In response to Tribe’s (1997) argument that tourism is not a discipline, Leiper (2000) (and previously Leiper 1981) made a case for tourism as an emerging discipline, an argument that was subsequently rebutted by Tribe (2000). It is Tribe’s (1997) contention that tourism is a field rather than a discipline. Here, Henkel’s (1988: 185) distinction between disciplines, which ‘are held together by distinctive constellations of theories, concepts and methods’, and fields, which ‘draw upon all sorts of knowledge that may illuminate them’, provides a useful starting point to develop this argument.