Environment oncl Planning D: Society ond Spoeo, 1991.

volumo 9, pnrjos 461 -478

Tourism, capital, and place: towards a critical geography

of tourism

S Brittonf
Deportment of Geography, University of Auckland, Auckland, Now Zealand
Received 20 February 1989; in rovisod form 10 Docombor 1990

Abstract, Travel and tourism has become one of the largest industrial complexes and item of
consumption in modern Western economies. It is argued here that, to date, geographers studying
tourism have done so without fully grasping the fact that tourism is an important avenue of
capitalist accumulation. I contend that if this weakness is rectified the geographic analysis of
tourism could provide important contributions to contemporary debates in geography, In an
attempt to integrate critical theory and political economy into the study of tourism, two themes
are developed: the capitalistic nature of most travel and tourism production and consumption;
and the contribution of tourism to the analysis of territorial competition and economic
restructuring. The core of the argument presented is that the study of tourism assists us to
recognise how the social meaning and materiality of space and place is created, and how these
representations of place are explicitly incorporated into the accumulation process. To understand
how tourism is involved in this, we need a thcorisation that recognises, and unveils, tourism
as a capitalistically organised activity driven by the inherent and defining social dynamics of
that system, with its attendant production, social, and ideological relations.

1 Introduction
Tourism has become a major internationalised component of Western capitalist
economies: it is one of the quintessential features of mass consumer culture and
modern life. Because of its importance, it is not surprising that geographers have
explored tourism as a field of research. What might be surprising, however, is the
nature of geographic writing on travel and tourism. A scan of the table of contents
of recent volumes published by geographers (Britton and Clarke, 1987; Lea, 1988;
Mathieson and Wall, 1982; Murphy, 1985; Pearce, 1981; 1987a; 1989a) reveals a
common view of the substantive and theoretical domain of tourism studies in the
discipline. Although oversimplifying, we could characterise the 'geography of tourism*
as being primarily concerned with: the description of travel flows; microscale
spatial structure and land use of tourist places and facilities; economic, social,
cultural, and environmental impacts of tourist activity; impacts of tourism in third
world countries; geographic patterns of recreation and leisure pastimes; and the
planning implications of all these topics. Invariably, books on the geography of
tourism also contain chapters on the composition of tourists and outlines of what
constitutes the industrial and institutional system in which touristic experiences and
travel occur. These are vital elements of the study of travel and tourism. But these
sections are dealt with in descriptive and weakly theorised ways. This is a major
problem for the advancement of the geographic study of tourism. Geographers
working in the field have been reluctant to recognise explicitly the capitalistic
nature of the phenomenon they are researching. The supply side of the tourism
system, for example, is hardly mentioned in a recent review of international tourist
flows (Mansfeld, 1990). This problem is of fundamental importance as it has
meant an absence of an adequate theoretical foundation for our understanding of
the dynamics of the industry and the social activities it involves.

f The editors regret to inform readers that Dr Britton died in June 1991. His colleagues at
the University of Auckland completed the work on proofs of this paper.
452 S Britton

In this essay I argue that the geographic study of tourism requires a more
rigorous core of theory in order to conceptualise fully its role in capitalist
accumulation, its economic dynamics, and its role in creating the materiality and
social meaning of places. In addition, I contend that geographers conducting
research on tourism have the potential to integrate their topic into the forefront
of contemporary debates in the discipline. In the confines of a paper it is not
practical to range over all the possible points that might be part of a widened
agenda for the geography of tourism. Instead, I restrict my comments to two
themes: the capitalistic nature of most travel and tourism activities; and the
contribution of tourism to understanding territorial competition and restructuring.

2 Situating tourism in capitalist society

We can start by noting that the very concept of leisure, and its subset tourism,
must be situated in their socially specific context in order to be properly theorised.
With reference to Rojek (1985), it is only partially correct to argue, as is done in
much conventional theory, that leisure (including tourism) is synonymous with 'free
time' remaining after commitments to work and 'human maintenance' (biological
necessities) have been met, and that the growth of tourism can be accounted for
with the notion of an increase in per capita or aggregate social 'free time'. Not
only does this notion miss the point of why and how leisure occurs in the socially
prescribed activities and temporal forms that it does, and the social relations and
functions embedded in them, but it is insufficient even on its own terms. Statistics
suggesting the shrinkage of the working week are averages, with certain social
groups gaining more 'free time', others less: and this trend typically relates only to
paid wage and salaried labour. Beyond these qualifications, a drop in averaged
hours of formal wage work is compatible with increased casualisation of work
contraf ts, increased size, and amount of time devoted to transactions in the informal
economy, or the expansion of household production and maintaining the exchange
value of the family house (cleaning, home improvements, gardening, and landscaping).
Furthermore, the definition of 'free time' and how it is spent varies among segments
of society: the 'forced leisure' of the unemployed; the relatively clear-cut distinction
between work and nonwork for men; the seeming inseparability of the labour of
women as care givers and domestic workers from their 'nonwork' time; or the way
ethnic minority groups spend and organise their nonwork time compared with
white European society.
These issues aside, however, the origin of the word leisure derives from the
Latin licere - lawful, allowed, or permitted. Leisure is not free time in any absolute
sense, but is subject to rules of permissible forms and sanctioned behaviour:
"leisure is ... an effect of systems of legitimation" (Rojek, 1985, page 16). How
does this notion advance our attempt to situate tourism, as one form of leisure
activity, in wider structures? It does so once we recognise several interrelated
dimensions of our tourism in capitalist society, and the fact that the "consumption
of tourist-services cannot be separated off from the social relations within which
they are embedded" (Urry, 1990, page 23).
2.1 Consumption and the organisation of leisure
One of the hallmarks of modern society is the separation of work from leisure and
culture. It is axiomatic in neomarxian accounts of leisure in capitalist society that
individuals, in having to sell their labour, have become partially reduced to
commodities in the production process, subordinated to their employer during
working hours. There is, consequently, a forced segregation of leisure activities,
unlike in earlier eras and other sorts of societies where work and nonwork activities
Tourism, copitfti, oncJ pfoco nm

were not so discrete. One consequence of the subordination of individuals to

capital in the workplace is the significance people accord leisure, and the desire
for distraction from the demands and drudgery of everyday routines. Forms of
entertainment not only become central means of escape and relief (Held, 1980),
but it is m the sphere of choosing and participating in recreation activities that
individuals have "the illusion of freedom and self-determination'* (Rojek, 1985,
page 107). The illusion derives from the premise that capitalist social and production
relations carry over into leisure time. Rojek identifies four characteristics of
the organisation of leisure in modern capitalism: privatisation, individuation,
commercialisation, and pacification. In order to explore the presence of capitalistic
relations in tourism, two of these general characteristics arc explored here.
First, there has been a long-term trend in Western society towards recognising the
individual as distinct from the group. This in turn has facilitated: (a) a corresponding
differentiation and specialisation of leisure pursuits; and (b) the linkage of personal
status and individuated identity* (with corresponding differentiating of life-styles
and experiences) through the consumption of commodities. To appreciate the
specific nature of modern leisure, recent commentators have noted the comparison
with feudal society where the carnival was the primary mode of organised leisure.
Not only was this an event in which all social groups and strata participated, but it
was a forum for the licensed transgression of normal codes of behaviour governing
social life (Rojek, 1985; Shields, 1989). In contrast, leisure in modern society is
characterised by a vast range of institutionalised special interest group pursuits
which society as a whole does not participate in. Rather than the anarchic sanction
breaking and mockery of established order in the carnival, today's special interest
group leisure is conducted according to firm rules at two levels: that the activity
poses no threat to the majority of the community which is not involved in the
activity, or to the underlying ideology and power structure of society; and each
leisure pursuit has its own membership rules and behavioural conventions.:
Contemporary organised tourism, along with its historic antecedents, is no exception.
It involves specific cultural practices governing what is seen, how it is seen, the
composition of tour groups, the behaviour of individuals and the group during the
touristic experience, and so on (Feiffer, 1985; MacCannell, 1976). The ideological
content of institutionalised leisure, and its co-option as, and compatibility with,
social control and prevailing class relations, are generic features (Held, 1980;
Lefebvre, 1976; Ley and Olds, 1988; Rojek, 1985; Shields, 1989).
Second, and more apparent as far as tourism is concerned, leisure activities
have become increasingly commodified as a 'culture of consumption' has evolved
(Featherstone, 1990). The expansion and deepening of commodity markets has
witnessed the transfer of the logic and rationality of commodity production to the
sphere of consumption and culture. One manifestation of this trend has been the
formation of what the Frankfurt School of critical theorists (especially Adorno,
Horkheimer as well as Marcuse) called 'the culture industry' (for a review, see
Held, 1980). Many cultural and recreation pursuits have been transformed into
experiences which are bought and sold as commodities. This process complements,
yet subverts, the trend towards individuation of leisure, with the personalisation
and differentiation of leisure products expressed in market niching, cosmetic design
variations, and advertising disguising the industrialisation and mass production of
such products. Recreational travel is, then, along with professional sport, outdoor
recreations, music, food catering, films, videos, books, magazines, television, art,
and numerous other leisure activities, an avenue for the pursuit and accumulation
of profit. Consequently, it is organised by all the social institutions designed to
create, coordinate, regulate, and distribute exchange values: enterprises, industries,
454 S Britton

markets, state agencies. In an unambiguous way, capitalist relations of production

