And can I add that this is a very exciting time to be studying tourism. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Flickr have dramatically affected the way destinations are marketed and the way tourists engage with them. Photography, which has always been an important tourism practice since the mass availability of cameras in the 1940s and 1950s, has become an even more significant practice with the smart phone.

Online accommodation platforms such as AirBnB have dramatically impacted where tourists stay as well as imposing significant economic and social costs at some destinations such as New York, Venice, Barcelona and closer to home, at Byron Bay. And tourist consumption is significantly driven by ratings and reviews posted on TripAdvisor.

On top of these innovations, we also must recognise that tourism is implicated in rising carbon dioxide emissions and their effect on climate change, and in the creation of huge amounts of waste, particularly plastics, that are causing unimaginable ecological and social impacts at many destinations.

The tourism industry and, importantly, society, need smart, clever, imaginative, creative, respectful and analytical tourism graduates to help to address these significant challenges. Do you want to be part of the solution?

How are you going to study tourism in this unit?

Because we offer flexibility of study options at SCU, some of you will be studying this unit entirely online, others will be studying at one of our campus locations (Gold Coast, Lismore and Coffs Harbour), still others at the Hotel School, Sydney or Hotel School, Melbourne, and some of you are studying at Dalian University in China.

No matter where you study, however, you will have access to all the learning resources and support that you need to successfully complete this unit. Make sure you have read Turbocharge Your Learning which explains the learning resources for the unit.

Your local lecturer will also be a key resource for you. S/he will guide you through each topic, provide advice on assignments and help to facilitate discussions and debates.

Next up is the SCU Library. Explore the SCU Library website, perhaps start at the ‘New Users’ section. For those of you on campus, physically go to the campus library and explore. Book in for a library tour [sorry about the bad pun]. Much can be learnt by simply browsing the tourism collections (books and academic journals). Ask a librarian for help – that’s what they are there for.

This link will take you to the Library’s ‘Study’ page where there are further links to wonderful resources such as LibGuides and Referencing Guides. If you are an online student you will be interested also in this link. And of course you can access all manner of books and journal articles, DVDs and other resources either by visiting one of the campus libraries, or visiting the virtual library online. You will be able to access most academic journal articles and also many books online. If you are an online student, you can also borrow books and they will be delivered to you through the mail.

Finally, there’s one more really important set of resources that are freely available to you and will help you perform to the best of your ability. These are the fantastic Study Resources that SCU’s Academic Skills unit provides. So check out just what is available here. Spend some time having a look at the resources that are available.

Let’s start with the question: what is tourism?

Tourism as we currently understand it, involves travel between the place where someone lives (their origin) and the destination or destinations that they are travelling to, and back home again. Most, if not all, definitions of tourism include a minimum threshold of at least one night stay at the destination. So if someone from Lismore goes up to the Gold Coast to spend a day at Dreamworld and then returns back to Lismore the same day, they are not regarded as a tourist, but as a day-tripper.

So, we can see there is a spatial dimension to tourism: it requires movement of a person (tourist) from their origin to a destination and back again and there is a temporal dimension; that for someone to be a tourist they need to spend at least one night away from home.

But there is also a third dimension to the definition of tourism: and that relates to the reason for travel. Most of us when we imagine ‘tourism’ in our minds, think of leisure travel, travelling for leisure and pleasure. But we should also not forget that business tourism, that is, travelling for business such as meetings, conventions or conferences, is also an important form of tourism. So, there is a behavioural dimension to tourism.

But people who are nomadic peoples, moving in relation to food supply, aren’t tourists. People who are deployed as part of armed services aren’t tourists. Refugees and asylum seekers aren’t tourists. What about students on a study abroad program for 12 months? Are they tourists?

As a social scientist, I also recognise that the identity that people adopt as well as their lived experience is also important. So for example, my partner and I are originally from Newcastle, NSW. When we travel down to Newcastle and stay for a couple of nights and then return back to what is our current home of Larnook, near Lismore, we have satisfied the definition of being a tourist. But neither of us ‘feel’ like we are tourists when we return to Newcastle. Sure, we are no longer locals or residents, but we have such a familiarity and connection to the city that we feel part of it, and don’t feel like an ‘outsider’. So perhaps we need to accept that definitions such as the ones we use for tourism can be nuanced and destabilised.

