George Hughes

Authenticity in tourism

Abstract Two food campaigns from Scotland are used to review the impact of commodity production and post-modernism on the construction of authenticity. The recognition that cultural production, including tourism, is thoroughly imaginary directs attention to the politics of whose interests are embedded in cultural representations. The global scale of commodities, finance, media, and population has transformed the terms in which debates about authenticity and ideology take place. The image saturated character of “reality” dissolves the boundaries between a place centered view of authenticity and an aesthetic illusion, and raises questions about the continuing relevance of the traditional concept of authenticity. The paper makes a tentative beginning to a “self” oriented retheorization of what authenticity might be.

The cultural construction of sustainable tourism

Abstract Injunctions towards more sustainable forms of development now characterize official as well as pressure group manifestos. In tourism this is marked by a discourse of sustainable tourism and the sponsorship of initiatives addressing the relationship between tourism and the environment. This paper, using a Scottish example, demonstrates that the dominant approach to sustainable tourism is technical, rational and scientific. It suggests that, while necessary, this has eclipsed the emergence of an ethical response. The paper concludes with some tentative strategies for sustainable tourism fashioned out of an ethical interest in the development of people, as tourists, and destination populations, as communities.

The politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow

Abstract North American literature on the changing role of the local state these past two decades has been dominated by the view of a transition from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism . Associated with the transition has been the emergence of a New Urban Politics (NUP). Within a political economy framework. the NUP has been rooted in the material redistributive effects of the transition. This paper explores the character of this NUP, as experienced by one British city, and highlights some fundamental differences with the established political economy reading. Our argument, based upon the city of Glasgow, draws attention to two distinctive features. First, the institutional structure of urban governance in Glasgow differs from that of cities in the United States. In Glasgow, it has been the Left controlled local Council which has orchestrated the transition to entrepreneurialism, rather than the North American model of a coalition between local capital and the local state. Secondly, the transition in Glasgow has been marked not by a significant transfer of local state revenue from service provision to local economic development, but by a symbolic reorientation of the local state as marked by the central importance of large place marketing hallmark events. These events represent the city in ways which differ from traditional ‘self’ identities. Consequently, the transition has evoked a political response which has focused upon the symbolic posturing of the local state rather than the material consequences of the shift. In focusing upon local identity, the politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow points to a dimension of conflict which has received inadequate treatment in accounts of the NUP to date.

Tourism and the geographical imagination

The application of modern marketing techniques involves a significant philosophical commitment to commercial objectives, which put product marketability before development. When these techniques are transferred to the promotion of places, as tourist destinations, adherence to this philosophy raises issues for communities. This paper deconstructs some promotional text from Scotland, as a way of illustrating the singularity of this representation of reality, and suggests that there are tourist ‘ways of seeing’ places that differ from other representations. The fusion of tourist representations and marketing philosophy blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, through the commodification of place imagery. In aggregate this amounts to a geography of the imagination in which places increasingly vie with each other to get on the tourist map.

Urban revitalization: the use of festive time strategies

The widespread use of festive promotions, in the urban management of the 1990s, represents an extension in the practice of city marketing. This interest in festivity might be accounted for in two ways; as an economic strategy to combat the deleterious impacts of globalization on local economies, and as a social strategy to combat the growing alienation and insecurity felt in public space. However this paper offers an additional, more cultural, reading. Because of its highly competitive character, the practice of city ‘imagineering’ demands continuous innovation. Recent attention has turned to the liminal possibilities of ‘economically underexploited’ temporal periods. Temporal patterns of celebration are being mined for their touristic potential in a process that robs them of their commemorative depth as it simultaneously strives to retain their festive form. This paper examines two such initiatives- the ‘Night-Time Economy’ and the Hogmanay Street Party. While these have been promoted for economic and so...

