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TAKING THE MORAL TURN IN TOURISM STUDIES Kellee Caton Thompson Rivers University, Canada Abstract: Morality tends to receive little direct consideration in the realm of main- stream social science, but moral dimensions are an unavoidable feature of all human activities, including scholarly pursuits. The paucity of formal discussion about this issue is particularly unfortunate in tourism studies, given that those of us working here oper- ate on loaded moral territory, confronting a phenomenon that at once speaks of light- hearted pleasure and heavy social consequences. This conceptual paper briefly traces the history of moral concerns in tourism studies, indirectly articulated as they have typically been, and then attempts to provide some grounding analysis on why overt talk of such matters has been so difficult to tackle in this domain—and why things need to change. Keywords: morality, ethics, values, philosophy, epistemology, responsible scholar- ship. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION We human beings are endowed with a beautiful capacity for imagina- tion, and most of us who work in the tourism academy or in the indus- try—and who tend to be avid tourists ourselves—have spent at least some time daydreaming about the kind of tourism world we’d like to be involved with. We may have experienced an instant pang of joy in a moment of existential authenticity (Steiner & Reisinger, 2006; Wang, 1999), when our presence in a liminal tourism space allowed us to feel we had reached out and connected with something beyond ourselves. Perhaps we have experienced despair, when our leisure travels or re- search journeys have taken us into contact with people who have many fewer privileges than we do and whose suffering is hard to even impute, much less to carry the knowledge of as we continue on with our lives. On some level, our experiences translate into values, which guide our scholarship, leading us toward the particular types of questions we find important, which we then commit our energy to pursuing. And yet we rarely discuss our utopian dreams overtly, engaging in open debate about the big questions in life, such as what it means to be happy or Kellee Caton (900 McGill Road, Kamloops, BC, Canada V2C0C8 <[email protected]>) is assistant professor in the School of Tourism at Thompson Rivers University. Her research interests include philosophical issues in tourism, epistemology, and tourism’s role in ideological production. Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 1906–1928, 2012 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.05.021 www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures 1906
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Taking the Moral Turn in Tourism Studies

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Page 1: Taking the Moral Turn in Tourism Studies

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 1906–1928, 20120160-7383/$ - see front matter � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Printed in Great Britain

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.05.021www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures

TAKING THE MORAL TURNIN TOURISM STUDIES

Kellee CatonThompson Rivers University, Canada

Abstract: Morality tends to receive little direct consideration in the realm of main-stream social science, but moral dimensions are an unavoidable feature of all humanactivities, including scholarly pursuits. The paucity of formal discussion about this issueis particularly unfortunate in tourism studies, given that those of us working here oper-ate on loaded moral territory, confronting a phenomenon that at once speaks of light-hearted pleasure and heavy social consequences. This conceptual paper briefly traces thehistory of moral concerns in tourism studies, indirectly articulated as they have typicallybeen, and then attempts to provide some grounding analysis on why overt talk of suchmatters has been so difficult to tackle in this domain—and why things need to change.Keywords: morality, ethics, values, philosophy, epistemology, responsible scholar-ship. � 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

We human beings are endowed with a beautiful capacity for imagina-tion, and most of us who work in the tourism academy or in the indus-try—and who tend to be avid tourists ourselves—have spent at leastsome time daydreaming about the kind of tourism world we’d like tobe involved with. We may have experienced an instant pang of joy ina moment of existential authenticity (Steiner & Reisinger, 2006; Wang,1999), when our presence in a liminal tourism space allowed us to feelwe had reached out and connected with something beyond ourselves.Perhaps we have experienced despair, when our leisure travels or re-search journeys have taken us into contact with people who have manyfewer privileges than we do and whose suffering is hard to even impute,much less to carry the knowledge of as we continue on with our lives.On some level, our experiences translate into values, which guide ourscholarship, leading us toward the particular types of questions we findimportant, which we then commit our energy to pursuing. And yet werarely discuss our utopian dreams overtly, engaging in open debateabout the big questions in life, such as what it means to be happy or

Kellee Caton (900 McGill Road, Kamloops, BC, Canada V2C0C8 <[email protected]>) isassistant professor in the School of Tourism at Thompson Rivers University. Her researchinterests include philosophical issues in tourism, epistemology, and tourism’s role inideological production.

1906

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what it means to treat other people like subjects instead of objects inthe context of our tourism world.

It is perhaps true that every generation claims the privilege ofdescribing itself as standing on a precipice, preparing to leave behinda fraught history and dive into a shining new world, from which van-tage point past ways of knowing, doing, and being will seem barely rec-ognizable in their logic. Certainly, this is now the case with the studyand practice of tourism, which is increasingly proclaimed to be enter-ing a new era, articulately described by Ateljevic (2009) as ‘‘transmod-ern tourism,’’ a mode of existence that recognizes interdependence(both among human groups and between humans and the planet),questions strictly economic notions of human progress, values partner-ship across identity categories (e.g., gender, religious orientation), andrecognizes the rich contributions of non-dogmatic spirituality to thehuman experience. As such, transmodernity represents a Hegelian syn-thesis of the best parts of modernity with a response to postmodern cri-tiques in the form of an expression of potentialities for new socialorders that overcome modernity’s limitations, thus seeking to tran-scend modernity rather than to reject it and dissolve into nihilism(Ateljevic (2009), citing Magda). Such an era is also characterized bythe blossoming of a reflexive and value-engaged scholarship in tourismstudies (Hollinshead, 2006), as scholars actively query how researchand education can better be a part of the solution to global problemsin the face of the new understandings produced through critiques ofmodernism. In this new milieu, a space is opening for overt discussionsof morality and ethics in tourism, as evidenced by a new and flourish-ing body of work by scholars like Tribe (2002, 2009), Macbeth (2005),Fennell (2006a, 2006b, 2008, 2009), Smith (2009), Jamal and Menzel(2009), Feighery (2011), and Pritchard, Morgan, and Ateljevic(2011). By morality, here I simply mean the human imaginative anddiscursive capacity for considering how things should be, as opposedto describing how things are—what is sometimes referred to as the‘‘is’’ versus ‘‘ought’’ distinction. These discussions are long overdue,for those of us working in tourism studies operate on loaded moral ter-ritory, confronting a phenomenon that at once speaks of light-heartedpleasure and heavy social consequences. Nevertheless, philosophicalconversations on such matters have been late-breaking in the litera-ture, for a variety of reasons that have to do both with the history ofknowledge production about the social world and with the uniquemeanings associated with the human experience of leisure travel, asit has unfolded over time and space.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to add to the new but grow-ing body of literature on philosophical issues in tourism by attemptingto provide some grounding analysis on why talk of values has been sodifficult to tackle in this domain. Why, as Tribe (2009) queries, hastourism been so stubbornly under-philosophized with regard to issuesof beauty and virtue, despite its immense power to shape physical land-scapes and social relations? As Fennell (2006b) notes, those concernedwith the question of whether tourism is serving as a force for beautyand virtue in the world have primarily articulated this concern through

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the study of tourism impacts, rather than broaching the subject on adeeper level through philosophically informed discussions of moralityand ethics. It is important to try to understand this historical blockage,so that we can come to terms with it and awaken to the interesting andimportant types of questions we could be asking if we were to fully em-brace the relevance of moral philosophy to understanding the tourismendeavor.

