Emerging Research Themes for Tourism: Insights from Geography

The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) is held every Spring. In 2011 in was held in Seattle, April 12-16. In the previous fall there are a plethora of CFPs (Call for Papers) from people who are organizing paper sessions. I am personally on several geography email lists, including UrbGeog (urban geography), EconomicGeography, CulturalGeog, and LeftGeog, in addition to the email list of the Recreation, Tourism and Sport (RTS) Specialty Group in the AAG.  

As an avid academic geographer, I find many of these CFPs (certainly not all of them) to be very thoughtfully written and informative in themselves.  And, more importantly, they are often (certainly not always) at the cutting edge of research thought in my home discipline of geography.

In fact, I often find the geography CFPs more compelling that those that are written for tourism sessions at the AAG.  Because of that, I collected some 100 CFPs for last year’s meeting and culled through them to find the most interesting topics that academic tourism geographers should be studying (IMHO of course).  I grouped the 100 CFPs into the three topic areas below. Here is a selection of some of the more compelling research topics that I came up with:

TOPIC AREA 1 – Economic and Urban Geography

1.       City Image – This is an old theme in tourism research that seems to be re-emerging in the geographic literature. Some of the key concepts being discussed include: global cities, sustainable cities, declining cities, postcolonial cities, spatial inequality, urban political economy, nature in the city, urban boosterism, cities in film and new or social media, city landscape, place identities as commodities, and comparing neoliberal  and conventional  forms of place marketing, including architectural, social, textual, and sensual  branding.

2.       City Hubs and Networks – This is also a concept that has been around for awhile in travel and tourism studies, though not a major part of the field. Emerging geography research is still looking at the idea of transportation hubs (air and sea), but also extending that into “brainports” (aka “centers of competence”), the influence of municipalities on regional policies related to theorizing policy networks, sustainability and environmental governance, transnational networking and sociotechnical regimes related to global civil society and NGOs, and the new geographies of global production networks focusing on the relationships between small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and international corporations.

3.       Mobile Technologies and Place – This is, of course, a major new area of emerging activity and research. As such we are still evolving ways to study it. Geographers are interested in: how mobile devices change the spatial and temporal flexibility of individuals and organizations; how they change the ways in which material places are used and perceived; how technology transforms social and spatial relations, affects social identification, and transforms state-society and nature-society relations; and how information, communication and telecommunication technologies are becoming (or not) integrated into the everyday practices of businesses and households -- and with what socioeconomic consequences.

TOPIC AREA 2 – Cultural and Political Geography

4.       Everyday Culture and Experiences – This has long been a topic of interest among cultural geographers, but has been addressed much less by tourism researchers. It includes tangible or artistic aspect of culture; folk and popular culture; visual and performing arts; uses of space and place in music lyrics, television plot lines, movies and film, contemporary novels, graphic novels and short fiction; social space and resistance on the internet. Overall it is the everyday practice of making the world habitable and providing for our needs, which are based on relationships among subjectivity, identity and place.

5.       Multicultural Peoples – This is a popular topic in the broader social sciences that tourism researchers have touched upon to some degree. Topics include multicultural people's sense of place and the various belongings they have to where they grew up, where they live, where they travel, and where their ancestors were from. Also of interest are the intersections of race with gender, class, religion, and space; spatialities of post-racial thinking; and the growing diversity in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas the developed world.

6.       People Mobilities - The multicultural peoples topic is related to the growing mobility of people worldwide. This topic presents many geographic research themes, including: the search for alternative mobility futures; slow movements; borders and their surveillance and securitization; embodied performances and affective mobility; friction, turbulence and rhythms of movement; mobile and locative social media and electronic gaming; and imaginary and virtual travel. Also of related interest are how class, gender, sexuality, are ethnicity are enacted, (re)produced and potentially transformed in mobile practices by individuals and their social relations, experiences, mobile strategies, and identities. At another level are issues of freedom of movement, challenges and changes in the global system of migration controls, and “no borders” politics in an era of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

TOPIC AREA 3 – Planning and Sustainable Places

      7.       Green Economies – Sustainable tourism is a very popular topic for tourism research, but the broader geography research on the green economy still brings some new ideas, including: new forms of green commodification and the rapidly expanding markets on which these are traded; developing spaces of the green economy; the work of creating ‘sustainable’ cities, transportation networks, waste management systems, and alternative/renewable energy; how ‘green jobs’ differ from traditional jobs; green urbanism; Foucault's apparatus (dispositive; institutions that support power structures); and the political economy and material processes of the green economy.