Changing approaches to domestic tourism

In a paper suggesting in its title the intention of addressing In so far as Kuhn’s thesis is a plausible description of domestic tourism, it may seem a little bizarre to set out theory building in the sciences it applies a forriori in the with a brief reference to the work of Emmanuel Kant. But foundation of an academic discipline. The designation of Kant’s theorizing concerning the generation of what an area of academic interest as a ‘discipline’ implies the counts as valid knowledge has important implications for establishment of conventions and traditions which create the construction of theory in general, and concomitantly the ways in which we look at a subject. In time these the theorizing of tourism. Kant formulated a distinction conventions and traditions take on the character of canons between ultimate or ontological reality (which is indepenwhich are used in arbitrating the legitimacy of competing dent of our minds), epistemology (or the ways in which we theories in a way analogous to the notion of a ruling come to understand reality through reasoning), and empirparadigm. Said describes the formation of a canon as a ically derived sense information. For Kant, and much ‘blocking device for methodological and disciplinary selfsubsequent philosophical tradition, when we reasoned questioning’, and with Foucault, emphasizes the represabout the world what we were, in practice, doing was to sive nature by which disciplinary formation achieves conreconstruct reality or make representations of it. Howformity among its members.’ The way in which expertise is ever, since ontological reality was ultimately unknowable, built up involves the passage through rules of accreditarational endeavour was destined to be limited to repretion, speaking the language, mastering the idioms and sentation. accepting the authorities in the field. The power of scientific method, involving procedures for falsifying hypotheses about the nature of reality, lies in its promise that eventually we can come to know this ultimate reality and control it. Scientific method is seemingly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the eradication of superstition. However, in an historic study of the sociology of science in 1962 Kuhn defined the process by which scientific theory was constructed as the development of paradigms.’ Kuhn argued that, far from an open academy in which competing theories were evaluated in an explicitly rational and. objective manner for their conformity with established facts, hypotheses were only admitted if they came framed within the terms of the prevailing paradigm. The major productive periods of scientific research were thus seen by Kuhn as puzzle solving. Only when major discontinuities between research findings and hypotheses arose, and even then only if such discontinuities were generally experienced across the breadth of theorizing, was there sufficient pressure to initiate a paradigm shift. Theorizing in science, in this perspective, was thus constrained by the social community in which it took place. It would be overambitious here to attempt such a comprehensive assessment of the disciplinary development of tourism, but I propose to embark on a part of this project by examining, first, a variety of ways in which tourism has been represented. I will then draw upon some case study work from Scotland to illustrate what I shall call the institutionalization of tourism. The purpose of this analysis is to suggest that tourism, epistemologicaliy, has existed in different forms and that our contemporary understanding is but another social construction. By relativizing tourism in this way I intend to show that the current debate on its disciplinary credibility should be conducted mindful that we are actually crmrirlg rather than discovering the phenomenon called tourism. Whether tourism be an established discipline or a ten-year wonder, the manner in which we as theorists discuss it is simultaneously the manner in which it is made manifest. As such I wish to show that we are instrumental in the construction of paradigms or canons against which future tourism theory is evaluated and against which contemporary claims to its disciplinary independence are advanced.

Tourism and the environment; a sustainable partnership

ABSTRACT Sustainable development is now an established part of the rhetoric of government policy. In Scottish tourism this has been expressed through an initiative on tourism and the environment. Yet Scottish tourism may be more readily associated with scenery, nostalgia and a ‘tartan’ heritage. This paper discusses the potential for sustainable tourism to become but another part of the touristic portfolio of myths.

Agenda 21, local authorities and tourism in the UK

The United Nations World Congress on the Environment and Development witnessed the launch of Agenda 21, accepted by over 150 States and local governments throughout the globe. Such support is essential to the realization of this Agenda and nowhere more so than at the local level. This is explicitly recognized in the Agenda by Chapter 28 which outlines the role and objectives for local authorities-in particular local authorities were asked to prepare plans for a local Agenda 21 (LA21) by the end of 1996. This paper reports on a study, initiated in 1995, which investigated the extent to which tourism, as one domain of overall local environmental management had been incorporated into the implementation of Agenda 21. Preliminary findings suggest little awareness of the significance of LA21 to policy development in tourism and of an institutional separation between the local authority management of LA21 and tourism.

The self, signification and the superyacht.

The reading of landscape as text has become an important theme in cultural geography. However, where many readings are performed on the partially stable landscapes of cities and countryside, this case study examines a more ephemeral landscape of the superyacht. The acquisition of superyachts, by many of the worlds richest and most powerful actors, is treated as a symptom of late modernism. Superyachts are analysed as exemplars of the compression of time and space that is symptomatic of contemporary society, since their mobility and telecommunications overcome many former locational constraints. They are also exemplars of the blurring of work and leisure and raise issues about the construction of a notion of the self where the signifiers of the self have, in a post-structuralist reading, floated free from what they signify. This paper seeks to argue the potential for reading the superyacht as a signifier of the self.

Conference tourism: implications for Scotland

ABSTRACT The importance of conference tourism in local economic development is becoming increasingly recognised. The geographical pattern of conference venues and market segments is examined to provide a context for a discussion on the implications for Scotland for the acknowledged growth of this sector.