It should be noted from the outset that my goal here is not to pro-vide an overview of various famous positions from the philosophy ca-non that could be fruitfully applied to the addressing of tourismphenomena; fine examples of such work already exist (Fennell,2006b; Gras-Dijkstra, 2009), in the book-length format that such an en-deavor would reasonably occupy. Nor is the goal to provide a compre-hensive analysis of all extant work in the tourism studies domain, withregard to its content directly or indirectly concerning morality or eth-ics, although an attempt is offered below to outline this history in orderto provide context for the present discussion. Instead, the paper’s aimis to help build the case for the importance of tackling issues of moral-ity head-on in tourism and to add depth to this currently very youngand underdeveloped branch of scholarship by offering contributionson several fronts that can help to move us beyond our current stateof engagement. These contributions include (1) an attempt to analyzesome of the barriers, both epistemological and sociocultural, that haveled overt discussion of morality to be so late-breaking in tourism stud-ies; (2) an introduction of the work of twentieth-century world-re-nowned philosopher Richard Rorty, whose corpus of thought isgenerally not explored along with the canon of older masters like Aris-totle, Locke, and Nietzsche, when seeking to apply philosophicalframeworks to tourism problems, despite the great promise it offersin this regard; (3) an exploration of some of the types of very interest-ing questions we could be asking if we were to give moral philosophy amore prominent place in tourism scholarship; and (4) an analysis ofthe importance of value-engagement in our field with regard to theideological and political-economic realities that characterize our loca-tion as workers in the tourism academy.

The paper thus begins by offering a brief historical tour of the fieldwith regard to concerns in the domain of ethics, morality, and values. Itthen moves to engage an epistemological angle, noting the long his-tory of viewing morality as the province of metaphysics in post-Enlight-enment western thought and arguing that postmodernist critiques ofEnlightenment reasoning have done little to recuperate values as viablesubject matter for social scholarship. It then proceeds to a more con-text-oriented discussion on the sociohistorical realities of leisure travel,drawing on the work of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and hisnotion of the ‘‘two vocabularies’’ of self-actualization and socialresponsibility to explore why tourism is such challenging (but also suchfertile!) ground for philosophizing about values. Finally, it concludesby attempting to situate tourism scholarship’s ideoscape in relationto the structural realities of institutionalized knowledge productionin the contemporary western university, in order to consider what

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responsibilities we may have for the types of values we choose to engageas researchers who are also agents of the public sphere. It is hoped, inarticulating the barriers to exploring the ‘‘oughts’’ of tourism, that wemay find seeds of the way forward for a scholarship in which values arenot only personally engaged but publicly articulated, and thus ren-dered open to deliberation (House & Howe, 1999), and ultimately tochange and growth.

THE LONG APPROACH

Although direct discussions about ethics, morality, and values haveonly recently begun to proliferate in the literature, it would be wrong-headed to claim that tourism research has historically been completelyunconcerned with such matters. The history of our field is complex be-cause our subject matter was initially approached independently by sev-eral very different disciplines, including economics, anthropology,sociology, psychology, and geography (Jafari & Ritchie, 1981; Nash,2005; Pearce, 2011; Tribe, 1997), and some of these disciplines—hav-ing their own internal epistemological trajectories as they do—havelogically shown more of an openness to engaging with moral concernsthan others. Economics, for instance, is premised on the idea of ra-tional choice, with the assumption that each individual will pursuethe achievement of his or her own maximum utility in any given trans-action; this language of individualism and rationality doesn’t lend itselfvery naturally to the exploration of moral issues, which are often collec-tive in character and which command consideration of the full com-plexity of human beings, far beyond the simple capacity forrationality that characterizes homo economicus. The related area of busi-ness studies more broadly also tends to be undergirded by an ideologyof instrumentalism, in which the goal of knowledge production is lar-gely to enhance the ability of organizations to generate more outputfrom less input; thus, the emphasis is on finding the best means toreach one particular end and not on questioning that end itself(Belhassen and Caton, 2011). Although the sub-field of criticalmanagement studies has arisen in resistance to this idea, and otherdiscourses such as those of ‘‘corporate social responsibility’’ and‘‘marketing ethics’’ have found their way into the literature (e.g., Font& Harris, 2004; Nicolau, 2008; Yaman & Gurel, 2006), the disciplines ofeconomics and business or management—which inform a massive, ifdeclining (Xiao & Smith, 2006), proportion of tourism scholarship(Nash, 2005; Tribe, 1997, 2010)—continue to be constituted in waysthat leave little openness for moral exploration. Similarly, psychology’scontributions to tourism studies have occurred largely in the areaof modeling consumer desires and behaviors (Pearce, 2011), withlittle emphasis being given to the human mind as the locus of moralreasoning in tourism.

The social research disciplines that have contributed to tourismknowledge, however, are perhaps more complex in their relationshipto moral questioning. Although anthropology has its roots in the

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notion of objective description of peoples and their lifeways, andalthough this discipline formally pioneered the perspective of culturalrelativism, anthropologists have not been able to escape the reality ofmoral issues in their work. This has come about both through an aware-ness that grew in the mid-to-late twentieth century regarding the disci-pline’s close historical ties to colonial projects in the early years of itsdevelopment, and through its late twentieth century ‘‘crisis of represen-tation’’ phase, in which anthropologists began to face up to ethicalquestions regarding who has the right to describe, represent, and speakon behalf of whom. Similarly, sociology has spent much of its existenceas a discipline under the rubric of ‘‘social science,’’ with all the episte-mological baggage (discussed at length later in this paper) that the sec-ond half of this term entails. However, this discipline has always houseda strong critical theory component, dating back even to Marx, with asubstantial body of scholars arguing that the social disciplines shouldnot merely seek neutral understanding of societal forces, processes,and interactions, but rather should pursue this study with the goal ofmaking the world more just. Critical theory has also helped to spawnthe younger discipline of cultural studies, with its emphasis on decon-structing cultural objects and practices to understand their relationshipto the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of alliances of power insociety that produce discursive and material outcomes.