are an integral part of our 'free time', just as they are an integral part of tourism.
The central qualities of the 'cultural industry' is that it offers escape, entertainment,
expansion of personal understanding, and perhaps something 'metaphysically
meaningful', but without challenging the existing social and material order. In the
sense developed by the Frankfurt School, the 'culture industry' represents a set of
institutions and practices designed to facilitate the adjustment of individuals to
existing social rules and organisations. Hence commercial entertainment largely
consists of activities that require attentive yet passive and uncritical participation
through patterned and predigested cultural entities (Held, 1980). The 'industry'
reproduces and reinforces dominant interpretations of reality, while including
sufficient degrees of novelty to capture audience (market) attention, by classifying
and coding the entertainment, and predisposing consumers on how to interpret it
through suitable cues (commentaries, brochures, reviews, advertisements) for eliciting
the intended response. As the institutions of the 'culture industry' are also avenues
for the accumulation of capital in their own right, they are characterised by the need
to maintain and diversify demand for entertainment and leisure products. This is
achieved largely through the generation of constant change and novelty, and the
pseudoindividualisation of leisure activities as expressed in the multiplication of the
range of identified market segments, leisure pursuits, choice of leisure products and
models, and leisure places and destinations.
The commodification of travel and tourism involves, as with many other forms
of recreation, the production of tangible goods (souvenirs, transportation vehicles,
purpose designed buildings, consumables), as well as intangible labour-services
(waiters, reservations clerks, tour guides). Diverse market segments are identified with
the usual range of demographic and 'psychographic' variables utilised by the advertising
industry. Novelty and change are incorporated through the selective marketing
promotion of, and fashion shifts in, the range of activities offered at tourist destinations.
Most importantly, however, the tourist industry sells 'experiences', which are
anticipated outcomes of what Urry (1990) calls gazing and the search for signs-
instances of cultural practices—which indicate the (authentic) experience has been
achieved (Culler, 1981). Under the logic of the culture of consumption the value
to the consumer, of in this instance the travel mode, cultural events and associated
material goods packaged through the tourism production process, lies in the quality
and quantity of the experience they promise and symbolise. Commodities in this
form become a means to an end: the purchase of a life-style; a statement of taste
and demonstration of the possession of 'cultural and symbolic capital'; an invigoration
of the body; an uplifting of the spirit; a broadening of the mind; a signifier of
status; a confirmation or challenge of attitudes (Featherstone, 1990). The 'culture
industry' encourages the constant search for novelty and alternative experiences,
which in the case of tourism incorporates unfamiliar and unconventional cultures,
peoples, places, sights, behaviour, and settings into a commercial and institutionalised
system constructed to satisfy demand for these experiences. It also encourages the
collection of signifiers of these experiences and the social status they convey.
The search and collection by individuals of 'positional' or 'marker' goods
manifests itself in tourism by the very act of indulging (regularly) in overseas travel,
and the deliberate choice of (fashionable) destinations, travel luggage and clothing,
services (accommodation, mode of travel, etc), and recreation activities which signal
taste, judgement, and status (that is, 'cultural capital': see Bourdieu, 1984). In addition,
cultural mediators—writers of articles in travel and life-style magazines, travel guides,
trend setters—help the consumer choose, appropriately interpret, and use the touristic
experiences to social (status) ends; and along with the formal product providers
Tourism, capital, and ploco 465

((ravel agents, tour wholesalers, etc) they create a never ending range of new travel
experiences (Featherstone, 1990; Urry, 1990). Identities of individuals and groups
are constructed through the consumption, display, and usage of the signs and values
imputed in the consumption of cultural (touristic) goods (Urry, 1988) These matters
become of significance when it is remembered that the consumption of services is
becoming a more important means of social differentiation among individuals and
classes than consumption of material goods (Urry, 1990), and that the travel and
tourism industries are some of the largest and fastest growing sectors of consumer
expenditure and economic accumulation in Western countries.
We can also note that the tourist experience itself, as is often recognised, is
typically neither authentic, nor is it capable of fulfilling the promises of promotional
material, nor docs it meet the expectations of tourists, Not that this is necessarily
to the detriment of the industry (Culler, 1981). Having been persuaded to buy a
commodity package, tourists by and large arc conditioned to look for the qualities
associated with a cultural model, staged performance, or life-style representation,
rather than its authenticity or the reality of the social life it is part of. Any vague
feeling of expectations being dissatisfied are dissipated in any number of ways,
including: the steady flow of signals from tour guides, brochures, and numerous
other sources as to what one ought to have experienced; the social control of the
touring group (at least some members of which will have the requisite 'experience');
and the pervasive power of the marketing media to instill a steady escalation of the
means by which an experience can be 'genuinely' achieved (MacCanncll, 1976).
2.2. The tourism production system
To transform travel and tourist experiences into commodities, they must be
standardised and rendered amenable to capitalist production techniques (Britton,
1982a). Before they can be profitable, tourist experiences need to be regulated and
made predictable (MacCannell, 1976). Little must be left to chance—neither the
mechanics and logistics of travel nor the content of the experiences, as both are
constructions shaped as fully as possible by capitalist production and social relations
(Urry, 1987). A tourist industry has evolved that simultaneously enables tourist
experiences to occur, encourages tourists to anticipate their experience and the
expected social returns, and convinces tourists they have had the requisite experiences.
We can characterise the various commercial and public institutions designed to
commodify and provide travel and touristic experiences as the tourism production
system (after Walker, 1988). The reasons for this is it encourages an holistic
treatment of the supply and range of tourism products, as weir as bypassing the
semantic problem of whether to label tourism as one industry or an amalgam of
industries (for example, Leiper, 1990).
Included in the production system are: (a) those economic activities geared to
producing and selling travel and tour products; (b) the social groups, cultural
features, and physical elements which are incorporated into travel and tourism
products as attractions; and (c) agencies for regulating the commercial behaviour
and social externalities associated with such production. There are several dimensions
to the character and organisation of the system. It is simultaneously a mechanism
for the accumulation of capital, the private appropriation of wealth; the extraction
of surplus value from labour, and the capturing of (often unearned) rents from
cultural and physical phenomena (especially public goods) which are deemed to
have both a social and scarcity value. Companies, governments, and class and
nonclass social groups—each identified with specific territories (destinations)—
compete for the rents to be obtained from the construction and selling of experiences
and places to would-be tourists. This production system is not exclusively capitalistic,
456 S Britton

however; it will incorporate elements of the household and simple-commodity

economy in order to enhance the qualities of an attraction, and hence accumulation.
Conversely, there are many self-reliant tourists (in fact distinct market segments)
which consciously attempt to avoid the formal tourism production system by
selecting their own itinerary, accommodation, and transport: these are tourists
Leiper (1990, page 157) classifies as having a "low index of industrial dependency".
As with any production system, tourism can be conceived as having its own
division of labour between diverse functions (transport, accommodation, travel and
tour operators, marketing, ancillary services, attractions), its own markets (the
demand for, and supply of, travel and tourist products), and formal regulatory
agencies (industry or 'sector' associations, government departments, international
quangos) (Foster, 1985; Holloway, 1986). Beyond these features are commercial
practices, industry structures, and organisations which have evolved in response to
the interrelated technical requirements of creating tourism products, changes in
technology, and conditions shaping competition (including government licensing and
controls) (Hodgeson, 1987). Unfortunately, it is at this point that treatments of the
economic mechanisms and organisation of the tourism system in the geographic
literature cease. The geography texts on tourism offer little more than a cursory
and superficial analysis of how the tourism industry is structured and regulated by
the classic imperatives and laws governing capitalist accumulation. This paper is
not the forum for presenting a comprehensive conceptualisation of the means and
social relations of production found in tourism. A few central characteristics can,
nonetheless, be considered.
2.2.1 Product supply arrangements
The tourism supply system is made up of a number of separate conventionally
defined industries, each of which produce distinct services and goods for incorporation
into tourist products (Collier, 1989). There are several implications of this amorphous
arrangement. Because each industry supplies only part of a final demand tourist
product, strategic roles are played by coordinators which bring together the diverse
inputs, in infinite combinations, and onsell them as a package to the final consumer.
These intermediaries—notably tour wholesalers who deal direct with the principal
suppliers, and travel agents retailing direct to the public—extract a rent from:
(a) the convenience they provide in eliminating the costs to the tourist of having to
search information, compile a desired mix of services, and then bargain over terms
of the transaction; and (b) reducing product costs by purchasing in bulk from
principals and creating a range of standardised products. Still, the very existence
of the range of 'component' suppliers does mean the final consumer can deal
independently and directly with the principals (automatically categorising the
supplier as providing both a producer and a consumer service): conversely the
principals may wish to bypass the intermediaries and retail direct to the public,
especially private-sector and public-service clients who are large repeat purchasers.
Then again, to achieve stability and volume sales, principals are to varying degrees
reliant on wholesalers and retailers with their expensive, geographically dispersed,
point-of-sale networks. To complicate matters further, many principals supply
services or goods which are not designed specifically for tourist consumption: airline
seats, hotel beds, or travellers cheques, for example, are purchased by tourist and
nontourist travellers alike. Nor might these suppliers see themselves as primarily
in the tourism business. At the same time, there are nontourism industries which,
by the nature of their activities, have potential economies of scope and competitive
assets which encourage them to encroach on the traditional territory of conventionally
defined tourism companies. Examples are the established branch networks of banks
Tourism, copilot one! plnco 4B7

