Dennison Nash

Methodology in tourism research

Abstract This exploratory article attempts to highlight some areas of tourism research which are believed to lack sufficient methodological sophistication. The origin of such research is outlined, together with the ambivalent attitudes displayed by practitioners and outsiders alike. By means of a four quadrant model, the interplay between theoretical awareness and methodological sophistication is explored, but only in one quadrant is sufficient balance said to be achieved. To substantiate these points, examples are drawn from tourism research and from a meta-analysis of articles featured in two leading journals. Theoretical awareness and methodological sophistication are then spelled out in more detail and are seen to coincide at the conceptualization stage of the research process. Contributions to this special issue of Annals are introduced and possible areas for further research are briefly examined.

Tourism as an Anthropological Subject [and Comments and Reply]

This paper provides a critical evaluationof the growing number of anthropologically oriented studies of tourism and proposes a conceptual framework for future studies. A cross-culturally viable definition of tourism is offered. This definition, which conceives of the tourist as a person at leisure who travels and of tourism as a variety of leisure activity, suggest a transactional view of tourism that involves an encounter between tourist-generating and host societies. Such an encounter may be conceived of as a process or a system. Following this definition, it is possible ot identify tourism at all levels of sociocultural complexity. At present it does not seem possible to discover the causes of tourism, but one can begin to account for intra-or intersocietal touristic variability. Anthropological consideration of this latter is not well developed. Rather, interest has been centered on the consequences of tourism for host societies, particularly in the developing world. So far, thought, these studies have not demonstrated much methodological or theoretical sophistication. Though some variety of exchange theory may ultimately prove the best way of organizing an overview of the touristic process or system, less ambitious perspectives would seem to be, for the moment, indicated.

The rise and fall of an aristocratic tourist culture.

Abstract The character of winter society in Nice during the period of 1763–1936 is traced in cultural developmental terms. This society, which originally was comprised of a small homogeneous group of (mostly) sick upper class Englishmen, gradually evolved to a large international group of wealthy (mostly) healthy winter visitors. The character of this later society appears to have conformed to Cohens model for expatriate communities in which various groups of foreign nationals band together into an international group of expatriates linked with upper status residents. The evolutionary trend from the simple to the complex is seen to be the result of (mostly outside) entrepreneurial acativity directed at an expanding market. A continuation of such activity appears to have led to the mass tourism in present-day Nice.

The Personal Approach in Cultural Anthropological Research [and Comments and Reply]

The personal approach in cultural anthropology, self-consciously and deliberately undertaken, perceives value in the unique combination of interests, personal values, theoretical orientation, imagination, sensitivity, and other idiosyncratic qualities embodied in a particular competent investigator or team of investigators. Because of the uniqueness of the factors through which the personal approach yields knowledge, the approach is not easily taught, and the conclusions it reaches are incapable of being fully tested for their reliability. The credibility of the conclusions reached by that approach depends heavily on the cogency, consistency, logic, and persuasiveness with which they are argued and presented. From the time description is begun, through subsequent analysis of data, to the final presentation of conclusions, idiosyncratic factors enter research undertaken by the personal approach because of the nonstandardized vantage point from which the events are observed. Considering the very substantial part played by the personal qualities of the observer when knowledge is produced by this route, accuracy of conclusions cannot be equated with one-to-one faithfulness to independently existing facts. The personal approach has been more often utilized in ethnography and ethnology than in archeology and is most appropriate for research whose goal is historical narration, depicting a way of life, the interpretation of meaning, or tracing relationships between cultural patterns. The credibility of knowledge obtained through the approach is no more unstable than that of knowledge founded on the objective method; all knowledge is constantly being upset as new evidence, new techniques, new standards, or new theories are brought to bear on a topic.

Ethnographic windows on tourism.

Considering the ethnographic method and its application in the study of tourism, this article takes up the essentials of this small scale, grass roots study of the cultures of human groups during field work. Aiming to penetrate the social life of some group of the people, the ethnographer may use a variety of procedures, of which participant observation and the use of informants of various kinds are basic. Secondly, in order to better demonstrate how ethnographies can clarify the subject of tourism and to indicate the pluses and minuses of its use in this line of research, three ethnographically based studies of different aspects of tourism are summarized and criticized in terms of criteria derived from current understandings about the method. Finally, some of the implications of this brief review for the study of tourism are considered.

Balance of Power in Developing an Association of Tourism Researchers

This is the story of what appears to have been a change in the balance of power associated with different forms of knowledge in an association of tourism researchers, founded by interested parties to support and further the development of their field of research, which as with a number of such organizations, has had its problems. The study was carried out by the author, an anthropologist, as a quasi ethnography, qualitative in nature, and it was aided by his position as a Founding Fellow of the association and as a two-time member of its membership committee during its early history in the last decade of the 20th century. It is fair to say that the author has been deeply committed to the issues raised here. This study has been centered around the grounded theory of Glaser and Strauss (1967), which has been used in anthropology, sociology and other social sciences (See, e.g., Hammersley and Atkinson 1995), in which theory tends to grow inductively out of ethnographic field work that often considers the subjective element in human action and the give and take between the researcher and people being studied. Further theories with more specialized applications emerged as the study developed. Its organizing issue concerns a specific problem in the production of knowledge encountered by the association in the course of its development, which is seen to have passed through positions of both academically– and business-oriented research.