      8.       Ethical Practice – This is a topic that is very new among tourism researchers, and has probably been better addressed by geographers. Major themes include: issues of civil, political and social rights, what might be called "place rights" or a "right to place" as an entitlement of citizenship, and what constitutes these place-based rights, theoretically and in practice; policy implications that arise from normative scholarship and practice; caring approaches to social theory; human rights and geographic place; defining hegemonies and counter-hegemonies; accommodation and subversion within social movements; meaning and materiality in societal mobilization; similarities between red and green social movements – and, of course, their relationship to tourism development.

As you might guess, there were many other topics among the AAG Call for Papers. Each of the topics above is based on three to four different CFPs. I am sure other academic disciplines have a lot that they can inform our tourism research. For me, I am glad to be a geographer as I find the entire discipline to be immensely stimulating and informative for my personal tourism research.

On the Use and Abuse of Tourism Satellite Accounts

I posted a link to my blog post on Tourism is Not the World's Largest Industry! to the TRINET email discussion list, which is the largest email list for tourism academics worldwide. It generated a fair amount of discussion. One of the arguments used to support the importance of tourism as an industry was the Tourism Satellite Accounting system, which estimates the total economic and employment impact of tourism, taking into account the proportions of other industries that rely on tourism and travel in some way. (A satellite industry is any industry that is no part of the traditional core industries that comprise the System of National Accounts, which is the economic data commonly collected by all countries.)

An example of the statements that people made based on the TSA is seen in this post, which was also emailed to, and reposted on, eTurboNews:

• May 05, 2008: eTN Mailbox: Tourism is NOT the world's largest Industry, so stop saying it is!
  
  "Tourism is not an industry in the definition of "industry" as per the System of National Accounts (SNA) the measure of contribution to an economy (GDP). Tourism is a consumption group (all tourists, domestic & international) and hence the set up of the TSA, (Tourism Satellite Account) which is apart from SNA but draws data from SNA.
  
  So when one says one should exclude transport for example when comparing Tourism to say Transport, one of the worlds biggest industries, one is denying the contribution towards transport made by Tourism (consumption group) By definition Tourism overlaps a number of industries and is a combination of partial outputs of many industries. most only partially associated with tourism. Put another way, if Tourism consumption were to cease, this will result in a reduction of the output of a number of industries, the biggest of which is probably the transport industry.
  
  The development of the TSA has been very important in understanding the economic impact of an "industry" defined by tourists and their consumption for the 'industry' in getting recognition by the community and public sector, for planning purposes.
  
  At the end of the day, it might not be the biggest industry in the world, but it is one of the biggest both as an employer and economically speaking. We could not say this with confidence prior to the TSA."
  
  (Click Here to see the original article on eTurboNews.)

Well, I think we could easily say that tourism is one of the largest industries in the world prior to the TSA system. The World Trade Organization data clearly shows this, and their data is based on the System of National Accounts (SNA), which is the core economic data collected by each country. In addition, I am not sure who wants to exclude passenger transportation from tourism, though I would argue for excluding cargo transportation, as I did in my previous post.

Anyway, in response, I posted my own assessment of the Tourism Satellite Accounting System.

• "Well, of course I have my issues with how people use the TSA, as well...
  