and supermarkets which put them in contact with large volumes of customers, and
thus the potential to provide retail travel agency services; banks have the additional
advantage of being able to supply other complementary financial services such as
loans, insurance, travellers cheques, foreign-currency transactions and so on. (It
should be noted that one outcome of this ambiguity in industrial organisation is the
wholly unsatisfactory downgrading and compartmentalisation of business travel in
geographic research: yet it is precisely this segment which is the mainstay of most
large hotels in central business districts, of downtown bar and restaurant sales, of
the conference trade, and of the internationalisation of upmarket hotel chains,
rental car franchises, and financial services—such as American Express,) This maze
of linkages and alternate channels among suppliers, intermediaries, and consumers,
and the blurred boundaries of the tourism supply system and what constitutes the
tourism market, has important repercussions with respect to the nature of competition
among tourism enterprises and industries,
In the first instance, there is considerable fragmentation in the system. It is
almost universal to hear of complaints about lack of cooperation and coordination
between different sector groups. With so many diverse linkage arrangements to
exploit, so many permeable boundaries between industries, so much crossover in the
skills required to provide particular services, and wide scope for new alliances, the
market position and share of any one company and even whole industry segments is
unstable and difficult to secure over the long term. This characteristic is exacerbated
as advances in information technology break down entry barriers further, increase
economies of scope, encourage both vertical and horizontal integration for some
companies (as is the case with computerised reservations systems), and at the same
time create new niches for relatively small specialised operations. Competition in
tourism is, therefore, as much between industries and subsectors of the system, as
it is within each industry and market segment.
An equally important feature of the system is that, being so specialised (offering
only one part of the final tourism product), an operator in one industry is very
reliant on other upstream or downstream suppliers or buyers to ensure maintenance
and growth of sales. There is, consequently, considerable pressure to exert control
over transaction arrangements by entering into long-term contracts, internalising
critical functions via vertical or horizontal integration, or achieving de facto control
over extended networks through strategic use of licensing, commissions, franchising,
and technical compatibility. There are within the system, however, industries and
industry segments with greater power to exert control than others. The two key
sets of players in the tourism sector of any country are usually the national airline(s)
and tour wholesalers (also called tour operators). Because of the enormous sunk
costs which must be recouped, and their substantial carrying capacity, airlines have
both the financial imperative (unless subsidised in a major way by the state) and
commercial clout to extract advantageous terms from wholesalers and retailers, and
the ability to mould distribution channels (either set up retail branches, site direct
reservations terminals in the offices of major clients, or manipulate travel agent
commissions). They also have the resources to buy into hotels, tour operators, and
other transport operators to reap the benefits of vertical integration: and by forging
alliances, set up computerised reservations systems which create captured international
integrated (interindustry, for example, airlines, rental car, and accommodation)
networks. The competitive advantage of the tour wholesaler lies in their doubly
strategic position between all principal suppliers and between suppliers and
consumers. Their power derives from the enormous volumes they can command,
their pivotal familiarity with diverse market segments, and the capacity to shift
tourist flows from one destination to another or one supplier to another through
458 S Britton

the travel products (tour packages) they construct and promote. In other words,
those sectors of the tourism system which intersect between the tourist in the home
market and tourist destinations wield considerable influence over interindustry
transactions and the geography of tourist flows.
2.2.2 The state
Associated with the problem of fragmentation is the critical role of the state in the
tourism sectors of most countries. In this regard the state is important at two levels.
First, it will typically provide forums where industry associations and representatives
can meet to overcome their differences, rise above vested interests, and attempt to
coordinate the supply and provision of the wide range of services and goods required.
Without such coordination, the identification and clearing of critical (quantitative
or qualitative) supply bottlenecks, or avoidance of the risk of sending potential
customers mixed and even contradictory images of the destination, will not proceed
adequately or quickly (Collier, 1989). Second, the state will be required to make
substantial expenditure to market the region or nation as a destination. Destination
marketing is entered into but reluctantly by individual tourism companies and
individual industries. On the one hand, destination promotion is vital to differentiate
one place from another and so make the product/place less price elastic; this helps
ensure stability and resilience of visitor flows and thus increases the economic
rents extractable (Ashworth and Goodall, 1988; NZ Business Roundtable, 1990).
The problem, however, is there is no clear-cut ability of an enterprise to identify,
let alone achieve, the capture of that share of rent which is commensurate with
their share of expenditure spent on promotion. Not only are the tangible benefits
of place-promotion campaigns indirect and diffuse, there is every likelihood that
enterprises which did not contribute to the marketing costs will benefit to the same
extent as those which did: there is simply too much leakage of benefits to rival firms.
For these reasons the state undertakes to fund and implement place promotion.
The state has other roles to play as well. The most evident are the offering of
investment incentives, and the underwriting of the supply of critical inputs. Incentives
to attract domestic or international incentives are common as part of the local
state's function to act on behalf of a particular territory's attempts to maintain
accumulation in the face of territorial competition from other states offering
investment inducements. Although the benefits of such incentives are typically
captured unearned by capital from specific industries, without them investment may
not proceed. The most obvious instances of the state intervening in markets to
ensure the supply of key services or goods are in aviation, national parks, and
provision of accommodation in places considered of excessive short-term risk for
private capital. As with regional marketing campaigns, a mixture of public economic
and welfare goals will lie behind such intervention, as well as deliberate policies to
subsidise and promote particular industries.
2.2.3 Labour and tourism services
The position of labour in the supply of many final demand tourism products is
unusual in that workers are simultaneously providers of labour services and part of
the consumed product—as the oft discussed matter of the 'quality of service' or
'attitude' of staff testifies. Most elements of a tourist experience, for instance the
need to travel in an aircraft from one place to another, become imbued with both
the unique qualities associated with the tourist product, and with the capitalist
social relations necessary for the creation of the commodity. But unlike in many
other industries, the provision of these two dimensions is indivisible with respect to
the role of labour. Thus the commercial necessity of an airline, for example, to
capture market share means it must differentiate its image and service product
Tourism, capital, nod ploco 469

from that of its competitors. It will do so typically by astute route scheduling and
pricing and by market positioning; and it will inevitably also emphasise the quality of
the service offered by its flight deck staff. The upshot of this is that the parameters
of good staff are friendliness, helpfulness, courteousness, as well as disseminating a
sense of security. But as any observer of airline advertisements will know, the
subtexts will include, for men at least, vicarious sexual thrills, and reinforcement of
patriarchal supremacy, from being waited on by attractive, obliging, and deferential
female flight attendants. An edict by Air New Zealand to require its cabin staff to
conform to certain body shapes (standards of 'trimncss') so as to preserve a certain
image for the airline (Auckland Star 1989) is a reminder that the provision of even
the most mundane component of tourism can force labour into the dual role of
being part of the tourist product or experience, as well as having to submit to the
class, gender, and market-determined social relations by which the product is created.
The same principle may be found with respect to cultural events staged for tourists,
or the allocation of staff of various ethnic, racial, and gender groups to customer
contact and back-office functions in shops, hotels, and tours.
The problem for labour lies in the fact that many tourism products involve the
production and consumption of social experiences; these cannot be reduced just to
tangible elements (Urry, 1990). The behaviour and qualities of the waiter, room
service person, tour guide, or steward arc as important as the physical labour service
they undertake. For capital this can create problems. Management demands labour
which has all the personal qualities which will guarantee the required quality of
service. Yet the very qualities in demand are often not recognised with formal
credentials, which encourages the market to underprice such skills. This is
exacerbated by the fact that much of the labour force willing to supply these skills
is casual, highly feminised, and attracts many members of indigenous minority groups
(to give local colour!). Consequently tourism employment is often characterised by
clear-cut ethnic and gender divisions of labour and prevalence of secondary labour-
market conditions. In settings where unionism is strong, as in Australasia, there is
the additional feature of constant capital-labour conflict surrounding penal rates
for overtime, weekend, and statutory holiday payments, as well as over the length
of the working week. Because of the frequently twenty-four hour, on-demand
nature of hotel and other services, capital requires a high degree of flexibility and
commitment from labour, even though the very labour intensive nature of these
services has management wanting to suppress wage rates and increase working hours.
Hospitality sector unions, however, seek to upgrade their members conditions of
employment in line with those prevailing in other occupations. In the current
recession and momentum towards flexible labour markets, capital is able to make
important inroads into the services employment conditions (for example, NZ
Business Roundtable, 1990).
From these thumbnail sketches it is evident that geographers must come to grips
with the fundamental elements which govern behaviour in commercial tourism. At
the least, to adequately understand the tourism production system requires familiarity
with basic concepts and processes involved in capital-labour relations, competitive
strategies of enterprises, characteristics of entry prices and barriers in the various
subsectors of the industry, industrial structure (including concentration and
centralisation, product differentiation, economies of scope and scale), transaction
costs (internalisation or externalisation of production), labour markets and so on.
These are essential for identifying how the character of the products of each branch
of the tourism system determine ways in which profits are generated, enterprises
compete, and social groups and places are incorporated into the production system.
460 S Britton

