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domain of knowledge is not always altogether easy, for customer and
researcher alike.
As is well known, and often lamented too, tourism studies and
tourism research is haunted by the divide between applied and academic
research, between expectations and demands from the industry and
independent scientific development of knowledge free from external and
partial interests. Perhaps this divide is more evident in tourism studies than
many other social science disciplines. Yet, a common core assumption in
social research philosophy is that any and every knowledge of the social
produced by social science is itself already fundamentally and inevitably a
part of the social world.
This means, in principle, that the social scientist has no access to a
separate place from where the social world can be observed without
involvement. The issue at stake is then not whether the tourism researcher
is objective or subjective, in the hands of the “business” or in the head of
the academics, but instead about in what ways and from what perspective
the researcher is participating. In as much as the focus is on tourism itself,
then it also becomes actualized. One could then argue that it is not unusual
that tourism research is done under the spell of de nobis ipsis silemus (“on
ourselves we are silent”) (Farinelli 2009).
According to Shaw and Williams, “[o]ne of the greatest challenges
for researchers is to understand how it [tourism] shapes and is shaped by
wider societal processes” (Shaw and Williams 2004, p. 3). Yet, as easy as
it is to agree that understanding of tourism could benefit from aligning it
with “societal processes”, one could still put question marks around the
social in tourism theory. What we particularly have in mind is the recent
interest in exploring various materialities in the social sciences, which
includes a recognition of the role of non-humans and their material
agencies in the constitution of what traditionally has been conceived of as
social. This “material turn” problematizes attempts in tourism studies to
understand and explain tourism and tourists primarily as social
phenomena. Given that human tourism mobility is co-produced with
material, objects, goods, artefacts, and other non-humans, tourism is only
partly social. Indeed, as Franklin puts it:
Tourism abounds with things, tourist things, and tourists are tied up in a
world of tourist things for a considerable period of their time. And. yet,
if you read all the past and current text books on tourism, and make a list
of all the really important explanations of tourism, the key concepts and
theoretical developments, you will discover that these things are not held
to be very significant (Franklin 2003, p. 97).
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