Unpacking the

1
Unpacking the Project of Place

• Professor Nigel Morgan, UWIC Inaugural and
  Professorial Lecture Series 2007-2008

2
Outline

• Positioning myself
• Locating tourism
• The origins of critical tourism studies what is
  new about it?
• The power of place critical perspectives on
  place marketing
• An ongoing project where next?

3
The shift to positionality

• Researcher positionality is a new trend in
  tourism enquiry
• Exposing the researchers autobiographical ways
  of knowing allows the reader to contextualise and
  interpret their work
• Provides a more honest and stronger account of
  how knowledge is constructed and used.

4
Positioning myself

• Degrees in history and economic history
• Early career in sports policy, tourism marketing
  and public relations
• Spent 15 years teaching and researching
  destination development marketing and
  critical approaches to tourism studies
• White, middle class, able-bodied, middle-aged man
  typical of the tourism professoriate.

5
Tourism an industry and a field?

• The field is divided between business (tourism
  management) and social science (tourism studies)
  approaches
• Tourism management is mainstream and dominated
  by objectivist and positivist management
  approaches
• Tourism studies is fragmented dispersed across
  a variety of different disciplinary audiences.

6
Locating tourism programmes

• Most tourism programmes world-wide were
  established in the early 1990s
• The vast majority (over 70) are located in
  business not tourism schools and this has had a
  major impact on the fields research agenda
• Tourisms doctoral landscape is dominated by a
  drive to provide useful contributions
  industry-specific questions or policy-oriented
  studies which provide safe rather than
  challenging scholarship.
• Sources (Ateljevic and Hall, 2007 Botterill,
  Gale and Haven 2003)

7
The academys gatekeepers

• Gatekeepers police knowledge creation.
• They are leading scholars, tourisms
  professoriate - journal editors and manuscript
  reviewers, members of learned societies, doctoral
  examiners, book editors, conference organisers
  and members of university research degree and
  ethics committees.

8
Who are tourisms gatekeepers?

• First-generation tourism scholars who made their
  reputations in the late 1970s many members of
  the International Academy for the Study of
  Tourism are emeritus or close to retirement age
• Geographically concentrated in the USA, UK,
  Canada, New Zealand and Australia 75 of
  journal editors are based in these five
  countries
• Men only 9 of the 74 IAST members are women,
  only 6 of UK tourism professors are female and
  there are none at all in New Zealand.
• In essence, the tourism gatekeepers are first
  generation, white, male scholars grounded in
  Western, Anglo-centric research traditions.
• Source Pritchard and Morgan, 2007.

9
The unchanging power of gatekeepers

• Editorial board membership of leading tourism
  journals remains heavily gender imbalanced at a
  time when the academy is almost gender-balanced
• Annals of Tourism Research (1973) 89 men
• Tourism Management (1979) 84 men
• Tourism Analysis (1996) 88 men
• Tourist Studies (2000) 73 men
• Journal of Sport Tourism (2006) 78 men.

10
The failure of tourisms orthodoxy

• 40 years of business oriented work has not
  managed to establish tourism as a credible field
  with governments, industry or the wider social
  science academy - other fields see tourism as an
  intellectual lightweight
• On the other hand the early pioneers of social
  science approaches to tourism study failed to
  significantly challenge this view (in contrast to
  fields like media and cultural studies).

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Challenges to the existing orthodoxy

• Tourist is ideally placed to contribute to
  analyses of social injustice, disenfranchisement,
  human and spatial marginalisation, globalisation,
  political representation and cultural
  commodification.
• As an inter/multi/trans-disciplinary field, it
  has much to offer the study of identities,
  relationships, mobilities, consumption,
  embodiment and subjectivities.

12
Philosophically

• New tourism enquiry moves beyond the Cartesian
  essentialist dualisms of subject-object
  mind-body feminine-masculine us-them
  self-Other, etc. It embraces both/and thought.
• Through tourism we can explore the impacts of
  both structure ( the grand narratives of gender,
  race, class, etc.) and human agency (how
  individuals and groups experience and negotiate
  life).

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Theoretically

• New tourism research or critical tourism
  research embraces new ways of theorising tourist
  experiences, processes and phenomena
• It takes tourism to the forefront of social
  science as a research context in which the
  questions of seeing, making and experiencing the
  world can be teased out at a local and global
  level. We seek to disturb and challenge points of
  privilege created through race, class, gender,
  etc.

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Methodologically

• The embodied tourist and her/his dwelling/
  involvement in the world and relational tourism
  mobilities becomes an innovative and progressive
  methodological point of entry to capture the
  spatiality of broader structures (both material
  and non-material).
• Here, autoethnography and embodiment are central
  to such approaches.

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Politically

• It challenges the political agenda of
  traditional disembodied Western masculinist
  academic (and non-academic) knowledge.
• It confronts Eurocentric discourses in academia
  as well as in the real world which privilege
  and are connected with capitalism and linear
  thinking and seeks to play an active role in the
  fight for equity and social justice.

16
A critical lens on place marketing

• Place marketing can fuse public and private
  sector interests
• Raise the economic value of produce and products
• Increase pride and confidence in places and
  change how they are seen internally and
  externally.

17

• Developing countries account for a third of all
  global international arrivals
• Tourism is vitally important to the worlds
  poorest countries
• National strategies promote private sector
  investment, macro-economic growth and foreign
  exchange earnings.

18

• For peripheral and especially for poor and
  developing places, nation branding is not an
  indulgence but crucial statecraft.
• The decision is not whether to brand but how to
  brand themselves.

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Place branding can

• Fuse public and private sector interests
• Raise the economic value of produce and products
• Increase pride and confidence in places and
  change how they are seen internally and
  externally.

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The place-branding hexagon

• After Anholt, S. (2006).

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Where next?

• Over 130 tourism scholars worldwide are
  associated with our Critical Tourism Studies
  Network launched in Split in June 2007
• This is a collectivity of scholars who want
• to produce social change in the academy
• and society
• We are gaining footholds in the field through
  networks, conference organisation, a growing
  group of emerging doctoral and post-doctoral
  students journal special issues and books.

22

• Being a critical tourism scholar has an impact
  on every aspect of the research process from
  your choice of topic, through to your research
  framework, to choosing particular methods and
  disseminating the work.
• Thinking about your research and those with whom
  you co-create knowledge (your participants,
  audiences, etc.) sharpens your approach in that
  your appreciation of the complexly spun web of
  academic power brings into focus the varied
  contexts in which research takes place.