and medium sized enterprise and their importance vs. the mega corporation.

The existential authenticity vs. the “conventional” cultural authenticities – the questioning of whose authenticity.

Taking experience to the limit of death, disaster, the macabre, to the sites of man’s inhumanity to man.

The picture that emerges is thus one whereby tourism research comprises more particularism and contextualisation, of sensitivities to difference and more dynamic understandings that consider temporalities and spatial evolutions — all based upon recognition of significant social change. That social change is in part economic (with generally growing wealth but also evidence of greater disparities of income and wealth) and technological (but evidencing greater differences between those with and without access to information exchanges those technologies bring). Tourism theorising and research reflects these social changes in different ways. Not only does it concern itself with social and political change and aspiration, but also it has become more “technological” as researchers adopt more computer based tools with which to conduct their analyses. Econometric forecasting and textual analysis share, for example, the commonality that increasingly both require the researcher to be conversant with computer modelling but often with a dependence upon only partially understood mathematical procedures. The algorithms of neural networks, backward propogation, co-integration have become part of the language of tourism research.

Consequently, like many forms of social science research, tourism stretches and bends its own boundaries and its own understandings of what comprises its concerns and the means with which those concerns are analysed, defined, measured and interpreted. It overlaps with other discipline areas and fields, such as those of marketing, psychology, environmental sciences, management and transport to name but a few. As a field of enquiry, tourism research like many social sciences faces a tension. On the one hand, there is displayed a greater flexibility in thinking, a greater utilisation of more sophisticated analytical techniques but on the other there is the risk that the work of the academic researcher may become less accessible to the industry or governmental manager who faces the uncertainties of “playful” tourists with constrained resources and possibly ageing asset structures. In practice however, this divide is perhaps more apparent than real with academics being able to address more than one audience (thereby again displaying the skills of adaptability) and practioners increasingly having been exposed to academics through an expansion of higher education. If a characteristic of post-modernism is the de-differentiation of fantasy and fact, history and myth, and the affective and cognitive, then too the boundaries between theory and practice also become blurred to create some hybrid product which often, in tourism, emphasises the experiential. For example Amsterdam without the hypodermic needles is found at Huis Ten Bosch at Sasebo in Japan (see Figure 1.1).

Table 1.1 indicates a number of different interpretations of the “limit.” It is not new to state that tourism has often incorporated concepts of limits. The concept of a continually changing periphery is inherent in Butler’s destination life cycle because not only does the resort area change its nature over time, but arguably different types of tourists are attracted over time, each type being succeeded by another in a process of resort diffusion. To adopt the language of Rogers (2003), early adopters are replaced by later adopters until eventually laggards discover a resort, by which time it has changed to better meet their needs, thereby ensuring that early adopters have moved on to other thus far undiscovered locations. Cohen’s (1972) drifters become replaced by mass organized tourists, Plog’s (1977, 2002) allocentrics submit to the psychocentrics in patterns of geographical discovery and social class encroachment. Historically commentators can point to the locations like the south of France which, even by the late nineteenth century evidenced not only this process, but also highlighted the importance of property developers and planning regimes (e.g. Haug 1982).

Figure 1.1: Amsterdam in Sasebo, Japan — an example of “de-spacing” place.

The changing nature of the resort complex is well demonstrated by Young (1983) in his article on the touristisation of a Maltese fishing village. Other studies have confirmed the evolving spatial boundaries of place and examples include those of Miossec (1976) and Smith (1992). Tourism is thus, from a spatial and social perspective, not simply taken to the limit, but challenges and stretches spatial and social limits. The challenges presented to the planning processes are social, technological and political. New technologies aid planning, but by their nature infrastructure planning has to incorporate the assets needed to utilise those technologies. For example, contemporary hotels are designed with fibre optic networks to provide rooms with internet access and potentially a whole range of entertainment facilities. The technocrats of planning also increasingly have to involve whole communities, but these communities are not simply those of local residents, but a range of stakeholders that might include global pressure groups with local representation. The “green movement” has given rise to political parties of varying hues of “greenness” as a countervailing power to that of corporate and central government, so that planning is political. Indigenous peoples are brought from the periphery as an interested stakeholder to validate processes, which processes are a means of legitimising their own interests.

