Discussing Tourism as a Rite of Passage: A New Fresh Paradigm in Tourism Research

Introduction

This chapter centers on themes I am not accustomed to discuss but are very important to the epistemological advance of the discipline, precisely in a moment where the epistemology of tourism enters in a serious crisis. Though I here am synthesizing my experience as author, reviewer and editor, no less true is that it situates as a complementary platform to expand the current understanding of tourism and its intersection in culture. Some decades back, J. Tribe holds the sway tourism-research was experiencing an irreversible fragmentation, which led investigations to shaky foundations. Besides, the flexibility of Academy respecting to the methodological borders of the discipline wreaked havoc to coordinate efforts in sharing a definition of tourism. This suggests that what tourism means or its evolving facets seem to be a matter of dispute to date. While academicians have advanced a lot in the study of tourism, they failed to construct an epistemological root of the discipline, which ushered their studies into a climate of indiscipline and conceptual dispersion (Tribe, 1997, 2006, 2010). In his seminal text, which is entitled the Scientifization of tourism, Jafar Jafari called the attention to the rise of a new knowledge-based platform in tourism fields, where any individual interpretation would set the pace to more objective evaluations not only based on empiricism, but in blazing the trail of other tourism-related researchers in the years to come. As Thirkettle & Korstanje put it, the struggle for emergent schools to monopolize and impose their own interpretations prompted a much deeper dispersion almost impossible to control. Instead of coordinating efforts to forge a more efficient and harmonized method, tourism-related scholars adopted transdisciplinarity as a vehicle towards scientific maturation. From its onset, applied-research in tourism has been influenced by a business-centered paradigm in which case, tourism was naively defined as an industry in lieu of an ancient social institution. Rather than achieving the desired results, studies focused on the needs of finding new segments (demand) to satisfy the needs of suppliers.