REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY

This Department publishes rejoinders, commentaries, and rebuttals on the

contents of Annals. Attempts should be made to submit such contributions to
the Associate Editor for Rejoinders and Commentary, Graham Dann
(Department of Tourism and Leisure, University of Luton, Luton, Beds.
LU1 3JU, UK. Email graham.dann@luton.ac.uk).

Pergamon Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 805±809, 2000
# 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures 0160-7383/00/$20.00

An Emerging Discipline
Neil Leiper
Southern Cross University, Australia

Can tourism studies be realistically described as a discipline? This is an

interesting question, revived by John Tribe's article ``The Indiscipline of
Tourism'' (Annals 24:638±657, 1997) where, while the discussion is
thought-provoking, the arguments and conclusions are debatable.
Dismissing the idea of a discipline in tourism studies, Tribe asserts what is
implicit in the public stance of research journals. Chief Editors avoid pro-
moting a distinctive discipline, for a strategic reason, as follows.
Researchers on tourism topics use diverse disciplines (in some cases, none)
and many of them would be discouraged from sending manuscripts to jour-
nals which advocated a distinct discipline, since it could be sensed as a bar-
rier erected by a community protecting its little enclave from invasion.
Research would suffer if that happened. Tourism-related phenomena are
too complicated, with too many implications, for knowledge to be ade-
quately developed by specialists favoring one discipline.
However some Chief Editors, including Goeldner (cited by Tribe) and
Ryan (1997a, 1997b), recognize an emerging discipline, even if they do not
voice it loudly. The emergence has been apparent (Cooper 1997; Echtner
and Jamal 1997) if one looks diligently. John Tribe might not have looked
far. Trying to refute a reality that might exist empirically without contem-
plating possibilities beyond one's home turf almost inevitably produces a
tenuous argument. To investigate the existence of a discipline, Tribe could
have surveyed universities with tourism departments. Perhaps he did not
do so because of his perception that ``there are very few departments or
faculties of tourism'' (p. 644). Had he looked beyond his immediate envir-
ons, at universities in the United Kingdom and internationally, many
examples could have been found. In Australia, for instance, where tourism
courses are offered in 25 universities (far too many, Leiper 1999) a
national register, Australian Standard Research Classi®cations, lists tourism as
``Discipline 350500'' comprising nine ``subjects'' (ABS 1998:30).

805
806 REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY

All this points to the realization that Tribe's argument is ¯awed because
of a principal problem: it relies on abstract argument, ignoring empirical
evidence. The emphatic title of Fodor's (1998) article could serve as a use-
ful reminder for researchers wishing to avoid that occupational hazard.
Failure to state precisely what he means by discipline is another problem
in Tribe's argument. Citing studies by Hirst and others, he lists character-
istic attributes. In fact these are merely accoutrements, notable when a
discipline has evolved, matured and become well established. Evolution
seems to have been ignored by Tribe. To recognize disciplines only in a
mature condition is misleading, similar to the pre 19th century perspective
in Europe that regarded infants and small children as not real human
beings since they lacked the characteristics of adults. Like humans, disci-
plines display different attributes at different stages of growth and decay.
Behind that process, a discipline is, at heart, a body of knowledge that has
been organized to some extent, ideally in a formally systematic manner, in
a way that helps teaching, learning and research (Leiper 1981).
How does a discipline begin? The question exposes a reductionist pro-
blem in Tribe's approach, for he seems to imply that disciplines have no
beginning. He proposes that knowledge about tourism can be reduced to
two ®elds, business and non-business, and that studying those ®elds can be
reduced to seven disciplines, all well-established, plus ``n'' as a suggestion
that other well-established disciplines can be added. Could ``n'' be a hint
to revive the quadrivium and trivium of medieval scholarship, to form a
``second seven'' set of disciplines for Annals? Consider an alternative.
Medawar (1969) has shown how new disciplines emerge from cross-fertili-
zation of established disciplines plus a dash of intuition and observation.
Fodor analyzes the process:
Conjoining the experimental and theoretical armaments of several
sciences allows explanations and systemization of phenomena that
none of them is able to handle on its own: it's what spawns the
host of hyphenated disciplines that have become increasingly fam-
iliar, especially in the physical and social sciences±physical anthro-
pology, developmental psychology, acoustic phonology,
paleobiology and so on (1998:6).
Fodor's list brings to mind another problem in Tribe's discussion. Noting
the Leiper (1981) article mentioning ``tourology'', he observes (correctly)
that the expression has not survived and assumes (erroneously) that the
idea behind it must be dead. In fact, the expression was destined for a
brief life. From the start it was seen as an awkward term but with tactical
value, as it could clearly remind one of the potential discipline (``ology''=
study of). Once that development was of®cially under way, which occurred
with one's own work in 1983 when the New South Wales Higher Education
Board endorsed a syllabus designed by this writer and Lloyd Stear, they
stopped using the expression in serious contexts. Local knowledge could
have taught Tribe that changing a name does not mean that its referent
automatically disappears. The British Royal family, for example, down the
road from his home, has changed its name three times this century but
continues to exist as a well known family, as followers of the mass media
around the world would testify.
According to Tribe, all concepts used in tourism studies derive from
established disciplines where they began, which eliminates the possibility
of regarding tourism studies as a discipline. The assumption is ¯awed.
Citing the multiplier as the prime example was a risk, because Tribe
might not know how it began. He says the concept was used in economics
 REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY 807