Be sure that you understand the definition as given by your textbook on p. 3 as it is a more holistic definition than what I have provided above.

Tourism may be defined as the sum of the processes, activities, and outcomes arising from the relationships and the interactions among tourists, tourism suppliers, host governments, host communities, and surrounding environments that are involved in the attracting, transporting, hosting and management of tourists and other visitors.

So, we’ve now got a handle on the ‘Tourism’ part of the unit’s name, but what about the rest of the name:Theories and Practices … what does this mean?

Great question! What is a tourism theory and what are tourism practices? Well, remember you are just getting started on this, so let’s start at the beginning.

What does ‘theory’ mean?

I’m sure you have heard of ‘theory’ in a variety of contexts. If you studied piano or guitar then you would have studied music theory as well as practised the instrument by playing it. You’ve no doubt heard of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. And more than once you would have heard someone say, ‘I have a theory about why so and so doesn’t seem to like me’. Each of these examples uses the word ‘theory’ in a slightly different way.

So first point to make: theory is a word used in different contexts to mean slightly different things.

Underpinning our use of theory is the understanding that people are not robots that are continually reacting to stimuli with no prior understanding or knowledge. Instead, we are able to make observations of things that happen, and then work out patterns that can be seen in those observations and identify possible relationships that link these observations of phenomena. We have the ability to think; to cognitively process information that we obtain from our environment; to consider; to contemplate; to make sense of our experience. These are all activities that contribute to the act of ‘making theory’.

We also have the ability to create mental representations of reality (these are called abstractions or models) through our use of concepts. Concepts help us to think and understand. We can then make sense of the information that we have collected through thinking about that information in relation to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom that already exists. This is the basis of theory.

Theories are developed to understand how concepts interact with each other to produce some kind of social, economic, cultural, political or environmental (among many others), outcome or effect.

For our purposes we can understand a theory to be a proposition, statement or narrative that describes, explains and sometimes predicts a phenomenon.

Let me give you an example. One of the questions that the tourism industry is interested in is understanding better why people like to travel for pleasure. What motivates us to travel as tourists? Are we all motivated by the same things or are there differences? And are these differences based on things like our age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, educational background, etc.? (Market segmentation is based in part on those kinds of differences.) Academics studying tourism are also interested in the same question but for different reasons: tourism academics are interested in understanding human behaviour as it relates to tourism which helps to refine and build theory.

So a number of theories have been developed (based on the interpretation of data and other observations made in various research studies as well as our understandings of human behaviour more generally) that attempt to explain why people travel, to identify what the main factors are that underpin all recreational travel motivations. These theories of motivation attempt to explain the very fundamental reasons why it is that so many of us want to go on a holiday somewhere away from our home towns. We can also, in some cases, test the theory to see how well it ‘works’ for particular types of tourists. We will be exploring those theories in a few weeks’ time (Topic 4) when we investigate ‘tourists’ as a component of the tourism system.

OK, so what can we say now about tourism theory?

A tourism theory is a proposition that attempts to describe, explain, and perhaps predict some kind of tourism phenomenon. There are theories about tourist motivation. Theories about tourist satisfaction. Theories about how a tourist destination develops over time. Theories about what makes certain destinations more popular than others. Theories about the place of tourism in contemporary capitalist economies.

As a researcher, for instance, studying the motivations for women travelling, in the early stages of my research I would ask the question: so what do the various theories tell us about motivations for recreational travel generally, and can any of those theories adequately explain why women travel? Do our theoretical understandings of tourist motivations account for the particular factors that might constrain or enable women to travel as independent travellers?