The interest in issues of power and justice in the social disciplines hascertainly had its influence on tourism studies. From the earliest days ofsystematic academic research in our field, Nash (1977), for instance, wasnoting how tourism can serve as a form of imperialism, with demandfrom tourist-sending societies exercising massive coercive influence ontourism-revenue-dependent areas of the world, although he later soughtto distance himself from the political overtones of this argument (Nash,2005). Others such as Lea (1993) have more openly embraced this polit-ical angle and have discussed instances of local resistance to tourismdevelopment when it is constituted on these terms. Jafari (2001) hasdubbed this critical stream of research into the detrimental impacts thattourism can have on host societies, which first took root in the 70s, the‘‘cautionary platform,’’ a position he contrasts with the ‘‘advocacy plat-form,’’ which emphasizes the economic opportunities tourism can rep-resent. The cautionary platform is going strong (Xiao & Smith, 2006)and has blossomed into a state of maturity over the past few decades,as scholars have moved from the cataloging of specific impacts towardthe creation of larger and more abstract frameworks for addressing tour-ism’s fallout, as exemplified by the work of Hall and Brown (2006) onissues of welfare and responsibility in tourism.

The turn toward cultural studies in tourism, with its concomitantinterest in the application of postcolonial theory to the field, alsobrought much in the way of concern with the ethics of tourism devel-opment, although often with a focus on tourism representations andimaginaries. The list of scholars who have contributed to this body ofliterature is too vast to catalog here, but highlights include the workof Buck (1977), Albers and James (1988), Silver (1993), and Echtnerand Prasad (2003) on representation in tourism promotional imagery;

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the work of Fursich (2002) and Santos (2006) on mass-mediated travelnarratives; the work of Bruner (2005), Jeong and Santos (2003), Teoand Leong (2006), Buzinde and Santos (2009), and Salazar (2010)on the imaginative labor of tourism as enacted through site productionand consumption; and the more conceptually oriented work of Bruner(1991), Hollinshead (2007), Salazar (2012), Caton (2011), and Prit-chard et al. (2011) exploring themes of worldmaking, hope, imaginar-ies, and discursive production and consumption in tourism. And thenthere has been research into forms of tourism that are at least partiallycharacterized by their ethical orientations and which have been viewedby some as a potential corrective to mainstream tourism’s negative con-sequences (Jafari’s (2001) ‘‘adaptancy platform’’): these include,among potential others, ecotourism (e.g., Fennell, 1999), voluntou-rism (e.g., McGehee, 2012), pro-poor tourism (e.g., Scheyvens,2011), social tourism (e.g., McCabe, Minnaert, & Diekmann, 2012),and travel for the purpose of political activism (or ‘‘solidarity tour-ism’’) (e.g., Higgins-Desboilles & Russell-Mundine, 2008).

In addition to the pursuit of individual academic research projects,larger networks and organizations have arisen, inside and outside aca-demia, to address concerns related to tourism’s ethical content, includ-ing Tourism Concern, the International Centre for Peace throughTourism Research (with its Journal of Tourism and Peace Research), theCritical Tourism Studies network, the Tourism Educational Futures Ini-tiative, the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, the UNWTOWorld Committee on Tourism Ethics, the International Congress onEthics and Tourism, and many others. Most of these groups took formonly in the past decade, illustrating that the issue of ethics in tourism isonly now beginning to reach a point of institutionalization in its matu-rity as a concern. Of late, this concern has often been integrated withdiscourses of ‘‘sustainability,’’ but this relationship is complex becausesustainability is a broad term that can, in its simplest form, meanmerely the quest to make possible the indefinite continuation of partic-ular behaviors or practices, regardless of the moral desirability of thosebehaviors and practices (Hall & Brown, 2006), although the conceptoften carries dimensions of moral critique in practice.

Despite growing concern with morality in tourism through the indi-rect avenues illustrated above, there has been little overt exploration ofthis theme in the literature, in the sense of philosophically articulatingand interrogating the values and assumptions that lie beneath particu-lar visions of what tourism is or should be doing in the world. AsFennell (2006b) expressed it, writing a few years back,

Our propensity to investigate impacts has drawn us into a circuitousloop of reactance, preventing us from focusing on the underlying nat-ure of these disturbances. So, with all due respect to [those] . . .whohave attempted to wrestle with these difficult long-standing socialand ecological issues, we have not yet committed ourselves to anexamination of the broader underlying questions that create theseimpacts. . . .This is very much akin to setting standards for the industryon the basis of what is deemed ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘good,’’ without fullyunderstanding the meaning of right or good (p. 7).

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Hultsman (1995) and Lea (1993) were early pioneers in looking tophilosophy for such purposes, with Hultsman arguing for the needfor tourism scholars to articulate some philosophical underpinningsto the development of operational codes of ethics in tourism servicedelivery and Lea exploring the ethical dimensions of ‘‘Third World’’anti-tourism movements. These initial forays were followed a decade la-ter, in more fully developed conceptual terms by Holden (2003), whooffered a discussion of environmental ethics in tourism, and by Mac-beth (2005), who exhorted the development of an ‘‘ethics’’ platform,to build atop the advocacy, cautionary, adaptancy, and knowledge-based platforms conceptualized by Jafari (2001), and offered a highlycompelling case for tourism scholars to exercise critical reflexivityabout the consequences of their field. Tribe (2009) has similarly high-lighted the need for greater moral reflection, and greater philosophi-cal rumination in general, of issues germane to tourism, a projectthrough which he and his co-authors offer a substantial contributionin his edited volume Philosophical Issues in Tourism, which exploresthemes of truth, beauty, and virtue. Among its many other highlights,this book houses the debate between Butcher (2003, 2009) and Smith(2009), regarding whether it is even appropriate to introduce a dis-course of morality into the domain of tourism in the first place; a pieceby Jamal and Menzel (2009) exploring the idea of ‘‘good actions’’ intourism; and the aforementioned discussion of tourism and transmo-dernity by Ateljevic (2009). Additionally, there have recently emergeda handful of book-length treatments of ethics in tourism that containstrong philosophical underpinnings, including Smith and Duffy(2003), Fennell (2006b), Gras-Dijkstra (2009), and MacCannell(2011). With the exception of the last of these, which has more specificaims exclusive to the act of sightseeing, these books typically introducereaders to the work of classic movements (e.g., utilitarianism, hedo-nism, existentialism) and scholars (e.g., Aristotle, Bentham, Leopold)in the philosophy canon, and then attempt to explore aspects of con-temporary tourism (e.g., its relationship to capitalism, its imbricationswith nature) and some of its problematic impacts, using the languageand concepts developed by different philosophical traditions. Finally,there appears to be some will to stretch into new conceptual territoryof late, in terms of moving beyond an emphasis on the classic canonof authors to explore the potential contributions more recent thinkerscan offer, with Feighery’s (2011) work drawing on Foucault to informethical decision-making in consulting standing as a prime example.

