ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I posed the question: why study tourism? More broadly, I suggested that, despite the remarkable development of tourism as a focus of academic attention over the last two to three decades, manifested in the rapid and continuing global growth in the provision of tourism programmes (particularly at undergraduate level, although increasingly at postgraduate level, too), the equally rapid expansion of the tourism knowledge base in terms of both volume and disciplinary underpinnings, and the emergence of a distinct community of tourism scholars, there remains a lack of consensus or certainty about the overall purpose of studying tourism. This may reflect the diversity of influences that have driven this development – from the alleged employment needs of an expanding tourism sector and national higher education policies to increasing fascination with the subject among academics – or the eclectic disciplinary foundations from which it is studied. Equally, it may reflect a tendency towards academic ‘navel gazing’, with attention being paid to what tourism ‘is’ as a subject of study, how it should be studied, where (in institutional terms) it should be studied, and so on. Either way, to quote Jamal and Robinson (2009: 2), there has been a failure ‘to interrogate the very purpose of tourism studies’, while debates surrounding the disciplinary status of the subject ‘bypass questions as to why to study tourism’.