It is precisely how these factors are manifest in each segment and market that
expresses the capitalist, social, and production relations peculiar to the system, and
gives them distinct spatial relations. It is impracticable to follow up this topic with
any comprehensive coverage here. Instead the potential insights to be gained from
considering systematically the economic processes inherent in the system can be
briefly illustrated with international hotel chains. This component of tourism reveals
important relationships between function, industrial structure, social relations, and
the geography of product supply. Each industry and industry segment will have its
own distinct characteristics.
2.2.4 An example: hotel chains
In contrast to some parts of the tourism production system (for example, tour
operators) some hotel chains are highly internationalised (Dunning and McQueen,
1982; United Nations, 1982). A question for geographers is why these differences
exist between segments of the production system. For hotel chains the answer lies
in the nature of the product and in ownership-specific and internationalisation
advantages for individual large firms. In order to valorise these advantages,
offshore operations are necessitated.
The product offered by hotel chains has three features around which competitive
strategies are based. These are: a package of 'on-premises' services which provide
a certain experience (ambience, life-style) based on kinds and qualities of
accommodation, on-site recreation and shopping facilities, and catering; the offering
of 'off-premises' services (airport shuttles, local excursions, booking facilities); and a
'trademark' guarantee which signals to the customer a predictable quality of service—
an essential component as customers typically buy the product on a 'sight unseen'
basis because it is an 'experience good', one where knowledge of the product is
obtained only after purchase (Collier, 1989). The competitive strategies which follow
from these features centre around knowledge of customer needs and preferences, the
ability to supply these goods, and the signalling of this capacity to potential customers.
The means by which this combined capacity is marketed, and rents from it captured,
is the brand name. The brand name signals the firm's product differentiation
compared with its competitors, and is the equivalent to a patent in manufacturing
industry. It is legally recognised intellectual property which both commands a
premium in the marketplace and is the source of firm-specific competitive advantage.
The foundation of its proprietary knowledge, and hence the commercial advantage of
large transnational chains, thus lies in: (a) the firms location in the home market of
potential customers (and hence their understanding of the customers' preferences;
(b) experience in meeting this demand through operating hotels in the home market;
and, of critical importance, (c) managerial expertise and systems of staff training,
which in turn determine all the intangible qualities of the 'experience' associated
with the brand name—assets which are codified in management instruction and staff
training manuals. These manuals are the core of firm-specific competitive advantage
and the primary reason why firms owning them engage in offshore operations.
The problem with this sort of intellectual property (intangible know-how) is that
it is essentially unpatentable. A staff member transferring from one hotel to a
competitor can take such knowledge with her or him, thus leading a firm's source
of competitive advantage. Similarly, transferring know-how to a second party, even
via a commercial transaction, reduces the potential rents to be extracted from the
knowledge, as the very act of transferral means a loss of monopsonic control over
that asset. This is the essence of explaining the geography of hotel competition.
To capture maximum rents from its proprietary knowledge, firms such as Hilton
International, Sheraton Hotels, Holiday Inns, Inter-Continental Hotels, or Club
Tourism, capital, and plcjco 401

MiSditerranee must internalise their firm-specific intellectual property; that is, retain
them within the firm* So in order to compete for market share with other hotels,
and to maximise shareholders' return on invested capital, firms will horizontally
expand into new territories. Expansion will take the form of offshore operations
by the firm itself, rather than selling the proprietary rights to another firm already
established in the new territory: that way both the know-how and the maximum
commercial premiums can be retained by the firm.
The intangible nature of the proprietary assets also explain the form that offshore
participation takes, Typically, parent companies do not take out full equity shares in
their overseas hotels: in the 1980s about two thirds of the hotels run by international
chains were operated under some form of contract rather than equity investment
(Dunning and McQueen, 1982), with management contracts the most preferred
form of control, especially in third world countries. Franchising was also common,
but again less so in developing countries. There arc a variety of geographic patterns
associated with these arrangements and the country of origin of the parent firm
which we do not have space to deal with here (see Dunning and McQueen, 1982).
In general, however, the principle behind the lack of direct control through equity
ownership is that protection of proprietary knowledge does not require equity
involvement. Only where specific negotiations with hotel developers demand it, or
where there are prospects for considerable capital gains because of the nature of
the local commercial property market, will equity participation be likely, although
this does vary from firm to firm and by country of origin of parent firms. Otherwise,
management or lease contracts give the parent firm virtually full de facto control
over hotel operations and proprietary assets without the need to commit (or risk)
capital in direct invesment.
These contracts are nonetheless essential, as without close control of the design,
operations, pricing, and staffing of the hotel, the qualities and experiences associated
in the customer's mind with the trademark cannot be guaranteed. The strategy used
by any particular firm will, however, depend on the precise nature of its proprietary
assets: where advantages lie in marketing and referral systems (for example, Best
Western Hotels, Flag Inns, Holiday Inns) then franchising arrangements are common;
where a package of managerial, organisational, and professional services is involved
(Sheraton, Hilton) then management contracts or leasing arrangements are more
common.
Similar and other principles can be applied to other parts of the production
system where the nature of the product requires different regulatory, ownership,
and competitive arrangements (franchising of rental car and airport duty free shop
chains; enormous capital entry costs, direct ownership, and high degrees of state
regulation in aviation; network control derived from ownership and technical
specifications of airline, accommodation, and rental car computerised reservations
systems; petty-commodity souvenir producers and retailers). It is clear, I hope, that
analyses utilising appropriate theoretical constructs which uncover the sorts of
commercial behaviour inherent in the system are particularly useful. Ironically,
most revealing analyses of the relations between industrial structure and spatial
pattern have been made by conventional (albeit Institutional') economists, not
geographers. This is not to say that geographers have not provided valuable
insights of their own on the nature of international tourism. For example, Forer
and Pearce (1984) and Pearce (1987b; 1987c) made important investigations into
the geographic patterns of package tours in some Western countries; and Britton
(1982a; 1982b) described the distribution of ownership and locus of commercial
control between metropolitan tourist source markets and 'third world' destinations.
462 S Britton

But geographers have yet to adopt, adapt, and apply to tourism the conceptualisation
of commercial dynamics available to them from industrial economics and management
studies. Nor have they integrated geographic dimensions of capital-labour relations
and industrial processes into tourism research with use of political economy
perspectives now well integrated into, for example, analyses of economic restructuring
(for example, Amin and Goddard, 1985; Massey, 1984; Massey and Meegan, 1982;
Storper and Scott, 1986; Storper and Walker, 1989): although one lead has been
given by the sociologist Urry (1987) with his suggestive work on labour, enterprise,
and product restructuring of tourist services.
I have argued so far that the theorisation of tourism requires consideration of
the commodification of leisure and touristic experiences, and that part of that
project is an adequate conceptualisation of the economic dynamics of the travel
and tourism production system in its own right. This is not, however, the only
source of theoretical inspiration for a more penetrating and informed geography of
tourism. There is another vital issue that must be addressed—the commodification
of place.
2.3 The commodification of place
Not all tourist trips centre around cultural and scenic sights; visiting friends and
relatives, for instance, renders the geographic site somewhat incidental when
calculating vacation itineraries. But there are distinct spaces, and means of
organising space, associated with the commodification of leisure. Certain places
and sites (with their landscapes, social practices, buildings, residents, symbols and
meaning) achieve the status of tourist sights because of their physical, social,
cultural—and commercial—attributes. As such they may become partially commodified
in their own right. This commodification can take two generic forms: first the legal
recognition or transfer of commercial property rights involving ownership or lease
of the site itself (a building, recreation land, or beach); or second, where the
attraction cannot be privately appropriated directly, the inclusion of the touristic
experience or attributes of the place into a saleable commodity (a tour, the ambiance
of a hotel in close proximity to a significant site, souvenirs, or symbolic image with
recognisable connotations). With the second form, spatial proximity is often crucial,
as the special ambiance of a hotel or authenticity of a souvenir is largely dependent
on its direct association with the sight. With both forms, places provide opportunities
for the generation of rents by virtue of their special qualities and status and the
captured proprietary assets that flow from them. In somewhat speculative and
exploratory fashion, it can be suggested that there are two mechanisms through
which this commodification is expressed: as leisure spaces and as tourist attractions.
Lefebvre (1976), starting from the assumption that a structured period of
recreation is a functional necessity given the subsumption of the individual to
capital in the workplace (a holiday to enable the reconstitution of 'human capital'),
has identified what he calls 'leisure spaces'. These are discrete and categorised
landscapes that actively maintain and consolidate prevailing production relations.
Leisure spaces are hierarchised and take various forms. Overseas holiday resorts
are at one extreme of physical accessibility and neighbourhood playgrounds,
domains, or ovals at the other. In terms of nominal monetary accessibility the
range is from local camp grounds to the most exclusive hideaway for the wealthy.
And then there are amusement parks on the one hand, to wilderness reserves on
the other, along a continuum from places offering what are often judged as material,
transitory, mundane, and superficial experiences to those providing the spiritual and
arcane; or put another way, places offering a 'romantic' form of tourist gaze "in which
the emphasis is upon solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship"
Tourism, capital, and ploco 403

with the sight, to public places for 'collective1 gazing where the attraction is the
crowd itself and the social variety and display associated with it (Urry, 1990,
page 31; see also Walter, 1982). In other words, there may be a distinct hierarchy
of holiday spaces in terms of the nature of the reconstitution and escape they are
designed to provide, the social groups and classes which use them, the types of
capital and attendant social and state relations associated with their construction
and provision, and their physical characteristics and symbolism,
It would seem there has been increased investment by capital in 'collective*
attractions, as these are most readily amenable to the systematic management of
large-scale accumulation by commercial alliances and the local state* There has
also been a trend to integrate tourist and nontourist commercial developments, thus
breaking down the separation of tourism from other activities (Urry, 1990, page 33)
to create "cnclavcd liminal moments of ordered disorder" (Fcathcrstonc, 1990,
page 15). These "liminal spaces" are sites of carefully contrived consumption and
excitement, often involving controlled relaxation of normal social behaviour.
Growth in the number and size of tourist resort areas, theme parks, renovated
inner-city precincts, trade expositions, shopping complexes, and festival markets
testify to this trend.
Leisure spaces have therefore become one clement of the sociospatial division of
labour in modern capitalist society. Some leisure spaces are unambiguously organised
along commercial lines, and as such their attractions are marketed in the same
manner as other service products. Others are spaces where private appropriation
of rent from a scarce public good is denied and instead preserved for the public
by the state, such as with a unique physical or historic feature. Many of these
spaces are an integral part of the geography of tourism, although not necessarily
designed to be so originally.
Overlaying these spaces is another set of sites readily and conventionally
identified as part of the tourism production system—tourist attractions: what
Lefebvre might include in his 'spaces of representation and imagination' (see
Harvey, 1987). Tourist attractions are simultaneously social and geographic: they
are sights and sites of significance to tourists. MacCannell (1976) defines a tourist
attraction as an empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight, and a marker
(for a reformulation of MacCannell, see Leiper, 1990). Many attractions are
unrecognisable as such except for one crucial element—the markers: these are any
information or representation that labels a sight as a sight (Culler, 1981). They may
take the form of brochures, guide books, on-site plaques, reproductions (photographs,
art prints, souvenirs), educational material, television travel programmes, reviews in
life-style magazines, or the incorporation of the sight into cultural symbols or
national icons. They may also be demarcated by surrounding spatial zones whose
signs condition tourist expectations, anticipation, and appropriate behaviour (Leiper,
1990). The means by which attractions are marked can extend far beyond information
directed specifically to tourists, with the sight often being incorporated into the
symbols, cultural reference points, and language held by a society. The Tower Bridge,
10 Downing Street, the Louvre, Sydney Opera House, Eiffel Tower, Grand Canyon,
the Capitol, (remnants of) the Berlin Wall, the Vatican, perhaps the Texas School
Book Depository in Dallas, are not only recognised attractions and symbols, but
there is a universality of recognition which transcends national frontiers.
The process by which such recognition—this 'miracle of consensus'—occurs again
extends far beyond the commercial domain of the tourism production system in any
economic sense. According to MacCannell (1976, pages 42-45) a set of institutional
mechanisms combine to create "sight sacralisation" and a corresponding "ritual attitude"
by tourists. Many of these institutional mechanisms will be capitalistic in nature,
464 S Britton

