Representations of

international tourism in
the social sciences: sun,
sex, sights, savings and
servility
Dr. Michelle McLeod
Representations of Travel and Tourism

Real travel is now impossible, we can only

aspire to touring.
Travel suggests discovery.
Tourism is about a discovered world.
Tourism is a packaged experience: sun, sex,
sea and sand.
Representations of Travel and Tourism

Tourism is referred to as a highly deceptive

industry.
Today almost every community and nation,
large and small, developed or developing, is
influenced in varying degrees by tourism.
Representations of Tourism

A trivial activity could not generate

such religiously constructed, lopsided
and ambivalent representations as
exist about tourism.
Tourism as the ordering of relations
between strangers.
The study of tourism
Tourism research discouraged.
Tourism research has been looked
down on.
Difficult to take [tourism] as a serious
area of research a phenomenon so
bound up with leisure and hedonism.
Tourism research shortcomings
Inadequate framework of economic
analysis.
Lack of local voice.
Failure
to distinguish the social
consequences of tourism from other
processes of change going on in a society
independently.
A noble savage syndrome.
Who or what is a tourist?

Passport type definitions are of little use.

Do all tourists engage in leisure?
Typologies abound based on different motivations.
Cohen claims that the generalizations about the
sociocultural repercussions of tourism are
premature there is no such creature as a tourist.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Representations of tourism have
been largely economic.
Tourism as a panacea for the less
developed countries.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
International agencies promoted
tourism development.
Foreign exchange in the developing
world will be tied to the affluence
and travel habits of the developed
world.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Advancement from primary based to service
based economies omitting industrial
development.
Attention to adverse sociocultural consequences.
Is tourism a secure growth industry?
Some countries lose substantial amounts of
foreign exchange vertical integration; all
inclusive holidays.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Tourism can be capital intensive in
the development phase.
Employment may not be stimulated
to the degree expected.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Weak inter-sectoral linkages reduce
the multiplier effect.
Tourism may retard national
development through increasing
inequalities.
Small islands may have no
alternatives to tourism.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Tourists do not go to Third World
countries because people are
friendly, they go because a holiday
there is cheap.
Alternative tourism may not
change the nature of international
tourism.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
To invest in international tourism is to
invest in dependence.
The way tourism is planned and shaped
will recreate the fabric of the colonial
situation.
A system that does not express local
needs or aspirations.
Tourism, economic development,
and political economy
Few people in a destination country
benefit from international tourism
grin and bear it.
Courtesy campaigns in the West
Indies.
Tourism, meanings, motivations and
roles
Elements of tourist behaviour such
as play, regression, ritual and so on
are opportunities for research.
Foreign travel can provoke anxiety
in many ways strain of uncertainty,
illness, finding accommodation.
Tourism, meanings, motivations and
roles
Motivations as relaxation, having dun
and so on pose problems for cultural
authenticity as the single meaning of
tourism.
One cannot sell poverty, but one
can sell paradise.
Tourism, meanings, motivations and
roles
In the West Indies, tourism is
associated with servility memories
of a colonial past.
Semantics of tourist-local
interaction: one is at play and one is
at work; one has economic assets
and the other has cultural capital
but little money.
Tourism and sociocultural change

The presence of the customer creates

a set of sociocultural consequences.
The effects of tourism are rarely
distinguished from other forces of
sociocultural change.
Tourism is the enemy of authenticity
and cultural identity (Turner and Ash,
1975).
Tourism and sociocultural change

Commoditization of tourism.
Moral and behavioural changes.
Long before tourism cultures were
changing.
Demonstration effect how
activities affect cultural behaviour.
Tourism and sociocultural change

Tourism as a force of social

divisiveness and conflict.
Tourism as a source of economic
development or a prime cause of
cultural dissolution.
Reference

Apostolopoulos, Y. S. Leivadi and A. Yiannakis (eds). 2002.

The sociology of tourism. London: Routledge.