Tourism Disciplines

Tourism is defined as the movement of individual from a place to another place for pleasure purposes. But this term is only been used on early 19th century (Smith 1989:17). On 20th century, tourism studies involve various ranges of disciplines. Jafari and Ritchie (1981) found that the five main academic disciplines in tourism research are economics, sociology, psychology, geography, and anthropology. The main disciplines present in 157 doctoral dissertations about tourism were found from a review by Jafari and Aaser (1988). Too many assumption arise among the tourism educators which is not relevant in study area of tourism (Pearce, 1993). Discussion among tourism scholars includes whether tourism should be studied as a distinct discipline

If not, arguments will rise in term of definitions, scope, and framework. Lacking of good frameworks and concept in tourism studies being noticed by other tourism scholars and they decided to not ratifying the development of tourism as a distinct discipline. According to Dann and friends, they claimed that tourism was found by the social science researcher in the early of 70’s. But it is still in a debate whether tourism will require unique conceptual or methodological difficulties (1988:2). Witt, Brooke, and Buckley (1991:164) state that tourism does not have any specific theoretical definition and the research will remain dynamic, variegated, and internally

Then the interdisciplinary issues that arise around these various disciplines must be explored. There are several dilemmas that have been debate by tourism scholars in tourism study. The intradisciplinary perspective could be highlighted into categories of discipline-based debates that could influence the study of tourism. Disciplines needs to be understood first because it has the effect of bounding and defining what aspects of tourism will be studied. Interdisciplinary isolation creates barriers for the development of a more holistic understanding of tourism. In order to deal with this challenge, philosophical and methodological debates within various disciplines need to be further discussed by the researchers and educators. As sociology and social psychology matter, it has significant challenges in theoretical and methodological combination. There are three arguments among the researchers trying to find out are the field as mention by Dann and Cohen (1991). First group they discuss for locating the sociology of tourism about the migration of sociology, second group about leisure of sociology, and the third group focusing on the travel dimensions of tourism. However, a major debate in social psychology between the experimental methodologies, executing surveys, fieldwork, and