For those of us who believe matters of morality and ethics to beamong the most important things we should be discussing in our field,the growth of literature directly addressing these themes—albeit stilla tiny fraction of tourism studies output—is incredibly exciting, afternear silence in this area (and indeed very little in the way of contribu-tions from the discipline of philosophy in any regard) over our field’s40-year history. After four decades, we finally appear to be comingaround the moral turn.

But the road before us is long. We have only just taken up thejourney in earnest, and we have far to go. In that spirit, this paper

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now attempts to add its contributions by exploring why morality hasbeen such difficult subject matter to broach in tourism studies andthen by suggesting examples of some deeper sorts of questions wemay wish to consider as we go forward in charting the moral implica-tions of our field. These questions focus not on philosophical analysisof frequently highlighted problematic impacts or niche practices (e.g.,environmental degradation, sex tourism), as these concerns have beennobly taken up by others already (e.g., Fennell, 2006b; Gras-Dijkstra,2009; Jamal & Menzel, 2009); rather, they address themselves to thedeeper basic features that characterize the act of tourism and ourbehavior as participants in this act—issues that are not so easy to over-come by developing alternatives to mass tourism or by policing deviantfringe practices, because they are, in fact, innate to the enterprise itself.But first, why such silence on morality until recently?

OF TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES?

In his posthumous book, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox,the late great scientific historian and philosopher Stephen Jay Gould(2003) provides an engaging account of the complicated evolving rela-tionship between the sciences and the humanities. Gould argues thatdespite their many shared features, including an emphasis on creativityand transcendence of past understandings, the two ways of knowinghave often been unduly contrasted with each other for political pur-poses. An early instance of this practice can be seen in the efforts ofrising Renaissance scientists to emphasize the differences betweentheir epistemology and pursuits from those of the established scholarsof the day, who were more interested in looking back to antiquity forguidance than in embracing the power of modern people to createequally valuable understandings about their world. Such framings ofcontrast were motivated less by sweeping differences in worldview(Gould, e.g. debunks the myth that the leaders of the Scientific Revo-lution eschewed religion whereas the reigning scholars of the day werebound by dogma) and more by a need to gain credibility, and the re-sources to pursue one’s work that accompany it, by setting up conve-nient dichotomies. (Writing from a century obsessed with identityand self-becoming, one has to wonder if there were some issues goinghere as well, as new ‘‘scientist subjectivities’’ were being forged to artic-ulate between these ‘‘revolutionaries’’’ scholarly pursuits and theirsense of meaning and purpose against the backdrop of the society inwhich they lived.)

In those days, science was the underdog, and so it is understandablethat its advocates felt the need to distinguish their ways of knowingfrom those of other intellectual powers operating at the time. Oncethe world saw what science could do via technology, however, the tablesturned, and today’s scientists rarely find themselves in a position ofneeding to defend their epistemological views. The problem, of course,as Gould so presciently points out, is that overzealous contrasting ofdifferent ways of knowing inevitably leads to each position taking shots

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at the others’ expense, and those which are able to best articulate theirvalue in immediate terms are likely to be seen as the way forward, as op-posed to one of many approaches to knowledge production that canmake valuable contributions to the human condition. Thus, science,the benefits of which could easily be translated through technologyinto tangible ends that fascinated the world and ameliorated intenselypressing problems, has in many ways become the model for progress inhuman civilization; meanwhile, disciplines like the humanities, whichmake equally vital contributions to society with effects that are simplymore subtle and harder to trace (e.g., the role of literature in cultivat-ing empathy, which serves as a building block for more inclusivedemocracy), find themselves constantly on the defense (Nussbaum,2010), forever needing to articulate their value in terms that taxpayerscan understand the way they can grasp the importance of, say, a newantibiotic or a more fuel-efficient car.

Given this situation, it is perhaps not surprising that science, more sothan the humanities, has tended to serve as the exemplar for social re-search (Barone, 2005). It would be hard to overstate the profoundinfluence of positivistic perspectives on the history of social research,including tourism research, and although there has been a tremen-dous proliferation of alternative paradigms (Tribe, 2010), it is probablyfair to say that most of us working from non-positivistic stances still feelthe hegemonic pinch, whether on a sociopolitical level, as during theBush administration’s proposed ‘‘web scrub’’ of ERIC (the educationalresearch database) in the United States, which would have resulted inthe deletion of pre–Bush era scholarship that did not pass muster withthe ideologically loaded strictures of the administration’s ‘‘evidence-based’’ research movement (Kincheloe, 2007, 2008; Lather, 2003), oron a personal level, when we feel a reviewer or conference presentationattendee asks a question or offers a critique that somehow misses ourwork on an epistemological level. We also feel the hand of science-cum-scientism in our promotion and tenure experiences, as prominentcountries producing mainstream tourism knowledge increasinglyadopt systems to measure intellectual contributions in numerical terms(e.g., Barnett, 1994), a practice which strikes at least some of the peo-ple producing those contributions as prima facie illogical (e.g., Small,Harris, Wilson, & Ateljevic, 2011).

But science cannot, at the end of the day, answer all of life’s pressingquestions. It cannot tell us how we should treat each other—what ourresponsibilities are to ourselves and to others. Given that the socialfields of inquiry, including tourism studies, deal overtly with humanrelationships, it would seem obvious that those of us working in themshould embrace such lines of questioning, but the post-Enlightenmentculture of hard science envy has produced discursive formations thathave made it hard for social researchers even to find a relevant lan-guage through which to pose such questions and has instead left usengaging in battles of criteriology (Schwandt, 1996), as we scrambleto battle down a crisis in legitimacy by articulating the validity of ourwork in terms half-borrowed from older language games like positivismthat are manifestly ill-suited to housing our ideas (see Weil’s (2007)

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paper from the ESF Exploratory Workshop on Improving the Qualityof Qualitative Research, held in Norway in 2007 and attracting somevery big names in the scholarship of qualitative research, for a perfor-mance of the all-too-familiar discursive themes on this front).