but they are not necessarily so. Nonetheless, MacCannelPs analysis is suggestive of
the means by which attractions are created by, or otherwise captured and assimilated
into, capitalist production. His notion of a tourist attraction is essentially a semiotic
one, in which it is impossible to separate the object from its subjective social and
cultural meaning. Attractions are signs which have meaning to certain social groups
and individuals. This conceptualisation is encapsulated in the following model
(MacCannell, 1976, page 110):
sign [represents/something/to someone]
attraction [marker/sight/tourist]
All societies sanctify certain phenomenon as cultural attractions by recognising
their importance with markers, by naming or codifying (with legislation, historic
places signification), framing and elevation (displaying, protecting, enhancing), and
through enshrinement as symbols (reproductions).
The tourist production system has three avenues by which it devises tourist
attractions. It can take advantage of already existing cultural attractions or
'curiosities' by co-opting them for the purposes of accumulation into tourist
products; tours to historic sights, ethnic minority neighbourhoods, and major
cultural (including sporting) spectacles are examples. It can create its own
attractions, such as all-inclusive recreation resorts, theme parks, or ship cruises.
And tourism can itself be (voluntarily) co-opted into other commercial ventures in
order to enhance the market profile, commercial returns, or social legitimation of
that venture: trade expositions, shopping centres, and the rehabilitation of the
downtown areas of cities are examples we have already noted.
The commodification of such places (which is not confined to the specific sites
but may include the city, region, and country in which they are located) occurs in
the process by which the tourist production system incorporates them into its
products. Places are assimilated into the production of tourism commodities in two
ways. First, the industry contrives to impart (additional, enhanced) meaning to its
products by associating them with the attributes of the noncommercially created
(public goods) attractions which of necessity also means imparting meaning to
specific places and sites. Secondly, noncommercially created attractions, or non-
tourism derived commercial attractions, such as shopping centres, take on (new or
other) meanings by being associated or assimilated into a tourism product.
The primary mechanisms used in tourism production to impart these meanings
(apart from propinquity, as noted) are advertising, packaging, and market positioning.
The purpose is to persuade the consumer, the tourist, that by purchasing a particular
product (a stay at a certain hotel, visit to a destination, taking a tour), she or he will
receive more than the product itself is capable of delivering. Although this is standard
advertising practice, with tourism it implies 'selling' the features of particular places,
but in a way which is never designed to genuinely impart full meaning and
understanding, which typically would be impractical (too long a stay might be
required), perhaps discomforting, or even subversive of prevailing myths and images.
For instance, in purchasing an inclusive tour to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Central
Australia, tourists buy the 'right', certainly the expectation, to experience the mystic
and spiritual qualities advertised as the essence of this place. And this 'right of
experience' includes not just the physical qualities of the monolith, or the connotations
of its location as virtually the geographic centre of the continent, but extends to
the native peoples as well, because the mystic of the Rock is inextricably bound up
with White Australia's notion of aboriginality and the social position of the Aborigines
at Uluru and in the wider society. Tourists expect to have an experience with the
local Aborigines, something intangible which they can take away with them. This
may simply be a confirmation of cultural or racial superiority, although hotel and
 Tourism, copitol, end ploco Am

tour advertising would put it more subtly, such as an experience of 'Stone Age*
culture. The highly publicised and politically charged return of Uluni to its
Aborigine owners has strengthened the Rock as a tourist attraction as it is now
more than ever a manifestly sacred and mystical site to Aborigines* By having
contact with Aborigines as tour guides, park rangers, artisans, or simply as part of
the backdrop to the monolith, the tourist experience is more 'meaningful' and
'authentic'. There is little pretence, however, that the transitory experience is
remotely capable of breaking down myths, misconceptions, and prejudices held by
White Australia about Aborigines (Fiske et al, 1987), Tourism has in fact been
interpreted as a mechanism of internal colonialism as far as 'fourth world* peoples
like the Aborigine, Maori, Innuit, and Indian are concerned (Crick, 1989).
Places, therefore, are marketed as desirable products: not necessarily as ends in
themselves, but because visits to them, and the seeking of anticipated signs and
symbols, are a vehicle for experiences which are to be collected, consumed, and
compared. Tourists arc 'armies of semiotics' for whom the identification and
collection of signs are 'proof that experiences have been realised (Culler, 1981).
Whether this search accords with conventional idealised rationalisations for the
encouragement of tourism is another matter: it is claimed that tourism broadens
the mind, breaks down ignorance of other cultures, and so on. This is unlikely, if
at all, to be the case (Crick, 1989; MacCanncll, L989). Places are not marketed
by capitalist enterprises with these intentions in mind, although they may be part of
advertising campaigns run by state-funded national tourism organisations. Rather, the
tourism production system 'sells' places in order to generate sales of the multitude
of services and material paraphernalia that is part of a tourist holiday. But there is
* more to such commercial transactions: what is being marketed is simultaneously
both the means to an end (an airplane seat or hotel bed) and the end itself—the
experience. In this respect tourism is merely following, is perhaps in the forefront
of, an important recent dynamic: the creation and marketing of experiences is
becoming increasingly an overt and conscious avenue of capitalist accumulation.
Tourists from modern capitalist societies have been socialised to think of many
social and material activities in terms of commodities to be consumed, discarded,
arid replaced. As implied above, tourists do not, and do not expect to, fully
understand or become familiar with a different place, culture, or peoples. They are
purchasing the intangible qualities of restoration, status, life-style signifier, release
from the constraints of everyday life, or conveniently packaged novelty. If this
interpretation is accurate, then it can be extended with Jameson's (1984) 'post
modernist' argument that one of the cultural characteristics of late-twentieth-century
capitalism is the integration of aesthetic production into commodity production
generally. Increasingly, sensations, feelings, perceptions, sensory stimulation, taste,
and style are being packaged and marketed in their own right, as well as indirectly
through tangible commodities. The logic of this process is that
"the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-
seeming goods ..., at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns essential
structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation"
(Jameson, 1984, page 56).
Certain outcomes arise from this process. Of interest is Jameson's notion of a
'waning effect'. On one hand, material and cultural objects, social activities, and
places, are commddified and transformed into images of themselves for consumption.
On the other hand, this transformation and consumption generates a 'flatness' where
depth of appreciation, understanding, and especially meaning, is replaced with a
"new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense": a loss of depth of feeling,
466 S Britton

meaning or understanding is compensated for with transitory exhilaration, glitter,

particular kinds of euphoria, and 'intensities' of feelings (Jameson, 1984, page 60).
A waning effect is one consequence of this superficiality, as well as the compensatory
escalation of the search for new and perhaps more satisfying intensities. If we
substitute the term 'intensities' for 'experiences', then this interpretation of Jameson's
becomes a useful way of characterising aspects of the tourist production system.
Places, landscapes, and cultures proffered as experiences hold out the promise for
the 'postmodern' citizen and Feiffer's (1985) 'posttourist' of transitory fulfilment,
sensations, fleeting attainment of styles, and elevation or confirmation of tastes.
These developments are not without their own contradictions: the sensory threshold
of what constitutes novelty and an extraordinary experience is constantly escalating;
for the experience suppliers, the cultural arbiters of what is 'in', and for the buyer
the 'shelf-life' and derived satisfaction to be had from an activity steadily declines
in proportion to the number of competing products and experiences consumed;
and the more experiences consumers have had, the more discerning and sensitive
to authenticity they become (Urry, 1990).
A further contextual dimension to these 'postmodern' ideas comes from theorists
who alert us to the consciousness of individuals in modern society taking on an
evident spatiality. Western society is increasingly removed from one where hegemonic
cultural constructs and epistemologies encourage people to situate unconsciously
themselves with respect to past generations and the future (as is evident among, for
example, 'fourth world' native peoples assimilated into Western capitalist societies).
In contrast, according to Soja (1989), modern consciousness is constantly assailed
with simultaneity and juxtaposition. "Via the mass media, one knows a little bit
about a lot of things [and, we might add, a lot of places]" (Feiffer, 1985, page 260).
We are bombarded from all over the globe with a collage of images and snippets
of insight on different places, cultures, peoples, and histories. Culler (1981) argues,
paraphrasing MacCannell, that one way we make sense of this world of juxtaposed
images is as a series of touristic spectacles: viewing each society in terms of its
primary symbols. Because of this process, we have a heightened spatial consciousness,
even if this is not always recognised, derived from the flow of images and socio-
geographic cliches from electronic and printed information media. In such a context,
it would be no surprise that tourism, once the enabling technology was developed,
become a means (and commercial vehicle) for providing 'hands-on' geographic
experiences that we would otherwise be only vicariously aware of from television,
travel and life-style magazines, news, music, 'ethnic' foods, fantasy architecture,
vernacular clothing, handicrafts, and numerous other ways.
So far I have dwelt with the structural, economic, social, and cultural dimensions
of commodification inherent in the travel and tourism production system, a discussion
in which I have argued that tourism not only reflects the defining dynamics of
capitalist society and assimilates place and territory into those dynamics. I want
now to turn to more conventional geographic dimensions of how tourism, places,
and accumulation are integrated.

