Evolving Tourism Studies

According to the UNWTO, tourism can be defined as activities of people travelling to and staying in places outside their ordinary environment for not more than one consecutive year. They travel for several purposes such as for leisure and businesses, however not related to activities remunerated from the place their visits. The increasing concern on tourism studies in academic literature started as soon as the growth of the tourism industry after the Second World War. In the 70s, tourism has become an academic endeavor of researchers and scholars in various disciplines. It is a complicated event that happens among the society which is hard to define and understand. Even researchers had faced difficulties in defining the real meaning

Evolving tourism studies into a distinct discipline will help to encourage the growth of theories in tourism studies. Jovicic (1988) insist on creating “tourismology”, a distinct discipline of tourism as he believes the growth of theories in tourism has been hindered by the fragmentations occur in tourism studies which fails to clarify tourism as one entity. By emerging “tourismology”, tourism can be viewed as a composite phenomenon. Comic (1989) and Rogozinski (1985) agreed with the statements made by Jovicic (1988) by affirming the needs of studying tourism as a whole to avoid conflicts and disparity. However, there are also researchers who put their doubt on the evolutions of tourism studies into a distinct discipline (Dann, Nash and Pearce 1988; Jafari 1990; Pearce and Butler 1993; Witt, Brooke and Buckley 1991). They believe the needs of viewing one discipline from the perspective of the other which also known as a cross disciplinary approach that able to cope more on the conceptual and methodological difficulties in tourism studies. It is impossible to imagine tourism work as a single theoretical study because it should be encouraged to develop dynamically (Witt, Brooke and Buckley,

In tourism research, there are a few situations involving tourism which works in intradisciplinary. Sociology and social psychology is one of the perspectives that influencing the study of tourism in intradisciplinary perspectives. Dann and Cohen (1991) believes that there is no single sociology of tourism and considered this as an ongoing enterprise since there is no universally accepted approach in sociology. However they also found that most researchers tried to place tourism into three positions in sociology; which is sociology of migration, sociology of leisure and travel dimensions of tourism (Dan and Cohen, 1991). The problems in carrying sociology research is the difficulties to find suitable empirical methods and over-reliance (Gunter, 1987). Besides that, sociology studies usually overlapping with anthropology, a study about the origins and human cultures, which is also one of the conflicting disciplines in making tourism as a distinct disciplines. Anthropology is already well established now and using methodologies and theories of its own with the help of other disciplines (Nash and Smith 1991:31). Anthropology carries interpretive approach which is ethnography to study this discipline. Ethnography covers a systematic study and interpretations of human behavior, cultures and customs in their cultural and social