If science-favoring discourses and sociopolitical structures have tradi-tionally tended to foreclose talk of morality in the social fields, certainmore recent approaches have done little better. Antifoundationalistscholarship has grown widely across the disciplinary landscape, underthe sway of famous late twenty-first century voices like Foucault in his-tory, Derrida in literary theory, and Rorty in philosophy. With its Nietz-schean radical skepticism of all truth claims as ideologicallyundergirded, antifoundational, or postmodern, epistemologies havedug at the root of Enlightenment faith in human reason. As a cri-tique-based approach to scholarship, antifoundationalism argues thatthere are no secure foundations for human knowledge that are freefrom the nexus of power, interest, and history (see Baronov (2004)for an excellent presentation). For instance, tourism scholarship thatdemonstrates the economic benefits of resort development generallytakes a particular definition of ‘‘economic benefits’’ for granted(e.g., the production of cash income or infrastructural features for par-ticular individuals), and this definition in turn tends to be underlain bya particular ideological substructure (e.g., the belief that materialism,efficiency, and progress are closely intertwined). Antifoundationalistscholars have helped us to see how even the very concepts we use asthe building blocks in our social theories—ideas such as self, language,community, progress, deviance, and sanity—are themselves contingent(Foucault, 1970, 1973, 1978; Rorty, 1989); they are the products of his-torical human sense-making, rather than notions that can be perfectlymodeled and explained given the ‘‘right’’ social-scientific theory.Thus, the postmodern position tends to regard master narratives pro-duced within other paradigms as simply one more set of metaphorsfor accessing the world (see Belhassen and Caton, 2009), rather thanas accurate representations of the world ‘‘as it actually is.’’ For the anti-foundationalist, the human stamp on knowledge production goes allthe way down, and there is no such thing as unmediated access tothe world beyond the human mind. Thus, antifoundationalist projectsoften focus on unpacking the assumptions that underlie particular the-ories about how the world works, eschewing the desire to build expla-nations that stand outside of time or space.

Although the radical nihilism associated with popular perceptions ofpostmodernism has often been exaggerated (indeed, few postmodernscholars have actually jumped off bridges out of a sense of Sartreanexistentialist despair over the absurdity of life), an intellectual positionthat is purely critically deconstructive leaves little ground for utopiansocial visioning (Kincheloe & MacLaren, 2003; McGettigan, 2000;Rorty, 1999). Hence, antifoundationalism represents a great stepforward in terms of forcing us to come face to face with the inherentlysituated nature of human knowing, but it leaves us no less impotentthan does traditional positivism when it comes to the ability to producevalue-engaged research.

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Essentially, from a pragmatic, values-driven epistemological stand-point, what positivism and postmodernism both get wrong is the ideathat scholarly efforts should be about the search for truth to beginwith. The preoccupation with truth, or alternatively with its imperfectachievability, leaves the issue of outcomes ignored, but this is preciselywhere there is ground for scholarly achievement. Human beings havemade enormous strides in creating concepts and forms of great conse-quence for ourselves, for each other, and for other creatures that shareour planet. The beliefs we choose to hold, the systems we choose to cre-ate, and the rules we choose to follow (or ignore) carry enormousweight in terms of the opportunities for lived experiences that accrueto each of us. In short, we don’t need to have any secure foundationsfor truth in order to wreak a lot of havoc, or alternatively, to create a lotof happiness and goodwill on planet earth.

Thus, formal moral reflection in social research has been under as-sault from two directions—a sort of bookended pair of fundamental-isms, positivistic and postmodern, that have undermined the questfor value engagement by either ruling it outside the bounds of legiti-mate social inquiry or pronouncing it irrelevant in the epistemologicalvacuum created by the realization that there are no secure foundationsfor truth. This is ironic because, in a world with nothing—not religion,not the scientific method, not even human reason—to firmly and abso-lutely hitch our conceptualizations to, it would seem that our moralcapacity, in terms of our ability to reflect on the meaning of our livesand to engage in deliberation with others, is the most important tool wehave to work with in trying to make choices about how to successfullyfunction with one another in the shared space of our planet. (Indeed,many pragmatist philosophers, from James (1978) to Rorty (1999) toPutnam (2004), have tried to move us in this direction of embracing‘‘ethics without ontology.’’) Imagine, for instance, if we had taken anapproach of moral deliberation about stewardship, wastefulness, andequity as an immediate response to the specter of global climatechange, rather than quibbling over the exactitude of the science, withprecious time being lost as climate researchers did their best to reach aconsensus on what is, in reality, a very complex socio-physical systemcharacterized by instability and emergent phenomena that cannot bytheir nature be predicted based on understandings of their componentparts (Hill & Pompili, in press). We would have had an extra ten or fif-teen years to try to avert the mess we’re now witnessing, and our civili-zation (and arguably our souls, for those of us who believe in theexistence of such) would be better for having had the conversation.Thus, overcoming the paralysis induced by what has become a patho-logical need for truth represents one of the greatest challenges oftwenty-first century scholarship. Meanwhile, the consequences tick on.

OF BEAUTY AND VIRTUE

If the unfolding epistemological narrative of western (and increas-ingly global) scholarship has been against us, in terms of our ability

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to consider, through social scholarship, not only what is but also whatshould be, then the terrain on which we work as tourism researchershas not made things any easier. The history of leisure travel is one ofthe desire to escape and to experience difference. This scripting inher-ently casts the tourist as the subject, who makes use of objects (people,cultures, artifacts) in the world around her in order to fulfill her pur-poses. At the same time, however, her behavior has consequences forthose who serve as actors or objects in her story, and she is thus boundwith others relationally, whether she wishes to be or not. Thus, there isan unavoidable tension in tourism between self-actualization (or, morebasely, self-gratification) and social concerns.

I have often been struck by this tension in my own empirical researchprojects, as well as in those of close colleagues whose projects I’vewatched unfold. Those of us who rely heavily on qualitative methods,especially interviewing and observation, are collectors of stories, andthose stories typically operate on two levels. On the first level, we hearthe voices of our research participants, as they express the role of theirtravels in their own life journeys. They tell us of the personal growthand communitas (Turner, 2002) they experienced through the physi-cal challenge of riding a motorcycle across 2,448 miles of Route 66(Caton & Santos, 2007), the spiritual growth they achieved asChristians by ‘‘walking in the footsteps of Jesus’’ in the Holy Land(Belhassen, Caton, & Stewart, 2008), or the social awareness theyachieved by being exposed to diverse cultural practices on a studyabroad trip (Caton, 2008). On the second level, however, our sociolog-ical imaginations echo these stories (Belhassen, 2007, on Mills, 1956),as we translate the personal narratives of our research participants upthe chain of social consequences to become aware of the sometimesconscious and sometimes unintentional imprint our participants andtheir ideologies and activities are leaving on the world around them.A story of spiritual growth through Christian pilgrimage is also a storyof transnational formations and consolidations of right-wing politicalpower, as particular sectors of the Israeli government seek to drawon tourism resources to advance ideological agendas that particularsectors of American society are all too happy to rally behind (Belhassen,2009; Belhassen & Santos, 2006). A story of educational opportunitythrough study abroad is also a story of participation in a cycle of discur-sive production and consumption that both resists and perpetuatesinequality through stereotyping and othering (Caton, 2008).