3 Tourism and territorial accumulation

Geographers have tended to treat elements of tourism and travel in isolation from
other spheres of social and economic life. By treating tourism almost solely as a
discrete economic subsystem, many revealing links have been missed between
tourism and other politically and theoretically important geographic issues which
demonstrate the wider role and position of tourism in capitalist accumulation. This
simple point can be demonstrated with two examples of how tourism can be regarded
as a central element of territorial competition and geographically uneven accumulation.
Tourism, capital, nntl ploco 46?

3.1 Tourism and economic restructuring

Hotels, community development, and territorial (especially intcrurban) competition
have long gone hand-in-hand. Raitz and Jones (1988) have shown that in the USA
the city hotel has historically been held by civic leaders, business, local residents,
and travellers alike as a symbol of community progress, achievement, economic
opportunity, and stability: an argument that has validity in the more recently
established white colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, When opening
up the frontier, one of the earliest acts of pioneers and speculators was, after the
purchase of land, to construct a hotel. Once built, the hotel became a trigger for
further development because it provided a base from which further construction,
land sales and enhancement of land values, and merchant trade could proceed.
Equally important, the existence of a hotel signalled confidence in the chosen
location and provided a competitive edge over rival sites seeking to attract settlers
and establish a stable economic base.
At a later stage of development in the 1800s and early 1900s, in the USA at
least, a new era and role of the city hotel evolved. In the larger urban centres
various pressures led to the transformation of the city tavern into the large 'grand*
hotel, an impressive and imposing architectural statement. Competition among cities
led urban leaders to utilise the grand hotel to make a statement about their city.
The large ornate central city hotel became a symbol of refinement and civility,
technological progress, and economic power; it became a prime mechanism for,
and manifestation of, intcrurban rivalry. The depression of the 1930s, and changing
requirements for suitable hotel sites (for example, space for car parking), and later
movement of many businesses and functions away from the central city and waterfront
areas, led to a decline in 'grand hotel' construction. Since the mid-1960s, however,
there has been a resurgence in the role of the downtown hotel. After decades of
capital flight from commercial business districts, and devalorisation of inner-city
neighbourhoods, a wave of downtown reconstruction programmes have put the role
of large 'international9 integrated hotel/convention-centre/retail-complex to the
forefront of a revitalised urban core, as epitomised by the Renaissance Centre in
Detroit and the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.
The reformulation by Raitz and Jones (1988) of the cultural and economic
meaning of hotels reminds us of the historical role that elements of what are now
categorised as part of the tourist industry, have for long been vital cornerstones and
embodiments of community construction, social representation of place, regional
accumulation, and territorial competition. We can extend this reinterpretation by
addressing one of the major concerns of contemporary economic geography, namely
the regional and industrial restructuring which has accompanied the persistent
economic crisis experienced throughout Western capitalism.
Capitalist countries have for the past fifteen years or more been reeling from the
twin economic forces of recession and restructuring. One of the consequences of
this upheaval has been dramatically heightened levels of economic competition
between territories, expressed most forcibly in the vociferous demands for more
punitive frontier-protection barriers against foreign imports, but also evident in
such developments as the spate of 'export processing zones', incentives offered by
governments to attract geographically mobile capital, the expansion of free-trade
agreements between neighbouring nation-states designed to create more competitive
and resilient economic units, and regional promotion campaigns. Much of the
economic stress over the last decades has originated in the manufacturing and land-
resource-based industries. Conversely, industries which have shown substantial
recent growth have been various services. Although tourism is a notoriously
volatile trade, it has been at the forefront not only of the rejuvenation of depressed
468 S Britton

national and regional economies, but has been a central instrument used by capital
and political managers to counter, and engage in, territorial competition.
Increasingly, the political management of towns and cities is framed in an
entrepreneurial ideology and directed at putting in place a 'favourable environment'
that will attract capital (Harvey, 1989). Conventionally this took the form of
subsidising industrial capital, but with the decline in average rates of profit in
manufacturing, and cutbacks of employment in many state institutions, civic
'boosterism' has refocused on enticing investment in commercial property, producer
services, corporate services, and leisure industries.
This is no accidental mix. The commercial control and strategic coordination of
capital investment is the pivot of economic power and profit generation. A substantial
proportion of this power lies with transnational corporations because of the sheer
quantity of resources and assets they command, the quality of proprietary property
they own, and their capacity to generate wealth. The location of their head and
regional offices result in a clustering of producer services supplying the sophisticated
needs of the corporates. In turn, the conjunction of corporate executives, professionals,
and skilled service and technical workers triggers demand for the range and quality
of consumption facilities commensurate with large salary packages, affluent life-styles,
and the self-imposed mantel of arbiters of consumer style.
To host such a complex has for long been the prerogative of the world's premier
cities—New York, London, Paris, and more recently Tokyo. The past few decades
have witnessed the widespread internationalisation of production and finance capital,
the growth of the transnational and global corporations, the integration of national
territories and deregulation of markets, and various contingent events (Thrift,
1986). These developments have resulted in both the increased mobility and
internationalisation of investment and the decentralising of corporate activities in
order to supervise far-flung commercial operations (Dicken, 1986). Consequently,
opportunities have arisen for favoured sites to capture a position in the global
command and coordination hierarchy of internationalised markets and corporations.
The good fortune of cities like Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dallas, Toronto,
and Frankfurt in securing such footholds, and the economic power and status that
is entailed, has provided incentive enough for political and commercial coalitions in
cities around the world to try and emulate their success.
Urban-region managers, in alliances with corporate, labour, and citizen groups
have been anxious to position their territory to attract this mix of corporate, services,
leisure, and consumption functions. Where this strategy has been taken, it has
coincided with, or been legitimated by, other vital issues of urban management: the
revitalisation of downtown areas in the face of competition from large suburban
shopping malls; how to compensate for the deindustrialisation resulting from
economic restructuring and recession; what to do with large inner-city transition
zones of derelict warehouses, ports, and factories rendered obsolete through changing
technology; or how to capitalise on the in-rush of discretionary income to the
gentrified central city neighbourhoods.
Not all cities can be successful in capturing a position in internationalised finance
and commodity markets, or be a regional centre for the operations of transnational
corporations. But they can try, as although the stakes may be high, the rewards
are substantial, even if it means inclusion only through the more peripheral rituals
and practices of business culture such as attracting conferences and conventions.
Whatever the circumstances or prospects of a particular city or region, it has
become obvious that tourism is a vital component of this process. The recent
writings of Harvey (1985; 1987; 1989), Logan and Molotch (1987), and Zukin (1990)
Tourism, capital, and plnco 469

provide a theoretical springboard from which tourism can be integrated into an

analysis of territorial competition and economic restructuring.
Harvey has suggested that one of the principal dimensions of interregional
competition has been over the spatial division of consumption, or competition for
position as centres of consumption (1985; 1988). Although argued in the context
of the internationalisation and structural reorientation of the capitalist economy,
Harvey stresses one other important element. Echoing Rojck, the Frankfurt School,
MacCannell, and Jameson, Harvey (1987) draws our attention to the idea of 'symbolic'
or 'cultural* capital. The concept was developed originally by Bourdtcu (1977; 1984),
and denotes the consumption and collection of commodities, social networks and
cultural values intended explicitly to demonstrate taste, style, and status. Harvey
extends the ideas of Bourdieu, and incorporates them into the analysts of the political
economy of regional economic restructuring and flexible accumulation. To counter
declining sales in mature and traditional Fordtst-organised product markets, to take
advantage of new flexible production technologies, and also to chase the considerable
spending power of the affluent middle classes, capital has begun to emphasise
product differentiation, the aesthetic qualities of material commodities, and to
proliferate services which embody the requirements of symbolic capital. The same
concept can be transferred to the realm of the built environment and public domain.
Economic recession has meant a heightened, pent up, desire of communities and
political managers for symbolic capital. At the same time urban regions compete
for command over symbolic capital.
From a different starting point, Logan and Molotch (1987) reach a complementary
conclusion, although from an eclectic theoretical position (which weakens their
explanatory power; sec Cox, 1989). Logan and Molotch argue that urban property
owners, especially large commercial property speculators and corporations, form
fluid and diverse coalitions and alliances among themselves, with residents, and
with political managers. These are undertaken to maintain and enhance the
exchange value of local property—in the form both of rents and of capital value.
As with Harvey's formulation, the alliances so assembled do so in ways designed
to promote the material interests of dominant factions of capital and to legitimate
prevailing ideological commitment to unfettered 'development' and accumulation as
conventionally expressed in property markets. This is achieved, or at least attempted,
through the political apparatus by co-opting or persuading politicians, planners,
and agencies of the local or regional state. When set in the context of territorial
competition and economic restructuring, these coalitions—or 'growth machines' as
Logon and Molotch call them—seek to capture, amongst other things, symbolic
capital and to build environments dedicated to attracting consumption, and so
support high property rents.
Zukin's (1990) focus is what she calls 'cultural capital'—that capital, especially
large-scale, which specialises and invests in 'culture industries': film, entertainment,
tourism, magazines, architecture, decor, and so on. Her thesis is that consumption-
biased complexes centred on 'culture industries' are remodelling not only investment
and consumption practices, but because of the necessity for spatial fixity and
embeddedness required to valorise any form of investment, circulating cultural
capital is creating new regional and international investment poles. Prototypes of
these landscapes and nodes of accumulation are Disney leisure parks and gentrified
inner-city residential and shopping precincts. One feature of late capitalism is the
emerging sociospatial organisation of consumption (pivoting around a production
nexus of entertainment industries, producer services, aesthetic production, and
commercial property) which is sustaining a rapidly expanding service economy that
generates consumption-biased (rather than demand-led) development. The spatial
470 S Britton

