Tourism: Rethinking the Social Science of Mobility
By C. Michael Hall
Pearson Education
Distributed by Trans-Atlantic Publications Inc.
December 2004
ISBN: 9780582327894 
468 Pages, Illustrated
$92.50 Paper Original
Description
Tourism is a critical and cutting-edge introduction to the major issues surrounding the production and consumption of tourism and its associated effects for the 21st century. Tourism is presented as one of the key social science disciplines by which contemporary human mobility can be understood.
Issues are examined in terms of the key concepts of contemporary social and environmental studies, such as globalisation, localisation, identity, security and global environmental change. It also utilises the concept of mobility to provide a coherent framework for analysing the development, nature and issues surrounding this worldwide industry which is integral to many government’s regional development strategies.
Tourism helps provide an understanding of the contemporary forces shaping tourism and its study in a manner that connects the field to broader policy and scientific debate and which is approachable by students of tourism at all levels.
This core text is designed to meet the demands of tourism students for a more conceptual, innovative and critical examination of the discipline in the context of the wider economic, political, and social environment within which the phenomenon of tourism mobility occurs.
Contents1. Introduction: The Scope of Tourism Studies
2. Globalisation and Tourism: Production, Consumption and Identity
3. Tourism Mobilities: Systems, Spatial-interaction and the Space-time Prism of Mobility
4. Place Competition in the Global Economy
5. Governance and State Intervention
6. Developing Destinations
7. Urban Tourism: Development and Issues
8. Tourism in Rural and Peripheral Areas: Development and Issues
9. Coastal and Marine Tourism: Development and Issues
10. The Future of Tourism
11. Tourism, Politics and Security: The New Tourism Agenda?
12. Tourism and Global Environmental Change: Biosecurity and Climate Change
13. The Future of Tourism Studies
Features- Divided into a series of chapters covering fundamental areas of interest such as production and consumption, each chapter includes a short guide to further reading, relevant websites.
- Presents analytical as well as descriptive frameworks using a range of concepts and theoretical constructs to illustrate how tourists and tourism occurs in different places and spaces and how tourism mobility changes over time.
- International in scope, with case material from the developed world and less developed countries.
- The text is firmly rooted in providing an understanding of destination and firm-related tourism studies that is relevant to students of the business and public sector dimensions of tourism as well as those in the wider social sciences.
"Carefully designed and well structured... It provides a broad international introduction from a macro-level perspective to tourism development issues and the wider field of tourism studies."
"...its comprehensiveness and advice on further reading accompanied by discussion questions at the end of each chapter make it a valuable addition to reading lists for students, practitioners and policy makers in tourism and across the social sciences who want to examine tourism from a more conceptual, innovative and crtical aspect."
Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, v3 n3 2005