for years before anyone applied it to tourism. That view is naive. The the-
ory of multipliers was conceived in 1931 by Richard Khan, a tutor at
Cambridge University, while he was on holiday in Austria (Skidelsky
1994:449). Juxtaposed ideas brought from the United Kingdom about
economics and new insights emerging in a tourist's mind in Austria seems
to have sparked off the conception. Khan's focal interest as an institutional
scholar was always economics, but that misses the theme of this debate,
which is about where concepts originate. The multiplier began with a scho-
lar observing tourism's impacts. Maybe that is splitting hairs for since a
new discipline comes from the same scholastic cultures as its parents, it is
almost inevitable that they will speak the same language. An insight into
the process is Skidelsky's discussion on how Moral Philosophy gave birth to
economics in the 1860s, ``the decade when Cambridge men lost their reli-
gious faith'' (1992:26).
Just as a human child can never be a clone of both parents, a new disci-
pline has its own idiosyncratic features which include novel ways of think-
ing and, hence, new concepts. Thus a number of concepts distinctive to
tourism studies can be identi®ed and more are emerging. Several can be
found in the Encyclopaedia of Tourism (Jafari 2000). One is ``main destina-
tion ratio'' (Leiper 1989), which has no meaning outside tourism studies.
True, it can be dissected into a mix of geography, psychology, and math-
ematics, but in those domains it always refers back to tourism.
Identifying one more problem leads to a possible resolution of the main
issue. Tribe follows an ``is it or isn't it?'' approach which leads him to
reject a discipline of tourism studies. It also leads him to ignore the follow-
ing scenario. Tourism knowledge exists in disciplined form for some scho-
lars some of the time, besides existing for most of the time in one or more
®elds without speci®c disciplines for all scholars interested in tourism.
Thus in his teaching roles the present writer uses a discipline of tourism
for a course entitled ``International Tourism Studies'' where the students'
principal aim is to learn about tourism, but in another course, ``Strategic
Management in Tourism Industries'', the disciplines of management,
strategy, and economics are the main ones used. (Copies of the respective
``Study Guides'' are freely available).
Accordingly, the debate about whether or not a discipline of tourism stu-
dies exists is similar to debates about whether or not the industry exists.
Black and white positions (yes/no) can miss the truth and mislead. That is
the risk in seeking truth from polemics. Consider the industrial issue
where the truth is, arguably, gray. Empirical evidence alongside theoretical
analysis leads to a conclusion that tourism-speci®c industries certainly
exist: they comprise collections of businesses with focused strategies ser-
ving tourists' distinctive needs and which operate within cooperative insti-
tutions (Leiper 1995:121±138). However, the same approach ®nds that
other businesses and resources directly supplying services or goods to tour-
ists might have incidental, non-industrial relationships to them, while
many tourists are independent, to greater or lesser degrees, of any indus-
trial support. Thus tourism, the behaviors and ideas shaping the activities
of tourists, can be described as partly industrialized (1995:282±302, 319±
324).
A similar conclusion can be made about education and research related
to tourism. These activities tend to be partly disciplined. Tourism-speci®c
disciplines can be identi®ed but are only a small portion of the total epis-
temological and heuristic resources used by scholars interested in the sub-
ject. There is room and need for one or more emerging disciplines of
tourism studies to develop within a much larger ®eld of multidisciplinary
808 REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY

