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usiness and market to potential customers. Also policy-making involves
hypothetical and speculative reasoning. For example, making plans for
tourism development is theoretical in the sense that it is about something
imaginary. The future does not exist here and now, it can only appear here
and now as a pure theoretical object.
That we in this chapter choose to address and put emphasis on the
importance of tourism theory is not be read as advocating theory for its
own sake. We do, however, believe that there are some substantial reasons
for paying extra careful attention to theory in tourism studies. We agree in
principle with Shaw and Williams that “tourism research is still often
descriptive, a-theoretical, and chaotically conceptualized in being
abstracted from broader social relationships” (Shaw and Williams 2004, p.
1). Although exceptions can readily be found, their argument indicates that
one future challenge for tourism theory is to further enhance and develop
accounts that situate tourism and tourists in a broader framework informed
by contemporary social and cultural theorizing.
What we now need to address first is what theory is, and how it is
related to tourism studies. With the student audience in mind, this
necessitates a brief introductory tour into the relationship between
scientific disciplines and theory more generally.
Tourism studies: a field or a discipline?
One of the distinguishing features of a scientific discipline, for example
biology or sociology, is that it has a common theoretical domain consisting
of understandings and explanations of the phenomenon being studied. This
does not mean that such a domain has to exist in the form of a single
unified discipline theory that all its scholars and researchers subscribe to.
The point is instead that a discipline theory offers a common disciplinary
ground on which theoretical conversations and critical debates can take
place. Even if there were to be substantial disagreements and disputes
between scholars and researchers, they are nevertheless able to position
and locate them on a map of their own discipline territory. So, does
tourism studies have a discipline of its own?
The question is not altogether easy to answer. Although tourism
studies clearly do exist in terms of formal academic institutional structures,
with departments offering university degrees and conducting research on
tourism and tourists, it is less certain how and to what extent it is a
discipline held together by a common theoretical domain. For a long time
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