Social tourism is at a pivotal point. Over the past decade, there has been increased interest and research into social tourism issues, and as a result there is now much greater evidence on the important role that social tourism can play in providing significant benefits for the people supported through social tourism schemes. However, despite these advances and awareness of the benefits of tourism participation in most countries, there is still much confusion and ambiguity about the definition, role, and purpose of social tourism. This comprehensive volume reflects recent shifts in social tourism research by focusing on target groups and the benefits or constraints of these groups in holiday participation. The authors explore the diversity of issues, theories and social contexts that are relevant to social tourism research, offering a range of quantitative and qualitative methods and experimental designs as well as various policy and practice contexts to address policy issues. They also highlight opportunities for greater intensity of research on the importance of policy in advancing social tourism and to stress the fundamental role that social tourism can play in achieving strategic policy goals towards enhancing wellbeing, citizenship, and quality of life in the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.

This thought-provoking Handbook considers the impact and challenges that social tourism has on people’s lives, integrating case studies from around the world. Showcasing the latest research on the topic and its role in tackling the challenges of tourism development, chapters explore the opportunities presented by social tourism and illustrate the social imperative of tourism as a force for good.

Sheds light on the legal bases of the new world trade order, documents the progress of liberalization in the tourism sector, identifies its risks and makes proposals for reforms. Takes account of the sectoral problems in developing countries in general and the Indian experience with tourism in particular.

This book proposes a new and original analysis of tourism employment in order to understand the multiple dimensions (economic, cultural, temporal, geographical, etc.) of this cross-cutting sector. It offers an overview of French knowledge, mainly in sociology, anthropology, geography and law, in the light of singular empirical fields. The diversity of disciplinary approaches, methods and questions allows for comparisons between various segments of the tourism employment market in France and with other countries. Based on in-depth case studies, this book will be a valuable resource for students and academics who wish to understand the specificities of tourism employment and the methods for studying them, as well as for professionals in the sector and decision-makers in European tourist destinations who wish to enrich their approaches to these phenomena.

Providing a unique analysis of current multidisciplinary research on the complex relationships between tourism and the imaginaries of tourist destinations, this book traces the links between tourism imaginaries and their religious (heaven) and political (utopia) antecedents. The substantive chapters are organised into three main thematic sections, the first explores the touristic production and consumption of place imaginaries, the second analyses the way places are practiced through imaginaries and the role imaginaries play in the tourist experience and the final section explores the way images and the media participate in the creation of tourism imaginaries.

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples as credible objects of tourism, “tourism imaginaries” have yet to be fully explored. Presenting innovative conceptual approaches, this volume advances ethnographic research methods and critical scholarship regarding tourism and the imaginaries that drive it. The various authors contribute methodologically as well as conceptually to anthropology’s grasp of the images, forces, and encounters of the contemporary world.

During the four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia a vast literature on working-class movements has been produced but it has hardly any value for today's scholarship. This remarkable study reopens the field. Based on Czech, Slovak, German and other sources, it focuses on the history of the multi-ethnic social democratic labor movement in Slovakia's capital Bratislava during the period 1867-1921, and on the process of national revolution during the years 1918-19 in particular. The study places the historic change of the former Pressburg into the modern Bratislava in the broader context of the development of multinational pre-1918 Hungary, the evolution of social, ethnic, and political relations in multi-ethnic Pressburg (a 'tri-national' city of Germans, Magyars, and Slovaks), and the development of the multinational labor movement in Hungary and the Habsburg Empire as a whole.