scholarship. Most of the contributions have been and will continue to come
from the broader ®eld. The important roles for speci®c disciplines are in
education. By contrast, in research there is more need for diverse, ¯exible,
independent approaches. Broadly speaking, the existence of common con-
cepts and similar models across curricula in tourism courses in universities
of many countries indicates that one discipline is emerging as a main-
stream body of knowledge for scholars specializing in the subject.
This all will probably continue to develop. A major in¯uence will be
trends in tourist numbers. Changing cultural and economic environments
early in the third millennium might stimulate great expansion, as most
forecasters predict, or maybe, as a minority predict, tourism will decrease
sharply, just as pilgrimage did, following four centuries of growth, after
about 1400. If tourism expands, then a discipline of tourism studies is
likely to develop, and vice versa. Which is the more likely direction, expan-
sion or contraction, is a very dif®cult question. One can be skeptical about
fancy predictions of trends in tourism and many other futures, for reasons
summarized by Coleman (1998). If nobody foresaw the severe downturn in
tourism across Asia that began in mid-1997, when all the of®cial forecast-
ing agencies were predicting strong growth, there seems little point in try-
ing to predict, using existing research approaches, what will happen to
tourism in the next century.&

Neil Leiper: School of Tourism & Hospitality Management, Southern Cross

University, Lismore 2480 Australia. Email < nleiper@scu.edu.au >.

REFERENCES
A.B.S.
1998 Australian Standard Research Classi®cations. Canberra: Australian
Bureau of Statistics.
Coleman, L.
1998 The Age of Inexpertise. Quadrant 42(5):63±66.
Cooper, M.
1997 The Future of Tourism Education in New Zealand and Australia. Paci®c
Tourism Review 1(2):89±91.
Echtner, C., and T. B. Jamal
1997 The Disciplinary Dilemma of Tourism Studies. Annals of Tourism
Research 24:868±883.
Fodor, J.
1998 Look!ÐA Review of Edward O Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Science.
The London Review of Books (October 29) 3±6.
Jafari, J., ed.
2000 The Encyclopedia of Tourism. London: Routledge.
Leiper, N.
1981 Towards a Cohesive Curriculum in Tourism: The Case for a Distinct
Discipline. Annals of Tourism Research 8:69±84.
1989 Main Destination Ratios: Analysis of Tourist Flows. Annals of Tourism
Research 16:530±541.
1995 Tourism Management. Melbourne: RMIT.
1999 A Conceptual Analysis of Tourism-Supported Employment which Reduces
the Incidence of Exaggerated, Misleading Statistics About Jobs. Tourism
Management in press.
Medawar, P.
1969 The Art of the Soluble. London: Penguin.
Ryan, C.
1997a Editor's Page. Tourism Management 18:1.
1997b Tourism: A Mature Discipline Subject? Paci®c Tourism Review 1:3±5.
 REJOINDERS AND COMMENTARY 809

Skidelsky, R.
1992 John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883±1920. London: Macmillan.
1994 John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920±1937. London:
Macmillan.

Assigned 4 April 1999. Submitted 28 April 1999. Accepted 29 April 1999. Final version 11
September 1999.
PII: S0160-7383(99)00118-8

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 809±813, 2000

# 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
0160-7383/00/$20.00

Indisciplined and Unsubstantiated

John Tribe
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK

In his comment on ``The Indiscipline of Tourism'' (Annals 24:638±654,

1997), Neil Leiper steers his argument by way of an indisciplined scenic
route, treating the reader to asides about the Royal Family, the tourism
industry and even a journey to Austria with the economist Khan. His
many asides serve often to obscure, rather than underpin, the conclusion
that the discipline of tourism studies will probably continue to develop (a
conclusion which itself cannot resist a minor detour into tourism forecast-
ing and the Asian economic downturn). Nevertheless, it is assumed that
the substantive point Leiper wishes to reassert is that tourism is a disci-
pline. But as this reply will demonstrate, that is a belief which his rejoin-
ders fail to substantiate.
The title of this reply, ``indisciplined and unsubstantiated'', is explained
under a number of headings. Leiper's comment is shown to be unsubstan-
tiated ®rst by reference to the highly unusual de®nition ascribed by him to
the term ``discipline'' and exposure of the misunderstanding implicit in it.
Second, numerous errors and shortcomings in his argument are apparent
and, third, the mounting of his argument as a comment rather than an
article is highlighted. His comment is demonstrated to be indisciplined by
reference to his unnecessary asides and by his misreading of the text of
``The Indiscipline of Tourism''.
In order to better understand that Leiper's comment is unsubstantiated,
an initial analysis of how to distinguish between the belief and truth of
Tribe's claim and Leiper's counter-claim is necessary. This exercise poses
signi®cant questions about the creation of tourism knowledge. Crucially,
given the subject of this debate, the question of tourism truths and the
resolution of this dispute cannot be resolved by reference to what he
wishes to refer to as the discipline of tourism. For if one looked in the
putative toolbox of this would-be discipline one would ®nd no rules or pro-
cedures that adequately helped resolve this dispute.