structuring of these new forms of investment both locates consumption (and its
attendant production apparatus, labour pools, and relations between culture
producers and consumers) in space, and localises specific features of an evolving
service-economy division of labour.
In some instances these cultural-capital-driven development complexes act to
transform existing built environments and their prevailing economic roles and
social relations, as is the case with inner-city gentrification, urban renewal projects,
and rehabilitation of old dockyards. New upper-middle classes and managerial -
professional occupational groups replace long-standing residents. The retail base is
transformed and complemented with outlets serving demand from buyers of art and
culture as well as tourists attracted by boutique shops and preserved architecture.
Property values soar and draw new rounds of investment. And proximate secondary
manufacturing and distribution activities give way to corporate and producer service
offices. In the end, the enhancement and rejuvenation of the architectural environment
in combination with the transformation of the social and economic milieux, creates
a coherent space of consumption which signals both the appropriation of that part
of the inner city by the upper-middle classes, and a particular interpretation of
what constitutes fashionable symbolic and cultural capital in the sense suggested by
Bourdieu (1977; 1984).
Other developments, however, may materially and profoundly create new
spatial arrangements, such as the greenfield sites for Disney's Disney World, or the
Edmonton Mall. Such land and capital intensive projects can produce new complexes
based around their own infrastructure requirements, clustering of allied enterprises
and work force residences, and often leading to intensive suburbanisation. What is
more, the landscapes so established under this type of development may be
characterised by contrived fantasy architecture, hedonistic escapist leisure activities,
controlled behaviour and consciousness, and planned communities—in other words,
social engineering of a particular type of consumption space targeted at specific
groups, particularly tourists.
Zukin (1990) also makes the point that the significance of such spaces, created
by 'cultural capital' and predicated in part on tourist expenditure, is their ability to
increase the value of investment capital, as the consumption upon which they are
based is somewhat immune, or countercyclical, to the usual property and business
cycles. Such investments, that is the sale of cultural, symbolic, and entertainment
products, also enjoy an elasticity of demand that is clearly in excess of that
encountered with manufactured consumer goods.
What forms, then, does this symbolic and cultural capital take, and how is
tourism implicated? There are two central dimensions: (a) cities and regions
compete to project an image of offering innovative, exciting, and creative life-styles
and living environments; and (b) the construction of physical infrastructure and
built environments to attract and capture circulating discretionary expenditure and
investment. We can conflate these two dimensions then disaggregate them into
four forms.
1 Built environments. A catalogue of the built forms such competition takes would
include the construction, refurbishment, and promotion of: amusement and theme
parks, with Disneyland and Disney World being the archetypes (and now being
replicated around the world, such as Tokyo Disneyland and the US$4b Euro
Disneyland being built near Paris with massive subsidies from the French government
[Economist 1989); cultural centres and facilities, especially art galleries and museums;
convention centres and hotels to attract business-related consumption (for example,
the Sheraton and Hilton chains which specialise in business travel); casinos (Leiper,
1989); new and/or exciting shopping environments, notably glitzy arcades, indoor
Tourism, capital, and placo 471

shopping complexes, gentrified inner-city neighbourhoods with boutique shopping,

retirement communities, marinas, and produce and merchandise markets; sports
stadia; ethnic neighbourhoods with their specialised shopping (for example, the
ubiquitous 'Chinatowns* of Western cities); and built environments of recognised
historic or cultural interest and value (heritage buildings, preserved neighbourhoods,
landscapes of past epochs, centres of political decisionmaking),
2 Spectacles. Competition is equally fierce for major 'footloose* public spectacles,
hallmark events, and festivals, such as sporting contests (the Super Bowl, America's
Cup, Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games), trade expositions, and cultural events
(Hall, 1989). This is partly to cash in on the evident commercial returns to, and
profile of, certain cities which have been long-standing hosts to internationally
recognised events (the Melbourne Cup, royal pageantry in London, Munich's beer
festival, dragon canoe racing on Hong Kong Harbour, Chinese New Year festivals
in Singapore). In part these are also attempts to ensure the commercial viability of
costly investment projects. Although cities frequently fail in their bids to host events
of international or national stature, there is no end to local attempts at imitation to
demonstrate, however unconvincingly, that a city has something to offer that is
cither different from, or as good as, other cities, and is worthwhile for a visit to
experience the event (and spend money in the area while doing so).
Spectacles can be conceptualised quite explicitly as events to encourage
consumption. They are typically designed to attract not just local residents, but
domestic and especially international tourists. Trade expositions arc perhaps the
epitome of contrived attempts at meshing the pursuit of symbolic capital and
tourist spending. They arc consciously international in their purpose, orientation,
and promotion, and have a duration of many months. Ley and Olds (1988) have
aptly labeled trade expositions of the like held recently in Vancouver (1986),
Brisbane (1988), and New Orleans (1984) as "events of heroic consumption"
(page 191). Among the objective of these spectacles are the expansion of trade,
creation of an international image in the mind of the corporate community of a
location with suitable status and infrastructure from which to base corporate
operations, land development, tourism development, and downtown renewal.
And to connect with some of the arguments made earlier, trade expositions offer
"a further example of the ... growing intrusion of leisure and the aesthetic into the
urban landscape" (Ley and Olds, 1988, page 209), with their adult playgrounds,
exhibitions of fantasy, and caricatures of other cultures and places.
3 Property markets. With the huge reserves of money capital circulating the globe
in search of high-yielding and secure investments, there has been a surge in
international property speculation. Investment is simultaneously a symptom of
economic crisis and extension of commodity production (Davis, 1985; Gordon,
1988). Slumps in industrial profits, capital gains from securities markets, capital
flight from politically unstable markets (especially from southeast Asia to Pacific
Rim cities) have all meant a ready supply of investors prepared to invest in suitable
commercial, particularly downtown, properties. This has been made possible by a
series of enabling conditions: the deregulation of national markets and removal of
barriers to the cross-border mobility of capital; new forms of enterprises and
commercial devices assembled specifically to coordinate the financing, site search,
construction, and management of buildings; the internationalisation of commercial
real estate companies and construction consultancies capable of providing high-
quality service to discerning investors (Rimmer, 1988; Thrift, 1985); and the
creation of property investment trusts and provision for the unitisation of titles to
very costly buildings (for example, see the cases of Los Angeles and Vancouver:
World Property 1988b; 1988c; 1988d; 1988e). Commercial buildings have become
472 S Britton

a major international investment 'vehicle' in their own right. As commodity forms,

buildings are increasingly combining the qualities of exchange values, infusion of
aesthetic fashions (postmodern architecture), and symbolic capital for corporate
tenants and investors (owners) alike.
Hotels, tourist resorts, retirement communities, and marinas are recognised among
institutional, corporate, and smaller-property investors as a distinct segment of the
commercial property market. Downtown areas in rapidly growing cities and centres
of commerce are attractive sites for large and luxurious hotels catering to business
executives (World Property 1988f). Cities hosting world fairs, sporting events, and
spectacles will similarly attract hotel and resort investment, as will cities planning
major convention facilities (World Property, 1988a; 1988j). Hotels, marinas, and the
like are a special niche in the commercial property market because of their asset
specificity, low economies of scope, need for constant renovation to maintain
competitiveness as an investment asset, and volatility of tourist flows. Hospitality-
industry-related property, therefore, has a somewhat higher risk than office buildings,
and they require specialist knowledge to search, assess, manage, and promote them.
Nonetheless, this is a thriving sector of the property market. Australia's premier
resort area, the Gold Coast, is a classic example of the convergence of tourism,
retirement residents, conspicuous consumption, surplus Asian capital seeking
profitable investment, and property-driven territorial accumulation. Development
projects combine a precisely planned mix of shopping, marina, condominium,
hotel accommodation, sporting, and entertainment facilities designed to provide
countercyclical income streams. In 1988 there was Aus$2.5b of integrated resort
development underway, involving eleven separate projects on 2000 ha of land on
the Gold Coast (World Property 1988i).
4 Festival markets. Festival markets are a recent development in the integration
of tourism with consumption on a grand scale, and wholly manipulative in design.
Examples include Sydney's Darling Harbour (Huxley and Kerkin, 1988), the Edmonton
Mall (Shields, 1989), Toronto's Harbourside, Baltimore's Inner Harbour, and London's
Dockyards (Page, 1989), there are many others built or under development in
Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Barcelona, Seville, Rotterdam, Toledo, Long
Beach, Boston, and elsewhere. These are mixed shopping and entertainment
complexes of such scale they are not commercially viable in urban regions of less
than a million people (World Property 1988h). Even then, they are predicated on
attracting major tourist flows from a much more extensive national and international
hinterland. As Shields (1989) has documented for the Edmonton Mall, with its
825 shops and 15-acre funfair and fantasy landscapes, these festival markets are
blatant contrivances for competing with other territories and for boosting tourism.
In 1987 the Mall attracted 9.14 million tourists, putting it behind only Disneyland
and Disney World as North America's largest tourist magnets. But they are far more.
Festival markets are an amalgam of symbolic capital and spectacle combined
with a celebration of impulse shopping. These American Express Ghettos' are a
new form of 'liminal spaces' where people can participate, and be so seen to
participate, in the mass-consumption community (Shields, 1989). Part of their
appeal is the manner in which the act of buying and browsing (window shopping)
is connected with pleasure, leisure, and fantasy in a safe and controlled environment
(Harvey, 1987). Yet at the same time they are places where those unable to
consume are excluded, where there is strict security surveillance for 'inappropriate
behaviour', shopping and browsing behaviour is channelled and manipulated, and
ideological messages are pervasive. But they are also remarkably successful as
tourist attractions, although their commercial success is not so clear-cut (Shields,
1989; World Property 1988g).
Tourism, capital, and placo 473

