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SOME BASIC CONCEPTS 5

wide definition. Most academics use the WTO definition, so studying tourism involves
studying a much larger subject than the study of holiday-makers and holidays. Indeed,
this element of tourism, the one which the lay person would readily identify as an essen-
tial part of tourism, is all too often neglected by tourism academics, with some notable
exceptions. Lois Turner and John Ash wrote of ‘the pleasure periphery’ (1975) when
describing the emergence of the Mediterranean as a major destination for the sun-seek-
ing northern European tourist,1 and Krippendorf (1987) and Urry (1990) have made
major contributions to the study of the tourist per se. Krippendorf and Urry wrote from
anthropological or sociological perspectives, and this raises an important question –
from the perspective of which discipline should we study tourism?
Jafar Jafari, a seminal figure in the study of tourism, has suggested that the study of
tourism can be made from the academic perspectives given in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Jafar Jafari’s tourism clock

Sociology
Economics

Transportation

Psychology

Law

Anthropology
Business and THE STUDY
Marketing OF TOURISM
Political
Science
Urban and
Regional Planning
Geography
Parks and
Recreation

Agriculture and
Ecology
Education

Source: adapted from Jafari and Ritchie (1981). Reprinted from Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 8, no. 1, Jafari, J. and
Ritchie, J.R.B., ‘Towards a framework for tourism education’, pp. 13–34, Copyright 1981, with permission from Elsevier.

These different academic perspectives have resulted in tourism being studied in different
faculties or schools within universities, and in consequence it is unusual to find ‘Tourism’
courses on offer. Most frequent offerings are ‘Tourism Studies’, ‘Tourism Management’
and ‘Tourism Geography’. This book is written from the management perspective, and is
designed as a core textbook for either a tourism management degree or a tourism manage-
ment module in a tourism studies or tourism geography degree programme.
There is an old joke: ‘Tourism is good; it’s tourists that are bad’. This raises two
important points. First, tourism is a process that can be studied in its own right, whereas
tourists are the actors who participate in that process. They could act alone, but in the

1 Authors of early studies of European and American tourists were often quite disparaging about their subjects, describing
them, for example, as The Golden Hordes (Turner and Ash, 1975), and The Offensive Tourist (Pritchett, 1964).