The social pressures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that create this fluidity in planning also creates on the part of the consumer, new demands and in consequence new products. Products evolve to create new “limits” of that which is possible, tasteful and which represent new forms of escape. The latter part of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of adventure tourism as a mass, commodified product which promises self challenge and escape from an organised world — yet increasingly the product itself is organised and packaged and subject to physical and objective risk minimisation, even while it is signed by promotional images to be life enhancing and free (Cloke & Perkins 1998, 2002). Ryan & Trauer (2005) in this volume present a framework of analysis that argues that image has become so pervasive in the promotion of place that it means that statements that tourism is a search for the unfamiliar have to be modified. They argue that much of tourism today is a search for the enactment of a role made familiar through the media, which role is thought attractive and meaningful to the participant. The adventure tourist wears the t-shirt proclaiming an image of the person as “adventurous” and thereby also identifying the participant to others of like mindedness (as is discussed by Ferguson & Todd 2005 in this volume). Participation is a social as well as an individual act that establishes communities formed upon the shared experience. Wagner (1996: 1) claims, in the formation of what he terms the Geltung Hypothesis that human beings are innately programmed to persistently and skillfully cultivate attention, acceptance, respect, esteem and trust from their fellows’. The Geltung is recognition and communicating of shared understandings that are signaled in many subtle ways whereby individuals recognise and generate mutual meanings that re-affirm their esteem and prestige of self and other. Ferguson and Todd’s analysis of the t-shirt reaffirms this process.

The chapters in this collection all represent different facets of the nature of the limits represented in tourism. The text is divided into five sections. The contributions under the heading of “tourism planning and management” concentrate on planning issues that represent some of the points made above. Three chapters (those of Paul Mitchell Banks, Sharon Kemp and Chris Cooper and Lisa Ruhanen) are about community involvement, multiple uses and the tensions that exist between the requirements of planning and political processes. The fourth illustrates how new technologies can play a research role as Colin Arrowsmith and his colleagues, Dino Zanon and Prem Chhetri report how the use of GIS to track visitor travel patterns within a National Park can provide new understandings of visitor activities.

The use of new technologies is also illustrated by the work of Robert Manning who discusses planning in the Arches National Park in the United States, and indeed it can be said that this chapter could have fitted into the first section. However, it does consider an important component of nature-based tourism, which is the issue of perceptual overcrowding and the way in which that can negatively impact upon the visitor experience. Orams and Taylor’s chapter picks up on the theme of education within eco-tourism and explores the degree to which environmental education programmes might impact on a marine mammal tour. But, as is indicated by the above discussion, nature-based tourism and eco-tourism do not exist within vacuums independent of a wider world, and Rosaleen Duffy’s paper argues that such tourism does not represent an alternative edge, but rather is a confirmation of the hegemony of capitalist structures.

In the section entitled “Adventure and Sport” the same point is argued by Ong Chin Ee with reference to how the language of sport and adventure is purloined by the Singaporean government to help propagate a new form of entrepreneurial activism that it sees as being appropriate to Singapore’s economic well being in the early twenty-first century. Shelagh Ferguson and Sarah Todd’s and Carl Cater’s chapters are also about representations of self, and through a self-selected commodisation as participants in adventure products quite consciously want to identify themselves with the product as a statement of who they are. Tracey Harrison-Hill’s paper is also about aspects of self and sharing, but reveals how the use of the internet can help shape expectations and anticipation.

Two sections remain. That on accommodation represent a return to the empirical and deductive as Sharon Kemp, Linda Roberts and Leo Jago discuss organisational structures and the need for investment. Asad Mohsin and Tim Lockyer represent a return to the emergent trends of playfulness in their discussion of accommodation as the new entertainment centre. Finally, the irrational and attractiveness of the possibly morbid is discussed in a section on dark tourism. Nell Smith and Glen Croy, and Tanaya Preece and Garry Price provide two examples of sites, those of Port Arthur in Australia and the Buried Village in New Zealand to argue that sites of inhumanity and natural disaster are feasible tourism attractions. Richard Sharpley, for his part provides an analysis of what links and what provides difference among such sites in his framework of various forms of “grey.”

Taken as a collection the essays represent some of the current thinking that pertains to varying interpretations of what constitutes as the limits of tourism. The texts are primarily derived, however, from a managerial perspective, as whatever the sociological significance of marginal products, peoples and places, the reality is that they are visited products, peoples and places, and thus the flows of people and their activities need to be managed. Consequently, the second part of the title of the book is important and this need...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half title
• Front matter
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction — Conceptualising “the Limit”
• Section 1: Tourism Planning and Management
• Section 2: Nature-Based Tourism
• Section 3: Adventure and Sport Tourism
• Section 4: Dark Tourism
• Section 5: The Accommodation Sector
• References
• Subject Index