Drawing from ethnographic work in five continents, this book demonstrates how different regimes of value in tourism can coexist, collide, and compete across a varied geographic terrain. Much theory in tourism economics defines 'value' as a measure of monetary worth, a concept governing commodity exchange, and a gauge for tourist satisfaction. The research included in this volume shows that tourism not only feeds off existing conceptions of value as a monetary category, but that it is also instrumental in reproducing and reinforcing those subjective, morally heightened, and highly intangible values that make tourism and the tourism economy a complex social, cultural, political, and psychological phenomenon. The book pushes the debate about the tourism economy beyond a simplistic understanding of producer-consumer relations, instead suggesting a refocus on the social, spatial, and temporal lags in tourism production, and the ensuing differentiated regimes of values.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.
About the Author: Émilie Crossley is a critical psychologist whose work explores tourist subjectivity from the perspective of psychosocial studies. She holds a PhD from Cardiff University, UK, and currently works at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. Her research interests include volunteer tourism, tourists' perceptions of poverty, spatialities of care, and longitudinal methods.
David Picard is an anthropologist working at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, with research interests in tourism and travel culture, hospitality, nature conservation, science & epistemology, and winemaking. He has led research projects in the Indian Ocean, Australia, Portugal and South America/Antarctica.