None of the forms of touristic consumption spaces outlined here are mutually
exclusive, The mix of forms and contrivances, the combinations of tourism and non-
tourism capital involved, or the mix of private-sector and public-sector responsibility,
can take on almost infinite variety. There is no doubt, though, that the coalitions
which come together to develop these sorts of consumption spaces can be powerful
and influential not only at the political level, but also in terms of transforming the
arrangement and meaning of place. The illustration can be given of the current
proposal of Walt Disney Co to build Tort Disney', a US$2.3b waterfront resort at
Long Beach, 30 km south of Los Angeles {National Business Review 1990, syndicated
from Wall Street Journal), In this project, five hotels with 4000 rooms, theme
parks, aquariums, ferry services, marine research facilities, retail and entertainment
complexes, and public parkland are envisaged. It is estimated Tort Disney' will
attract 10 million visitors in its first year, As a bargaining ploy with the City of
Long Beach officials, Disney has let it be known it will site the project near its
Anaheim facility if the City does not agree to 'suitable financial arrangements1
involving the addition of two lanes to the Long Beach Freeway, up to 250 acres
of landfill, and major alterations to sewerage, natural gas reticulation, and other
infrastructure. City officials for their part wish to upgrade their sprawling naval
dockyard, shipping, and distribution centre with its relatively weak tax base, poor
shopping, and low-income population. If the venture goes ahead, it will transform
the material and social base of the region, incorporate it into an internationalised
leisure circuit, and completely alter the social meaning of place. For Disney, the
opportunity will arise to rectify a serious constraint to its image and accumulation
at Anaheim where, because it does not own the land surrounding Disneyland* it
cannot control the independent souvenir, fast food, transport, and accommodation
companies which have established themselves and which benefit financially from
visitors drawn to the theme park.
There is one other point that must be made in this section on tourism and
territorial competition. It must not be forgotten that tourism is as much a rural-
based activity as it is urban. Many of the circumstances which have triggered
the pursuit of free-spending tourists in economically battered cities have their
equivalents in the countryside.
3.2 Tourism and the rural economy
Small, often isolated communities with narrow land-resource-based economies can
suffer major trauma from prolonged depressed commodity prices, the closure of a
processing plant, or the depletion of an extractive resource. In such instances
tourism-related activities can provide a means of economic survival. At the regional
level, the designation of local natural (for example, national) parks has been a
common policy followed by the state to stimulate a revival in depressed (and often
politically strategic) areas, with all the attendant social contradictions and economic
ambiguities that are known to accompany tourism as an economic-base industry in
narrow, import-dependent, peripheral regional economies (Olwig and Olwig, 1979;
Overton, 1979). At the community and household level, handicrafts, cafes and
eating establishments, boarding houses, bed and breakfast accommodation, and
such like can all provide this survival function. But promotion of such activities
puts these communities in direct competition with others. And as typically low-
entry cost and undercapitalised ventures, where proprietors have little experience,
where effective marketing is financially unaffordable, and where reliance is largely
on passing trade, there is a high risk of failure. On the other hand, being largely
petty-commodity producers implies having cost structures, economic relations, and
motivations that, being based on familial and patriarchal relations, may facilitate
474 S Britton

their survival. In addition, as MacKenzie (1988) has shown, the sorts of tourism
activities established as economic responses to adversity can have profound social
repercussions, with the balance of social power and economic decisionmaking
shifting from the formal to the informal economy, from external work-sites to
home-based work-sites, and from activities dominated by men to activities dominated
by women.
There are other aspects of rural economic structure that are linked to tourism.
More than with urban tourism, rural tourist attractions and facilities are often
small-scale family-owned enterprises, as often as not run in conjunction with other
economic activities, notably farming. There have been some important studies by
anthropologists and sociologists on the production and gender relations, as well of
conflicts arising from the distortion and commodification of local social practices,
which accompany tourism in rural regions (for example, Bouquet and Winter, 1987;
Machlis and Burch, 1983; Smith, 1989; Vincent, 1980; 1987). From a geographic
perspective, we might note that the promotion of domestic tourism, and attraction
of overseas visitors where feasible, has become a commonly espoused panacea for
economic diversification and revival in peripheral provincial localities in advanced
capitalist countries (for example, Pearce, 1988).
Farm-tourism, in particular, has received attention as an increasingly important
interface between tourism and rural producers. The supplementing of agricultural
household or family incomes by offering accommodation and meals to tourists has
been documented in a number of contexts. Neate (1987) relates how, in the
Scilly Isles, farm-tourism sustains petty-commodity producer families in the face of
remnant feudal land-tenure practices which induce an intergenerational decline in
returns from agriculture and stifle farm investment. Catering for tourists is a
compatible activity because it synchronises with the seasonality of farm tasks, and
fits well with established gender divisions of labour. In Devon, mechanisation of
dairying led to the reduction of on-farm demand for women's labour. This provided
a 'vacuum' in which women moved into farm-tourism so as to maintain their
involvement in cash employment, while at the same time remaining available to
undertake domestic chores for the farm family (Bouquet, 1982; 1987). Because of
the supposed complimentarity of farming and tourism for the rural household, as
long as the former remains the dominant activity, the promotion of farm-tourism
becomes a central plank in the dual preservation of rural landscapes and economically
tenuous farming regions, with the added bonus that such a mix is considered
'environmentally friendly' (Winter, 1987). The European Community, for instance,
actively encourages farm-tourism in peripheral agricultural areas. It appears, however,
that one common feature of farm-tourism is that, because it is the economically
better-off land-owning families that take up this avenue of accumulation, the practice
widens rural income differentials and does little to alter the financial predicament
of poorer agricultural households (Bouquet, 1982; Hall, 1989; Lawrence, 1987;
Maude and Van Rest, 1985; Neate, 1987; Vogeler, 1975; Winter, 1987).
There are other issues embedded in rural tourism which we cannot explore in
depth here, but a hint of the richness of the field is revealed by Mormont (1983;
1987). His work is an account of land-use conflicts in rural Belgium among
bourgeois second homeowners, commercial campsite proprietors and their urban
working-class patrons, and village residents. Social clashes over rural tourism land
use is shown to be at one level a microcosm of class conflict between second home-
owners and campers, conflict between (rural) residents and (urban) tourists, and the
classic trade-off over promoting (locally based) rural economic development against
(nationally based) politics of landscape preservation. But at a more abstract level,
it is an illustration of rural social struggles and how actors use conflicts to legitimise
Tourism, copitol, ond ptnco 476

claims on how the countryside is not only used, but how it is integrated with urban
society. In other words, it is, echoing Lefebvre (1976), a microcosm of how tourism
ts part and parcel of the organisation of the social division of space; involving
debates on the ideology of the nature and use of rural space in national society.

4 Conclusion
Tourism, travel, recreation, and leisure activities arc a well-established subject of
study by geographers. Yet the literature produced by this tradition has been largely
ignored in contemporary geography journals with an emphasis on critical and
political economy perspectives. This is not surprising given the narrow scope and
shallow theoretical base of much work on tourism that has been undertaken in the
discipline. But to continue to dismiss the nature and practice of tourism because
of this legacy would be most unfortunate. In sketching alternative avenues for
investigating the role and position of tourism in capitalist society, an attempt has
been made here to show that tourism is a rewarding field of study for geographers,
when viewed critically. There has been no suggestion that this paper is a full or
comprehensive review. All I have done is to illustrate, with selected examples
drawn from diverse social science litcratttrcs, some of the possibilities open for the
investigation of tourism and their relevance to contemporary theoretical and political
concerns in geography.
The core of the argument presented is that the study of tourism assists us to
recognise how the social meaning and materiality of space and place is created
through the practice of tourism itself, and how these representations are then
incorporated into the accumulation process. "Places package pleasure", to take
Wardc's (1990, page 2) phrase out of context: the qualities and ambiance of places
and sites are a critical element in the selling of experiences and commodities and
the encouragement of consumption. Furthermore, 'the camera and tourism are two
of the uniquely modern ways of defining reality', and tourism is an 'intense case' of
how modern society orders relations between peoples and places (quoted in and
paraphrased from Crick, 1989, page 310). To understand how tourism is involved
in these processes we need a theorisation that explicitly recognises, and unveils,
tourism as a predominantly capitalistically organised activity driven by the inherent
and defining social dynamics of that system, with its attendant production, social, and
ideological relations. An analysis of how the tourism production system markets
and packages places and people is a lesson in the political economy of the social
construction of 'reality' and social construction of place, whether from the point of
view of visitors and host communities, tourism capital (and the 'culture industry'),
or the state—with its diverse involvement in the system. As a major, yet typically
unappreciated and unacknowledged, avenue of accumulation in the late twentieth
century, tourism is one of the most important elements in the shaping of popular
consciousness of places and in determining the creation of social images of those
places. Tourism is also a facet of an everchanging spatial organisation and political
economy of production and consumption, and as such is implicated in some of the
critical economic and political issues of current concern to geographers: the inter-
nationalisation of capital; industrial and regional restructuring; urban redevelopment;
the growth of the services economy; the transformation of rural economies; political
struggles over the social divison of space; and the creation of new 'postmodern'
and vernacular landscapes.
Acknowledgements. My thanks go to Richard Le Heron, Massey University, for insightful
comments he made on the draft and his encouragement for the project. I must also thank
Ron Hovarth of the University of Sydney who, unknowingly at the time, provided the
inspiration for this essay with his stimulating tour of central Sydney.
476 S Britton

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