The philosophy of Richard Rorty grapples with this tension in prob-ably the most sophisticated expression to date. Rorty (1989) arguesthat the bane of philosophy has been to try to integrate the searchfor personal fulfillment and the project of social justice under one um-brella of righteousness. From Plato’s attempts to delineate why it is inone’s interests to be just, to Christianity’s claim that closeness to God isthe deepest form of human happiness and that it is achieved partiallyby ‘‘loving thy neighbor,’’ philosophers have attempted to define acommon human nature and demonstrate that ‘‘what is most importantto each of us is what we have in common with others—that the springsof private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same’’ (Rorty,

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1989, p. xiii). Others, such as Nietzsche, have criticized this project,arguing that there is no such thing as ‘‘human nature’’ outside ofsocialization, nothing necessarily shared that we can appeal to for col-lectivity, and that such theorizations are merely ‘‘transparent attemptsto make altruism look more reasonable than it is’’ (Rorty, 1989, p. xiii).

After considering these issues over 40 years of scholarship, Rorty con-cludes that the feat of making self-realization and social solidarity speakthe same language can’t be accomplished, at least not categorically. Ina lovely essay entitled ‘‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids’’ (1999), he tellsthe story of his own path to this conclusion, using his childhood obses-sion with finding wild orchids in the forests of the American northeastas a metaphor for all those private, idiosyncratic things and pursuitsthat one values passionately despite their potential lack of utility foranyone else, and the baggage of the leftist social education providedby his Trotskyite parents in the early decades of the twentieth centuryas an expression of his sense of social responsibility, which providedhim with an equally deep sense of purpose in life but which also some-times left him with feelings of guilt for pursuing arcane personal pas-sions like orchid hunting at the expense of time and energy thatcould be spent working for the liberation of the downtroddenproletariat.

In coming to the conclusion that a full and happy life will almostinevitably involve both deeply private projects that may have no mean-ing to anyone else and rich public engagements that produce a senseof connection with one’s fellows, Rorty ultimately advises philosophersto abandon the attempt to make the concerns for autonomy and self-creation expressed by thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger,and Kierkegaard speak the same language as the concerns for socialjustice and solidarity expressed by theorists like Marx, Dewey, Mills,and Habermas. Instead, what is needed is to embrace these two strainsof work as different vocabularies that can be used for different pur-poses. The former can help us to imagine what private perfectionmight look like, and the latter can lead us down a path of envisioningsocial utopias, a key feature of which will likely be the provision to allowas much personal freedom for pursuing private passions as possible upto the point of interfering with the social equity goal of allowing othersto do the same.

Rorty’s work thus opens a door for conceptualizing the fraught spacethat is tourism practice, as being a site of both individual fulfillment—what, broadly construed, Tribe (2009) might call the personal experi-ence of encountering ‘‘beauty’’ while traveling, a happening we’veall known and loved as tourists ourselves—and social consequence,which demands the importance of what he calls ‘‘virtue,’’ and which,as thinkers by trade, if we stay in the scholarly game long enough, weeventually find impossible to ignore. The inability to synthesize theseelements is perhaps one of the key reasons why it is so hard for us towrap our heads around the moral implications of our field, which isperhaps one reason why formal discussions about it have been so latein coming, despite the nagging many of us instinctively feel when westare at our subject matter directly.

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The fact that the ideas of self-cultivation and social solidarity stand intension with one another, only coalescing in particular circumstancesand not as a rule in the practice of tourism, however, does not meanthat we have reached a deadlock in discussing moral matters in this do-main. Far from it. We needn’t hold beauty and virtue in a single visionto make both worth interrogating, for both are important forces in ourlives in tourism and beyond, regardless of whether they can ever be rec-onciled. In other words, the day will probably never be won either bythose tourism researchers Jafari (2001) refers to as the ‘‘optimists,’’who see the spread of pleasure travel as the forebear of global humanhappiness and freedom (often, but not exclusively, through its associ-ated economic development perks) and for whom there is thus littleconflict between the best interests of self and society, or by those heterms the ‘‘pessimists,’’ who focus on the socially and environmentallydestructive effects of pleasure-seeking through tourism. Instead, tour-ism must be recognized as a space that awkwardly houses both of theserealities, each of which has been sorely underexplored with the toolkitphilosophy has to offer.

As tourism researchers of the current generation, then, we mustpush ourselves to grapple with the big questions. On an individual le-vel, what does it mean to be happy? Do we sit with utilitarian philoso-phers like Bentham and Hume, who argue that happiness equals thepure pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, in the most elementarysense of these concepts, or do we lean toward the ideas of Aristotle,Kant, and Mill that some forms of pleasure are higher than others be-cause they are the result of, say, hard work, self-discipline, or delayedgratification as one works toward a bigger goal (see Fennell (2009), Ja-mal and Menzel (2009), and Barber (2007) for excellent summaries ofthought on this issue). Certainly, contemporary consumer culture, dri-ven by the powerful interests of global capitalism, has helped to definehappiness in particular terms, and these have been of profound conse-quence for all manner of social activities, including tourism. Social the-orist Benjamin Barber (2007) has written extensively about theinfantilization of global society, as modern capitalism finds itself in aposition of needing to secure buyers for the surplus production it gen-erates, and hence allies itself with cultural forces that encourage impul-siveness, convenience, instant gratification, egoism, and dogmatism, asthese childish qualities are more useful for encouraging frivolous con-sumption than are the more adult characteristics of deliberation, infor-mation-seeking, skepticism, reason, and responsibility. We come tovalue the easy over the hard, the simple over the complex, the fast overthe slow, and so forth, and these reasoning patterns become so in-grained in our culture that they seem natural and beyond critique.Thus, we have a society that seeks ‘‘weight loss without exercise, mar-riage without commitment, painting or piano by the numbers withoutpractice or discipline, . . .war without conscription, idealism withouttaxation, morality without sacrifice, and virtue without effort,’’ and toask whether this reasoning pattern is a good idea or to question its sus-tainability is to risk being labeled as overbearingly moralizing, as theforces of advertising and consumerism work to frame lessons about

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the value of more slowly cultivated and deliberately achieved forms ofpleasure as ‘‘rigid and Puritanical, the preserve of people who are hos-tile to happiness’’ (Barber, 2007, pp. 87–90). The discourses that legit-imate lifelong childishness militate against the Aristotelian quest foreudemonia, or human flourishing that goes deeper than basic pleasure(Fennell, 2009), threatening to eclipse our ability to recognize the va-lue of seeking joys that come with more mature forms of engagementwith the world.

