ABSTRACT
A cost-benefit calculus underlies most summary statements in the field, with a recognition that tourism brings both benefits and costs, and that public policy can affect the balance significantly. International tourism in the Third World was quite limited in the 1950s and 1960s when the development paradigm, that came to be known as modernisation theory, took shape. As with the sociology of development, the general drift in the sociology of tourism has been away from universal generalisations and towards an interest in documenting and explaining variation in the cultural consequences of tourism. The reorientation of cultural concerns in tourism studies has at once paralleled, been influenced by, and in some ways anticipated the broader rethinking of the meaning of culture that has often been characterised as ‘post-modernist’. International tourism neither ‘destroys’ culture nor does it ever simply ‘preserve’ it.
