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senses, into various touristic meanings and values. This process of
translating and transforming is necessary in order for goods, services and
sights/sites on the Earth to be appropriated for tourism purposes and
become tourism commodities. In this perspective, tourism lives a life inbetween
meaning and matter where it continuously is involved in the deand
reterritorialisation of the Earth.
When we take such a conceptual step, recognising the fundament of
the Earth and how tourism can move beyond the social through this hybrid
life in between meaning and matter, we can better realise the earthly
emergence of tourism images as imaginationings. It is now hopefully also
easier to understand why we did not choose to simply approach images as
visual, that we avoided giving them a reductionist treatment, and that we
have instead insisted on placing them not only in broader socio-cultural
contexts but also in an earthly geographical frame of imaginationings.
With these conclusions in mind we are now ready to revisit the land
of tourism studies.
Tourism studies revisited
In the early days of tourism studies there was a lack of attention from the
social sciences. Tourism was considered a frivolous topic and an alliance
with the tourism industry developed an agenda favouring a more
hospitality and management oriented approach serving the particular needs
of businesses directly concerned with tourism product development and
promotion. This development is further compounded today by competition
amongst institutions for students, which creates a need to make courses
relevant to industry, but at the same time raises concerns over the quality
of provision. These are ‘universal’ issues in higher education. But the
extent to which these issues pervade tourism studies, a relatively new field
in higher education, seems to surpass similar influences in mature
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (Aykioru, Tribe, and
Airey 2009, p. 214).
Viewed over a 30-year span, the field of tourism studies has changed
in terms of research focus and methodological sophistication.
Nevertheless, with respect to paradigmatic shifts Xiao and Smith (2006)
confirm previous findings that the field is still dominated by the scientificpositivistic
paradigm while there is also evidence indicating an emerging
contribution from the interpretive paradigm and/or critical theory. What
we want to do here is explicate further the emerging contribution from the
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