An important point I want to make here is that theories are almost always in a state of flux – they are being tinkered with, challenged, and improved. They are not set in stone, never to change. Instead, as more research is conducted and more data analysed, our theoretical understandings also improve, and so the theory is modified or adjusted. Going back to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, biologists today know much more about the processes of evolution, helped along by advances in DNA analysis, than Darwin did of course, so they have been able to refine and nuance the theory. His basic proposition, though, that explained the origin of species, still remains.

And theories are rarely perfect, especially in the social sciences. People (and societies and cultures) are just too complex, they don’t always behave rationally, and historical, social and cultural factors can play a big part in human behaviour.

OK, so what are Models?

So far so good? Well, I’m going to add that as well as theories, we will also encounter models in this unit, as you will in probably every other unit you study.

A model, for our purposes, is a representation or depiction of reality, simplified, in order to help us to understand some kind of phenomenon, process or system.

Often times in tourism studies the models we use are depicted as a diagram which might consist of various boxes or circles with arrows connecting them. These arrows represent relationships between two or more elements of what it is the model is attempting to depict. Models can also use mathematical equations to represent reality as well, but in this unit, the models that we will be learning about will be the diagrammatic type.

So in a nutshell, models are simplifications of reality that help us to understand some kind of phenomenon. They are a useful learning device.

So now, the P word: Practices…

OK, so we are starting to get a handle on theories and models, but what is their relation to ‘practice’ and what does ‘practice’ mean in the tourism context?

‘Practice’ in our tourism context refers to the various professional and industry-related activities, actions, processes and behaviours that help the phenomenon of tourism to function. They range in scale from the way a wait-person serves a customer in a café (including what they wear as a uniform – yes, the way someone is uniformed is a kind of ‘industry practice’) through to the corporate behaviour of a 5 star resort or the decision-making carried out by a local government in relation to a proposed tourism development.

‘Practice’ also refers to all the behaviours that tourists engage in when they travel, such as decision-making, sightseeing, photography, dining out or, in some cases, making nuisances of themselves.

I’m hoping that you can see now that what this unit is aiming to do is to explore tourism from the perspective of various theories and models that have been developed that attempt to explain (and sometimes predict) tourism activity, behaviour and development and the ways in which these theories and models help to inform tourism practices or our understandings of them. Also, practice can feedback to theory and help to improve theory.

To go back to our wait-person’s approach to service in that café I mentioned earlier, there are theories that have been developed that explain what the elements of excellent service provision are; the best approaches to employ when serving customers; and what to do if something goes wrong. And we hope that these theories have formed the basis of the training that the wait-person has had. But that’s not always the case.

I don’t want you to think that there always is a lovely, close relationship between tourism theories, models and practices. The way the world – and tourism – works is far more complicated and complex than that. Too often, the research that tourism academics at universities undertake is not transferred to the industry very well, so the practices may not be very closely related to the most recent theoretical understandings that have been developed by researchers. University academics need to do a better job of communicating their research findings to the industry.

Actually, one way that this can be done – transferring new knowledge discovered by researchers into the broader community is through the fantastic online publication called The Conversation.

If you search for tourism you will find a couple of hundred, short (less than 900 words) and easy to read articles about aspects of (mostly) Australian tourism covering a range of very important topics including the impact of tourism on climate change and how to create a more sustainable tourism industry.

Can I suggest that you make use of The Conversation to help you on your tourism studies journey?

There can also be some scepticism from industry as well about academic theories which can be perceived as being too ‘unrealistic’ or ‘abstract’ or ‘airy-fairy’ and do not relate very well to their own experiences working in the industry. So there is often a tension between theory and practice, not just in tourism, but all kinds of areas: nursing and teaching, for example.

A word or two about academic disciplines and knowledge

When you think back to school, you studied various ‘subjects’: maths, English, biology, geography, history etc. Each of these subject areas was a coherent body of knowledge built around a set of related phenomena. In the case of biology you studied the living world of animals, plants and micro-organisms. In the case of English, you studied the English language: written and spoken. And here at SCU, you will be studying units that are also based on a syllabus that focuses on a particular phenomenon. In other words our educational system breaks knowledge up into coherent, systematic ‘chunks’ so we can concentrate on developing a deep understanding of each of these.

