Tourism

Tourism is now a major area of academic study and publishing. There has been a proliferation of tourism courses at tertiary institutions around the world since the late 1980s. Publishers have responded to the growth in student demand for relevant material with a corresponding increase in the publication of texts and reference material. Nevertheless, despite the growth in tourism texts, there are still relative few 'global' introductory texts for university students to the field of tourism studies from a social scientific perspective. This book is designed to fill some of that gap by providing a broad international introduction at a macro-level perspective to tourism development issues and the wider field of tourism studies. However, I would be the first to acknowledge that while global in scope, the international dimension is constrained by a dependence on academic literature in the English language. Where possible, however, reference is made to work in other languages. The text is designed to meet the demands of undergraduate tertiary tourism students as a core social science text in their degree, although it should also be of some utility for graduate students in tourism as well. Ideally, it will also be useful for students in cognate areas, such as geography, recreation and leisure. The use of key ideas of accessibility, mobility, globalisation and localisation are utilised in order to try to provide a coherent framework for understanding and discussing the development, myths, nature and issues surrounding a phenomenon such as tourism, which is simultaneously both local and global in scope. Moreover, as the reader will see, the book also uses these concepts to help ground the disciplinary context of tourism in the social sciences beyond that of being a specific set of institutional arrangements for the academy. This book has been several years in coming. It continues on various themes contained in Tourism Planning (Hall 2000), with a number of elements of that book (e.g. systems, networks, collaboration and place competition) being carried over into the present book. But by no means is this book a new edition of the planning text. Rather this book has aimed to reconsider the wider context within which tourism has developed as well as the development of tourism as an area of academic study itself and its theoretical capacity to explain tourism mobility. This book, as with tourism itself, has also been impacted by global events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001, the terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002, and the SARs scare in 2003. Accompanying these events have been substantial economic, political and social convulsions, which quickly made large sections of some chapters virtually obsolete before they arrived at the publishers. To further complicate matters serious illness in my family also delayed completion. In essence, then, this book has already been through two editions before the publishers even saw it, and here the support of Andrew Taylor and his predecessor, Matthew Smith, and all at Pearson Europe is acknowledged.