  The TSA approach provides alternatives to traditional GDP and employment calculations, and which is probably more accurate in estimating the economic role of passenger travel and tourism in an economy. The best source [that I have seen] for understanding how this is done is this publication from the WTTC:
  
  http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf
  
  There are a couple of caveats to this approach. First, while it is based on the best available data, there are holes in that data and assumptions must be made on how to fill those holes. These assumptions may or may not be valid in reality.
  
  Second, the data only looks at travel and tourism. It does not provide a comprehensive input-output model that compares travel and tourism (however it is defined as a partial industry) to other industries. Given the fuzzy nature of the partial-industries that the satellite accounting system is designed to address, I am not sure how this could ever be done. But more importantly, it means that you can not say that travel and tourism is the largest industry, or that it is second or third etc., based on the satellite accounting system. You can not compare the results of a TSA exercise with the results of GDP exercise based on traditional national accounts. They are related, but different beasts.
  
  What you would need to do is to run a satellite accounting exercise on other industries, some of which may claim large parts of the core of passenger transportation and tourism -- which I think would decrease the totals that people are currently coming up with in the TSAs. Short of that, you can only say that t+t makes a certain contribution to a certain economy based on certain assumptions.
  
  A quick review on Google found that Tourism appears to be the only partial-industry that has whole heartedly adopted the satellite accounting approach. The only other hits that come up are suggestions to use the satellite accounting approach to develop a green accounting model.
  
  As I said before, please let me know what I am getting wrong here.
  
  Cheers, Alan"

To further clarify the limits of the TSA, let's say you want to compare Tourism with Food and Entertainment and Education. All of these are what Neil Leiper (2008) refers to as "partial industries" because they all overlap (see reference below). You can come up with a total economic impact for tourism, using the TSA, but that number includes portions of Food (e.g., restaurants), Entertainment (e.g., amusement parks), and Education (e.g., museums). But a Satellite Accounting System for each of those industries would also include profits and employees that are in the tourism economy. This is why adding up the total profits and employees of all possible industries would probably 10 to 100 time larger than the real economy - depending on how the different industries are identified and defined.

Furthermore, I would guess that a satellite accounting system for Food would result in economic and employment impacts at least as large as tourism, if not larger. It all depends on definitions. Food could include all agricultural production, investments and transportation, along with all places and ways that food is sold and served, and portions of all other businesses that support the production, selling, transport and disposal of food in the world. Also included would be research and development of food, dietitians and other medical and quasi-medical diet clinics, food related television shows and books, and everyone employed in all of these roles. This is a huge economy and has a huge overlap with tourism.

My conclusion is that a satellite accounting system should NEVER be used to compare one industry with another because: (1) defining the boundaries of a satellite industries is subjective, flexible and easily changed; (2) anything can be defined as a satellite industry; and (3) the overlap between satellite industries varies and is not taken into account when comparisons are made.

TSA numbers can be used to benchmark industry changes over time, if definitions are fixed and not changed. They can also be used to see the degree to which tourism overlaps with different sectors of the economy. These are valuable planning tools. But, the TSA can not be used to claim that tourism is larger than any other specific industry, because under the satellite accounting system approach, each industry has a different definition.

One respondent in the "NOT Largest Industry" discussion on TRINET stated:

• "TSA provide insights into where tourists spend, the extent to which different sectors gain from tourist spending, and the extent to which individual sectors are dependent upon tourism.TSA can serve as a medium for public information helping to raise awareness of tourism and its contribution to national economies. They help tourism stakeholders to better understand the economic importance of this activity; and by extension its role in all the industries involved in the production of goods and services demanded by visitors. TSA thus help to legitimize or give credibility to the tourism industry as a main economic sector in the minds of politicians and the general public."

And another person stated that:

• "The technique is good but without the data it comes back to the rubbish in rubbish out syndrome. Also TSAs may show the significance of tourism they do not show the economic impact of tourism - for this you need the input-output model or CGE. But more fundamental to whatever model is used, the data collected relating to tourist expenditure globally is generally poor and without that the estimation of the size of the industry is impossible."

