Tourism Studies and the Social Sciences aims to provide students with a wider understanding of and grounding in the theories of the social sciences that tourism studies have been built upon.

This volume is designed to enable its reader to think through vital concepts and theories relating to tourism and hospitality management, stimulate critical thinking and use multidisciplinary perspectives. The book is organized around three key ways of producing social change in and through tourism: critical thinking, critical education and critical action.

Based upon a social science approach to understanding the significance of tourism in contemporary society, Andrew Holden’s fascinating book highlights tourism as a multidisciplinary area of study with rich and varied theoretical underpinnings. Here, Holden introduces social science disciplines and applies relevant theories to the understanding of tourism. He investigates how the economic and political structures of society influence the manifestation of tourism at a global level, and subsequently considers a variety of topical issues including citizenship and social exclusion, tourism as a form of trade, consumerism, the consequences of tourism, and feminism and ethics. Each chapter includes: a brief introductory summary of the discipline a critique of its main theories and concepts which have relevance to tourism a discussion of how the theories and concepts have been applied to tourism using cases and examples international case studies and examples. Punctuated with study and teaching aids, chapter summaries and ‘think points’ to encourage reflection, this excellent, broad-ranging textbook provides a wider understanding of tourism’s role in society.

This volume addresses the transformative power of tourism social media and offers novel theoretical and methodological approaches to its academic investigation. Acknowledging the collective value creation mechanisms of new media, the authors explore how technology nurtures, augments and modifies social or commercial interactions in tourism.

The recent surfacing of actor-network theory (ANT) in tourism studies correlates to a rising interest in understanding tourism as emergent thorough relational practice connecting cultures, natures and technologies in multifarious ways. Despite the widespread application of ANT across the social sciences, no book has dealt with the practical and theoretical implications of using ANT in Tourism research. This is the first book to critically engage with the use of ANT in tourism studies. By doing so, it challenges approaches that have dominated the literature for the last twenty years and casts new light on issues of materiality, ordering and networks in tourism. The book describes the approach, its possibilities and limitations as an ontology and research methodology, and advances its use and research in the field of tourism. The first three chapters of the book introduce ANT and its key conceptual premises, the book itself and the relation between ANT and tourism studies. Using illustrative cases and examples, the subsequent chapters deal with specific subject areas like materiality, risk, mobilities and ordering and show how ANT contributes to tourism studies. This part presents examples and cases which illustrate the use of the approach in a critical way. Inherently, the study of tourism is a multi-disciplinary field of research and that is reflected in the diverse academic backgrounds of the contributing authors to provide a broad post-disciplinary context of ANT in tourism studies. This unique book, focusing on emerging approaches in tourism research, will be of value to students, researchers and academics in tourism as well as the wider Social Sciences.

'Tourism' helps provide an understanding of the contemporary forces shaping tourism in a manner that connects the field to broader policy and scientific debate that is approachable by students of tourism at all levels. Issues are examined in terms of key concepts of contemporary social and environmental studies.

New approaches to tourism study demonstrate a notable ‘critical turn’ – a shift in thought that emphasises interpretative and critical modes of tourism inquiry. The chapters in this volume reflect this emerging critical school of tourism studies and represent a coordinated effort of tourism scholars whose work engages innovative research methodologies. Since such work has been dispersed across a variety of tourism-related and other research fields, this book responds to a pressing need to consolidate recent advances in a single text. Adopting a broad definition of ‘criticality’, the contributors seek to find ‘fresh’ ways of theorising tourism by locating the phenomenon in its wider political, economic, cultural and social contexts. The collection addresses the power relations underpinning the production of academic knowledge; presents a range of qualitative data collection methods which confront the field’s dominant (post)positivist approaches; foregrounds the emotional dynamics of research relations and explores the personal, the political and the situated nature of research journeys. The book has been divided into two parts, with the essays in the first part establishing a context-specific framework for engaging philosophical and theoretical debates in contemporary tourism enquiry. The second set of essays then present, discuss and critique specific methodologies, research techniques, methods of interpretation and writing strategies, all of which are in some sense illustrative of ‘critical’ tourism research. Contributors range from postgraduate students to established academics and are drawn from both the geopolitical margins and the ‘powerbases’ of the tourism academy. Their various relationships with the English-speaking academy thus range from relative ‘outsider’ to well-positioned ‘insider’ and as a result, their essays are reflective of a range of locations within the complexly spun web of academic power relations and social divisions.