David Harrison has contributed to the academic study of tourism over the last 30 years. This book brings together a collection of his published material that reflects the role played by tourism in ‘development’, both in societies emerging from Western colonialism and in societies previously part of the Soviet system.
The overarching theme looks at how, promoted as a tool for development, tourism can lead to conflict between competing elites, but can also empower groups previously subject to constraint by traditional authorities. Tradition is intensely manipulatable and always reflects power relations. Such pressure on tradition is but one aspect of tourism’s wider social impacts. This includes changes in economic and social structure, which, for many, constitute social problems that need to be addressed. At the same time, ‘sustainability’, though apparently a worthy aim, can be a problematic concept, especially when applied to ‘traditional’ cultures, and may conflict with such ideals as egalitarianism.
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David Harrison has been Professor of Tourism at Middlesex University since 2014. Before then, he was Professor of Tourism at the University of the South Pacific (1996-1998 and 2008 to 2014) and similarly at London Metropolitan University (1998-2008). Since 1987, his research has concentrated on tourism in deveioping societies. He is is author of The Sociology of Modernisation and Development, (Routledge, 1988), and editor of numerous texts on tourism, including: Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, (Belhaven, 1992). Pacific Island Tourism (Cognizant 2003), The Politics of World Heritage ( with Michael Hitchcock, Channel View, 2005), Tourism and the Less Developed World, (cab International (l2001). More recently, he has edited Tourism in Pacific Islands (with Stephen Pratt, Routledge, 2015) and, with Richard Sharpley, Mass Tourism in a Small World (CAB International, 2017)