But I am still puzzled as to why passenger travel and tourism is the only industry that is using the satellite accounting approach to measure its impact...


PS: the following two related readings was posted in the TRINET discussion list:

• Neil Leiper, Why ‘the tourism industry’ is misleading as a generic expression: The case for the plural variation, ‘tourism industries’ - Tourism Management 29 (2008) 237–251
• UNWTO's "2008 Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework" at: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc08/BG-TSA.pdf
• WTTC's Methodology for producing the 2008 WTTC/OE Travel & Tourism Simulated Satellite Accounts, World Travel and Tourism Council and Oxford Economics, March 2008: http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf

UPDATE (6May08):

The following list was sent to me today. These are a sampling of items that are included in the WTTC's calculation of the Global Tourism Satellite Account, collected from the WTTC document cited above. They demonstrate the subjectivity and arbitrary nature of the satellite accounting approach, and what the sender called "the WTTC-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink method of estimating the contribution of travel and tourism to the global economy."

• 100% of boats with motor (even though the boat owner may never travel beyond the 50 mile distance perimeter, which is the criterion for being classified a 'traveler.')
• More than 29% of all towing charges
• More than 35% of all VCR and video disk players
• Almost a third (29%) of all vehicle purchases and vehicle insurance
• More than 38% of all treadmills (sports, recreation and exercise equip)

From the document: "Because the Federal Railroad Administration runs Amtrak, its entire budget was also counted as 100% Travel & Tourism."

• US Federal Aviation Administration 89.70%
• US Federal Highway Administration 22.47%
• US Federal Railroad Administration 100.00%
• US National Park Service 100.00%
• US Fish & Wildlife Service 100.00%

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[All of the above was also posted on the New Economics of Tourism (N.E.T.) Blog]

Why Don't We Blog? University Faculty Blogging about Travel & Tourism

Last Updated: 30 June 2007

I have been somewhat involved, but very interested, in a recent discussion on the podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, on the topic of university faculty blogs.

• Six Pixels of Separation podcast #50 - blog - mp3 file - 6 May 2007;
  and #51 - blog - mp3 file - 13 May 2007

One of the "complaints" about academia is that it is very conservative and a late adopter of new technology, and in fact discourages faculty members from using new technology, such as social software or social media. A big part of that discussion is trying to figure out how social media would fit into the very traditional approaches to academic review and assessments of productivity. There are several sources that discuss these issues; here are a few:

• Academic Productivity » Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
• Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet
• Faculty blogs: Good idea or Bad idea? (and a more recent comment by the same author on libraries and blogs)
  

Despite these discussion, there are a lot of university faculty who are blogging about their disciplinary specialties, research activities, and teaching. These two links provide examples of university faculty blogs

• Professors Who Blog (not updated since 28 July 2006, some are no longer activee)
• All The Web search results on "university professor faculty blogs"

Looking at the web search results, you would think that almost all Law professors are blogging. Public policy faculty would be a distant second. However, the 150 blogs listed on the Professors Who Blog site shows predominance in the Humanities, though many other disciplines are represented, as well.

I have been blogging for almost two years now, prompted by my daughter, and starting with a trip diary. Since then I have started a couple other trip diary blogs, a couple of research and teaching related blogs, and I have had my students blogging in my classes. My podcasts evolved directly from my blogs.

• Alan A. Lew's Blogs & Podcasts - some are more active than others
  

DO YOU BLOG?

While there are quite a few interesting blogs about tourism and the travel industry, I had not seen any blogs by other tourism academics in the two years that I have bee doing this. In fact, blogging (which is celebrating its 10th year as a word 1997) is almost considered "old technology" is the realm of social software. So one would think that more tourism academics would be doing it.

So prompted by the discussions on Six Pixels of Separation, and with the Spring semester having ended, I sent an email out on 20 May 2007 to several discussion lists that are frequented by tourism professors and graduate students. These lists included Trinet, IGU Tourism Commission, AAG RTS Specialty Group, Tourism Anthropology, and Asia Tourism Research. Accounting for some duplication (people on more than one list), I guestimate that some 1000 people received my query: "Do You Blog?" Here is a summary of the responses that I got.