What is tourism’s role in this culture of infantilization? Does pleasuretravel bring out the impatient, impetuous child in all of us (Dann,1996), who simply wants an easy chance to feel like a king for a few days(Gottleib, 1982) and temporarily avoid being hassled by life’s tougherrealities? Should it? Is it important to have a space where we can in-dulge those tendencies, or is tourism, in serving as such a space, merelyfunctioning as a contributing force to a larger life context in which ourdesires for more complex and hard-won forms of pleasure are increas-ingly dulled in favor of instant gratification and ego fulfillment? And ifwe do need such a space of escape from the weight of adulthood, istourism the best candidate context for acting out these impulses?Maybe, as its socially constructed nature of apart-ness in time and spacemakes it perhaps the ultimate way to achieve the kind liminal mentalstate that can activate this sense of release. But, given that pleasure tra-vel is a unique domain in the human experience, as it is the mechanismin the modern world through which we can have visceral experiencesof spaces and customs beyond those of our own home while being un-der the liberating spell that comes with a mindset of leisure and play,are we missing an opportunity to cultivate higher forms of pleasurethat can’t be gained under any other circumstances, if we, as Butcher(2003), conceptualize tourism as being predominantly about immedi-ate gratification through sun, sand, sea, and sex, rather than some-thing more?

Moving from an individual to a social level as we ask the big ques-tions, what constitutes justice in tourism? Obviously, environmentaland resource issues are of central relevance in this line of questioning(indeed, as Tribe (2009) notes, questions of virtue in tourism are todaymost often interpolated through discussions of ecological sustainabil-ity), but at least on face value, such issues seem comparatively straight-forward to grapple with from a moral reasoning standpoint. If I canrelax in a cool swimming pool as a visitor in your community whileyou, as a resident of that community, lack clean water to drink, thenthere is clearly a problem. Cultural issues are stickier. Tourism studieshas traditionally conceptualized culture as somewhat monolithic,something which can be ‘‘preserved’’ through influxes of foreign cashand the pride-inducing gift of the gaze, as tourist attention revives localinterest in traditions that might otherwise be going the way of the dodobird, and also as something that can be ‘‘destroyed’’ by things like the‘‘demonstration effect’’ and other clunky matter from Darth Globaliza-tion’s arsenal of doom. The literature has now largely begun tomove beyond this perspective, however. If, in line with Bruner(2005), we conceive of culture as something fluid, always in process

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as new formations of power and alliance arise and dissolve, then whatof tourism encounters against such a socioscape? Indeed, increasingwork has been dedicated to understanding the role of tourism in in-tra-community power struggles, as members of different genders,faiths, and generations vie for control of representation of place andheritage for outside eyes (e.g., Jeong & Santos, 2003), a process whichthen turns in on itself, as hosts negotiate their own subjectivitiespartially in the context of performing for others (e.g., Santos & Yan,2008; Yan & Santos, 2009). As tourists, it is easy to say that none of thisis our business. After all, we are merely visitors—guests on the scene ofsomeone else’s social relations. If we truly take a more fluid and cosmo-politan view of culture, though, then the questions are harder to avoid.If we are all actors in shared social space and tourism is the forum parexcellence in the modern world through which we navigate issues ofmeaning across cultures, then what responsibility to we have for ourparticipation in the identity politics of other people’s societies?

And what about instances when individual and social good conflictin tourism? It is one thing to champion the curtailing of hedonisticforms of pleasure in tourism when they come into conflict with partic-ular conceptions of the greater good (although certainly not all wouldadvocate this position, as Butcher’s (2003) work exemplifies), but whatabout the deeper and more complex forms of personal fulfillment thatare sometimes achieved through tourism? For example, what happenswhen education for awareness and enlightenment about the places wetravel, generally seen to be in the interests of broader society, interfereswith personal experiences of the world that demand some level of igno-rance for their very creation? Consider the serendipitous interpersonalconnections that can be experienced through random encounters intourism, which are perhaps possible precisely because of the anonymityof the situation (Jonas, Stewart, & Larkin, 2003). Or consider the senseof existential authenticity that can be expressed through the creativeact of joining in with others’ rituals—as in the dance performancesDaniel (1996) considers in her work—with the creative, collaborative,and expressive potential existing precisely because the tourist doesn’t‘‘know the rules’’ of a cultural practice that ostensibly ‘‘belongs tosomeone else.’’ And what of the sense of mystery implicit in the dis-tance between ourselves and each other, which can sometimes bestbe appreciated in silence, where there is room for gazing, contempla-tion, and imagination? Is it possible to create tourism that is moreaware and more dialogic—based more on conversing than on peeringin at others as they go about their lives—without destroying travel’s ma-gic, or is this merely one more example of our need to lean on our fel-low humans as objects in order to craft our own stories of meaning inlife, and therefore of our imperfect ability to merge beauty and virtuein a single, satisfying vision?

As the previous discussion has attempted to demonstrate, there arevast continents of ideas still left open for intellectual exploration whenit comes to tourism and philosophy. Tourism is an ideal metaphoricalcontext for the messy collision of Self and Other in life more generally.It is a practice in which self-gratification, self-exploration, and social

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engagement all take center stage, often at the same time; hence, wecan use it as an exemplary context for thinking through questionsabout our relationships to ourselves and others and about the respon-sibilities we may hold on these fronts. Given humanity’s perpetualenchantment with travel, the field of tourism studies may even providea uniquely compelling space for engagement with these issues in pop-ular discourse, if we tourism scholars have the desire, courage, and willto step up to the podium of public intellectualism and initiate theexploration.

CONCLUSION: ON RESEARCH AND RESPONSIBILITY

As tourism scholars, we tend to be immediately in touch with the factthat we live in a world of ideas; indeed, concepts and theories about thesubject matter we study and how we study it generally preoccupy us, aswe attempt to contribute something to the larger world through ourarticulations and debates. But we also live in a world of structures: phys-ical resources, historical contingencies, and relations of power.