Underpinning each of these subjects you studied at school or are studying at University is what is called an ‘academic discipline’.

Academic disciplines are coherent branches of knowledge or fields of study that focus on particular phenomena and use their own set of theories and methods to discover new knowledge. For example, the discipline of psychology studies human behaviour; the discipline of economics studies economic systems; the discipline of geology studies the formation of rocks; the discipline of sociology studies human society.

There is some debate about whether tourism studies is a discipline in its own right or whether it is a ‘multi-disciplinary’ field of study. The approach that the textbook uses – and one which I tend to favour – is that tourism studies is a multi-disciplinary field of study utilising a range of disciplines such as psychology, economics, history, geography, sociology, anthropology and ecology to understand tourism behaviour and development. My own academic discipline is geography, although as a social scientist, I also draw upon sociology, history, cultural studies and anthropology, when I do my own research in the field of tourism.

Creating and communicating tourism knowledge

Now, how does the knowledge that you will be learning get discovered or developed? Where does all the knowledge come from that went into the development of the textbook? Who does the research that discovers the information that forms the theories that then becomes accepted knowledge?

Well, not surprisingly, much of this research comes from university-based academics who work in schools of business and tourism or in schools of geography, sociology and psychology among others. Tourism research is also carried out by government departments such as Tourism Research Australia as well as by tourism industry bodies such as The Tourism and Transport Forum and by independent consultants.

Can I boast a little here: the tourism research that is conducted here at SCU has been rated by the Australian Government’s Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) initiative as being ‘world-class’. All of the lecturers who you will have teaching tourism are actively undertaking and publishing their research.

These are a few of the books that tourism academics here at SCU have published in recent years:

Academics at universities undertake their research and then communicate the results and findings of their research to other researchers and also to the industry. They (or I should say we) do this by writing scholarly, academic articles which we then submit to appropriate academic journals where we hope that they will be published. It is important for you to understand that this is a process which involves the peer-review of that article before it is published, usually by two other researchers with extensive knowledge of the topic. It’s a similar process, actually, to when you submit an assignment for marking. Your work will be judged and assessed by the lecturer with considerable knowledge of the assessment and you will be given a mark.

When researchers submit their manuscript to a journal, it is also assessed, using a set of criteria, and then a decision is made as to whether or not the manuscript is deemed worthy of being published in the journal. The kind of criteria used includes: understanding of the relevant literature relating to the topic; suitability of the research aim and objectives; suitability of the research methods used; how the data were analysed; the interpretation of the results and the conclusions that are drawn. In most cases, the reviewers of the manuscript find problems with the manuscript and return it to the author so that they can improve it before it is then published. In quite a lot of cases the manuscript is rejected. Some journals have rejection rates of 60 or 70%.

So I explain all of this because this is a method – the peer review process – that although isn’t perfect, still provides a means of establishing whether or not a study meets the objective criteria used to determine its legitimacy or validity as new knowledge. And so while there can be debate about the findings of studies or criticisms of methodologies or assumptions made by a researcher, the articles that make it into academic journals have reached a certain (high) standard of legitimacy/validity. This is not the case for the vast majority of material that you might read online. There is usually no process that has been used to establish the legitimacy of what is posted – anybody can post anything online.

Always adopt a sceptical approach to information that has not been through some process of validation. Ask yourself: where is the evidence for the information that is being presented? Is the evidence trustworthy? How has it been obtained? Going back to the question I posed about the information used by the authors of your textbook, take a look at the list of References for each of the book’s chapters. Those lists of references present the sources of information that the authors of the textbook have used to write each chapter. Many of the chapters have more than 40 references. And of course sometimes those references will include published works by the two authors because they are themselves, active tourism researchers, publishing their research in the tourism journals. And that’s an excellent thing.

One of the things you will read about in the textbook is Professor Jafar Jafari’s Four Platforms of Tourism Knowledge. Professor Jafari is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of tourism social science and he established the very important tourism studies journal, Annals of Tourism Research, and was editor of the journal from 1973 until 2008.