NOT-YET-BLOGGERS

• One person told me that she has not blogged, but would like to if she only had the time. (I can certainly identify with that!)
• Glenn Croy (Monash) told me that Monash University is encouraging their faculty to blog "so as another way to promote our programme, especially to potential students. Encouraged is in the literal meaning, that it is not being forced upon us, though if we are interested this is something
  we can do and our marketing people will support us in this."
  
  • This seems to be a growing phenomenon, as seen in this example from Ohio Dominion University.

BLOGGING ABOUT TOURISM

• Fabian Frenzel (Leeds Metropolitan) - Recently started a collaborative blog on the New Economics of Tourism that is based in the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University.
• New Economics of Tourism N.E.T.
  
• Dimitrios Buhalis (Surrey) - Comments on tourism and his personal academic experiences. Although started in 2005, it has only been in the past month of so that he has been posting more regularly. Not a lot there yet, but show much promise.
  
  • Dimitrios Journeys
    
• Two of my (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) own blogs fall under this category
  
  • Web 2.0 Travel Tools - where I review interesting websites that are transforming the travel experience and tourism industry
  • Tourism Place - where I am posting this blog, and occasionally post tourism things that don't quite fit anywhere else. I originally created this with the intent of making it a collaborative blog. If anyone want to be a contributor to it, let me know.

BLOGGING FOR CLASSES & STUDENTS

• Wes Roehl (Temple) has been experimenting with using a collaborative blog to encourage interaction among the graduate students in his tourism program. All of the grad students in the program were members of the blog and could post to it, though not all of them did. He is currently rethinking how to make it more effective.
  
  • Tourism Grad Student Network
• Bruce Wicks (Illinois, C-U) is currently in Poland with five students study abroad students from the University of Illinois, and looking at tourism. They set up a blog for friends and family to follow their adventure. He said "Frankly I can't imagine anything better than a blog to record a trip. This time we have only some text and pictures but we are also taking video for a YouTube entry when we get back, and in the future will explore audio uploads."
  
  • Poland Blog 07
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have had students blogging, and recently podcasting, in a couple of the tourism classes that I teach. In one class, each student creates their own personal blog site. In the other class, they work in collaborative blogs.
  For this past semester, these collaborative can be found here:
  
  • Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
  • Sustainable Tourism and Money
  • Sustainable Tourism and Community

RESEARCH (and) BLOGS

• Mike Pesses (California State U, Northridge) presented a paper at the 2007 AAG in San Francisco on authenticity in the bicycle tourism experience, which was based on a content analysis of posting on a bicycle touring blog site. You can hear a recording of his presentation here.
  
• Peter Bolan (Ulster), has created a blog to generate discussions around research questions related to movie-based tourism for his Ph.D. research. He has been successful in creating a community and generating a fair amount of reader comments:
  
• Movie Tourism Group
  
• George F. Roberson (Massachusetts, Amherst) has created a blog site to facilitate his forthcoming Fulbright research in Tangier, Morocco, which will focus on current issues of modernization and cultural transformation of the city. His blog is currently mostly used as a repository for articles and resources.
  
• Space and Place
• Emma Stewart (Calgary), and her supervisor, Diane Draper, is using a blog to post preliminary research research and solicit feedback on her work with three Arctic Canadian communities. This blog was just launched last week:
  
  • Churchill - This older site has generated some comments from area residents
  • Cambridge Bay - This new site has not yet generated comments
    
• Carmen Cox (Southern Cross) is not a blogger, but is involved in a research/consulting project in NSW, Australia that will look at the impact of user-content generated travel sites (blogs included) on people's travel planning and trip behavior.
• Chin Ee Ong and Hilary du Cros (Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao) are presenting a paper titled "Almond Biscuit Tasting at St Paul’s Ruins and Camping on Hac-Sa Beach: A Blogspace Study of Mainland Chinese Budget Heritage Tourists in Macao" at the Heritage and Tourism Conference (8-11 July 2007, Guangzhou, China) in which they look at blogs and forums in English and Chinese regarding tourist's and potential tourist's views of Macau.
  