Recent decades have witnessed sweeping changes across the westernacademy. Traditionally, higher education was envisioned as a truly pub-lic good, in the economic sense of the term. It was non-excludable, inthe sense that knowledge created in the university flowed outward intosociety through the institution’s disciple-graduates, and non-rival, inthe sense that one person’s becoming enlightened did nothing to takeaway from others’ ability to do so. In fact, positive externalities werethere for all to reap, as individual learners contributed to an increas-ingly enlightened and informed citizenry, producing a more compe-tent democracy from which all could benefit. Much like vaccinations,which have utility even for those who do not take them by decreasingthe overall prevalence of disease in a community and thus renderingeven non-users less likely to fall ill, higher education was recognizedas conferring the public benefit of inoculating us, as a society, againstour worst tendencies. With the rise of global economic competition,the increasing political power of the New Right and neoliberalismalike, and the growing cultural tendency to use producer–consumersubjectivities as metaphors for social relations in ever greater domainsof life, this characterization has greatly changed (Fournier & Grey,2000; Giroux, 2007; Grey & French, 1996; Washburn, 2005). Highereducation is now increasingly seen as a private good, with individualstudents competing for rival spots in classroom seats to avoid being ex-cluded from the secret codes of knowledge that will confer a compet-itive edge as they march forth to make their own way in a free marketsociety. Meanwhile, citizen taxpayers still fund this business (althoughto an alarmingly lesser degree in many U.S. states and in England inthe U.K.), directly as well as indirectly, through government organiza-tions that provide research grants (e.g., the U.S. National ScienceFoundation). As I have argued elsewhere (Belhassen & Caton, 2011),we who are public university faculty have a responsibility to opposethe ideology of privatization in higher education. Those of us who work

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in public universities are public servants. Are guardianship and com-merce two separate functions in a proper liberal democracy? If the an-swer to this question is yes, then this has implications for our work astourism scholars.

As researchers, we have long held the romantic image of the Renais-sance scientist, tinkering away in his observatory, experiencing pureacademic freedom as he tracked the phenomena of the world aroundhim down to its essential reality. This dream, however, is deeply bathedin a scientistic ideology that views the pursuit of knowledge as value-free and independent of social consequence. This conceptualizationworks fine for private pursuits—if we want to spend our weekends inour basements enacting lone heroic acts of knowledge productionon our own coin, what is the harm?—but unreflexive scientistic notionsof pure academic freedom don’t square well with public responsibility.For those of us who receive a livelihood from our scholarship in publicuniversities, the sociopolitical context in which we conduct our workplaces moral demands on us, and we have a duty to interrogate wherethe benefits of our projects flow when making decisions about how tocommit our energies.

Some would argue that this means we have no excuse for behavinglike the unthinking handmaidens of capitalist industry in tourism,the profit motive of which often leads to the production of dispropor-tionate benefits for the few while distributing negative externalitiesover the reach of the many, given that it is the many whom we, as pub-lic servants, represent. Others would take the classic neoliberal tackand argue that research that benefits industry drives the economyand makes the pie bigger for everyone—that traditional notions of eco-nomic growth are in the public interest. Still others would point outthat we cannot ignore exploration of the private, personal happinessthat can be generated through tourism experiences, for this too consti-tutes a good. Perhaps it is not public in character, but then again,humanity is an aggregate of individuals as well as something largerand (arguably) more profound that transcends individuality, and toignore deeply personal, sometimes completely non-transferrable, expe-riences of beauty somehow leaves the universe feeling devoid of soul.

These are all potentially defensible positions, and this particularauthor is not nearly naıve enough to imagine that there is any processor criteria we could ever employ to reach agreement on all the ‘‘shoul-ds’’ of tourism, including the question of the right ways to direct ourscholarly energies. Indeed, a plurality of interpretations on this front,held within the diverse and hopefully democratic community of ourtourism research field, is probably quite healthy! But our duties as pub-lic servants demand that we must engage with such questions of pur-pose. Academic freedom isn’t free, and those of us in public rolesdraw the privilege of pursuing the lines of research we find so person-ally fulfilling directly from the good faith placed in us by our fellow cit-izens. The choice of how to direct our intellectual efforts ultimately lieswith us, but it is our responsibility to ensure that those efforts are theproduct of our best, most thoughtful deliberations about how we can useour roles and resources to do the most good for the world. I thus echo

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Macbeth’s (2005) call for all of us working in the field of tourism tounderstand and interrogate the ethics of our positions when we choosewhich projects to commit ourselves to, but place special emphasis onthe importance of this reflexivity for those of us serving in public roles.As a tourism academy, we need to make room for significantly greaterdiscussion on the idea of responsible scholarship—discussion that goeswell beyond traditional notions of ‘‘research ethics’’ to address deeperissues of purpose and consequences.

In his years as a prisoner of the Italian government for political dis-sidence, the neo-Marxist cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971)wrote much about social struggle. Not surprisingly, given his circum-stances, military metaphors were quick to mind. In one of his most fa-mous conceptualizations, he likened power in society to a war ofposition rather than a war of maneuver. In a war of maneuver, the tac-tical strategy is brute strength, as opposing factions march directly ateach other, battling until one side annihilates the other or inflicts suchdamage as to necessitate surrender. Gramsci thought much social anal-ysis had previously proceeded on this comparison, with the idea of abattle between social classes, one of which would ultimately overthrowthe other. In a war of position, however, the strategy is different. Warsof position depend on controlling access to key resources necessary forvictory—for instance, raw materials and transportation and communi-cation systems—and Gramsci found this a much more prescient meta-phor for social struggle. He commented extensively about the role ofcultural factors, such as religion and ethnic tradition, in mediatingimbalances of power that ultimately revealed themselves in economicterms (see Hall (1996) for a thorough discussion). In a world in whichpleasure travel has become one of the primary contexts through whichwe encounter spaces and customs beyond our own and interface withthe broad reach of our human family, tourism is a central site in thewar of position—not simply a metaphor for the social world (Dann,2002), which it certainly is, but a real, tangible practice in the socialworld, through which ideological currency is exchanged. Whether thissite in the war of position is colonized by forces of greed or generosity,othering or inclusiveness, unbending individual desire or an awkwardcompromising togetherness will impact the broader socioscape of hu-man relations and will in part help to determine whether our speciesmoves toward greater rifting or greater harmony. As tourism scholars,we have some deep reflecting to do on what it is we are—and shouldbe—fighting for.

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Submitted 14 October 2011. Final version 4 May 2012. Accepted 14 May 2012. Refereedanonymously. Coordinating Editor: Irena Ateljevic.