• I have heard of FIVE tourism research papers that at based on the analysis of personal travel blogs. Because these blogs are public, they are readily available as primary research data. (Both of the papers that I have heard of are under review for publication, so they cannot be cited here. I will add them if/when they are accepted for publication.)
  

PERSONAL TRAVEL BLOGS

• Michael Luck (Auckland UT) recently finished his first travel blog about a trip he tool to Thailand.
  
  • Thailand 2007
• Daniela Schilcher (University of Otago) keeps a travel blog for family and friends.
• Pham Hong Long (Vietnam National U, Hanoi) occasionally blogs about his graduate education and personal interests.
  
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) also have three travel blogs based on trips that I have made. I tend to continue blogging on those sites, though not regularly, about tourism, my research, and other issues in those destination areas.
  
  • Golden Triangle Conference and Travels - my first blog in summer 2005. I now update it occasionally with news items from that region.
  • Asia Travels, Tourism and More - originally based trips to Singapore and Thailand, I re-titled this blog to also include my subsequent trips to Malaysia, Nepal and other areas of Asia. The Nepal entries focus on a field research project undertaken their in 2007.
    
  • Australia Travel Blog - I experimented with two different websites that host travel blogs for this 2006 family trip:
  • VCarious.com
  • MyLifeOfTravel.com
    

PODCAST BLOGS

• Martin Fluker (Victoria, Melbourne) has a blog that supports his travel podcast on the ThePodcasterNetwork (TPN). His podcast is closely related to his teaching activities, and includes interviews with students about their travels and travel-related podcasts created by his students. He has also has some CAUTHE presentations on his show.
  
  • The Travel Show
  • Martin also had the following comments to make: "The Travel Show site contains blogs and podcasts to do with tourism. I produce the majority of the podcasts, however, my students are invited to submit the podcasts they produce, in subjects I coordinate, to The Travel Show. The latest podcast (#039) if from my students doing BHO3437 Destination Planning and Development. This subject is being run in Australia and Germany and both groups of students are producing podcasts. I use some of the podcasts on The Travel Show, such as the recording of Prof. Sam Ham, as part of the course material in BHO3437. I also use some podcasts, such as #038 as a way to encourage students to become exchange students. One of the benefits I have gained from podcasting is the winning of an Apple scholarship to attend the 2007 World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco."
    
    
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have a similar blog for my Geography for Travelers podcast. Topics covered include research that I am involved in, lecture material related to my classes, recordings of conference presentations by both me and others, and podcasts by my students.
  
  • Geography for Travelers
    

NON-ACADEMIC BLOGGERS

A few non-academics also responded to my "Do You Blog?" query.

• Richard Linington told me about the Planning Solutions Blog by the Planning Solutions Consulting Limited (PSCL) -- "specialist research and development company working in the fields of tourism, recreation and leisure." The blog has news about tourism, mostly in the UK, but occasionally beyond, as well.
• Joe Kelly of the Icarus Foundation in Canada told me of their blog on tourism and climate change - Up In The Air. They discuss news items, as well as approaches to mitigation and adaptation.
• Rinzing Lama works in the tourism industry in New Delhi, India, and maintains a blog about his homeland of Sikkim - Blog and Travel Journal.

EMAIL LISTS AS BLOGS

Email Lists are clearly the more common approach to social information sharing and discussion among academics than blogs. They are very different, though, and I am hesitant to put them in the same category as blogs. However, it is possible to use discussion lists postings as a form of collaborative (multiple contributors) blog.

• An example of this is David Dillard's (Temple) NetGold discussion list on YahooGroups.com. The purpose of NetGold is to share "important, informative and useful Internet and sometimes other resources for learning and improvement of skills." Tourism and hospitality are only a small part of the many topics covered:
  
  • Tourism content on Net-Gold
  • Hospitality Content on Net-Gold
  • He apparently distills some of this information on two resources sites for Tourism and Hospitality.
    
    
• Related to this is the Dark Tourism Forum, (hosted at Central Lancashire) which is both a website and an email discussion list. The website is used to develop a resources of material that is discussed on the email list. Again, this is sort of like a collaborative blog, but one with a strong moderator/editor role (the person who decides what moved from the open email discussion to the website).
  

Both of these email lists are more than just email lists (like the ones I posted my "Do You Blog?" query to. But, I do not consider them blogs because they do not fully represent the voice of particular individuals. Even with collaborative blogs, each contributing blogger usually has a distinct and identifiable identity, and each blog entry is treated as an indelible (and searchable) contribution to our world of knowledge and opinion. Email posting are searchable, though depending on the list it can be very difficult to do.

CONCLUSIONS

The diversity of blogging among this small group of tourism academics is quite amazing. There are blogs about tourism, blogs by and for students, research related blogs, and personal travel blogs. There may be even more personal blogs that are not related to tourism, but I think those fall beyond the reaches of this survey. While not a formally constructed survey, the small number of responses confirms the my previous anectodal impressions that tourism academics are not blogging.

Why do I blog? Because it is fun. Blogging enables me to communicating with a whole new audience -- a more real world audience beyond the ivory towers of academia. I meet interesting people through the blogs, and I love looking at the little map on some of my blog pages showing where in the world my readers are reading from. It does cut into my research writing, and does not yet contribute to my annual evaluations. That would be a challenge for most younger faculty, unfortunately. One of my blogs did get me an invitation to speak at a travel industry workshop in Seattle, though the timing did not work. In social media terms, blogging (and podcasting) is helping me to develop my "brand." In fact, when I first started blogging, I used a pseudonym. Today, however, I put my name everywhere I can.

Should more tourism academics blog? I think yes. Tourism is an incredibly important sector of the world economy. Yet the study of tourism is shunned as insignificant by most traditional and established disciplines. Perhaps that is why the relatively small number of tourism academics tend to be inward looking and prefer talking to each other rather than the larger world of academia and beyond. I have done, and still do that myself, and there are benefits from it. However, just as teaching helps balance the different intensity of writing and research, blogging helps bring a balance to the cloistered life of academics.

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NEW (July 2007): Analysis of blogs for strategy development in tourism

"On Thursday, July 12th 2007, the first worldwide conference for "Blogs in Tourism" took place, for which international experts and numerous participants came to Kitzbühel, Germany. The conference was organised by Krems Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Kitzbühel Tourismus and the Charles Darwin University, Australia and dealt with the analysis of the content of tourism blogs and forums, the understanding of the process of information exchange and the development of industry strategies for handling these virtual communities."

NEW (17Dec 07): Colleges Are Reluctant to Adopt New Publication Venues

...But, report from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative argues "that in four to five years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online material and will develop methods for evaluating it."

NEW (23Jan 08): Tired of 'Science by Press Release'? Try Science by Blog

ResearchBlogging.org, launched yesterday, is essentially a blog aggregator. Blogging academics (or, apparently, laymen interested in peer-reviewed research) register their blogs with the site. Bloggers can flag certain posts they write about peer-reviewed research by inserting a snippet of code. These posts then appear on the main page of the site, replete with proper academic citation.

...This, evidently, is part of the growing effort to ease communication in the research community, à la Big Think.

NEW (28Jan 08): A couple of related journal articles that may be of interest:

• Hookway, N. (2008) 'Entering the blogosphere': some strategies for using blogs in social research. Qualitative Research, 8(1): 91-113.
• Lin, Y.S. & Huang, J.Y. (2006). Internet Blogs as a Tourism Marketing Medium: A case study. Journal of Business Research, pp. 1201-1205.