On trial: a phenomenological view of behavioural tourism research

Citation

Pearce, P. (2014), "On trial: a phenomenological view of behavioural tourism research", International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCTHR-03-2014-0025

On trial: a phenomenological view of behavioural tourism research

Article Type: Commentaries From: International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Volume 8, Issue 2

Opening remarks

The metaphor of a trial pervades this review and evaluation. The specific study being considered is that of #B3 “A phenomenological view of the behavioural tourism research literature IJCTHR, 8”. The structure of these proceedings follows the laying of a number of charges. The evidence for these academic misdemeanours is then presented. Following the traditions of an adversarial justice system, opposing counterviews are considered with the theme of mitigating circumstances permitted to be brought into any reconsideration. In conclusion section, the balance of probabilities is then reviewed and a decision on the accuracy of the charges made. Preliminary judicial remarks will then be offered in terms of a full pardon with an enhanced reputation for the defendants, or, as appropriate, directions for sentencing will be outlined. It is critical to state at the outset that the trial being conducted is conceived as occurring in a court of minor charges. The issues addressed are not matters of the highest academic misconduct such as plagiarism, falsely representing the work of others, or shallowness of conceptual and philosophical thought. Instead, the charges are accusations of the middle range, not entirely trivial but not likely to condemn the offenders and any co-conspirators to excessive or hard labour.

The charges can be outlined as follows. This trial seeks to establish that the work by Gnoth and Matteucci consistently uses obfuscating language. It further asserts that this language presents an impediment to the communication of meaning for a wide range of the intended audience. A second and third charge will be heard at the same time. The second is that the defendants neglect important parallel literature to their own concerns. In overlooking or failing to include this literature there will not be any implication that the defendants have done this out of a sense of hubris. The case for the second charge is that the author has simply omitted this material rather than implying a deliberate and intentional neglect of this relevant work. The third charge is directed at inadequate specification of the model which is the culmination of the defendants’ paper. It will be asserted that the model lacks roots and useful links for its further use.

Evidence from the public prosecutor

The case for obfuscating language and its attendant consequences rests on a sample of the available evidence. The issue of word use and terminology is central to this first charge. As a first point, in the article title the expression behavioural tourism research is used. We have to ask “what is this?” To what does this term actually refer? It is simple and straightforward to speak of tourist behaviour, an expression widely used to encompass both observable acts and associated or parallel internal mental processes. But behavioural tourism research is confusing. It tends to imply that somehow the research is behavioural and that it is tourism which is the subject of inquiry. But tourism is an expression widely used to mean the amalgam of government and industry forces shaping the context for tourist activity. The subsequent lines of work in the opening part of the article indicate that it is really the tourist, not tourism, which is an issue, and that the development of the ideas in the paper confirms that this work is not much about tourism, at least in any organizational sense. Worse still, the antiquated term behavioural brings into mind, for many, the tenets of behaviorism, the Watson–Skinner-inspired rejection of human mental processes, as suitable topics for research analysis. This is a very distant territory from the material presented and is akin to a 180-degree misdirection south if one were asked where is north.

Another instance may be cited as further evidence. There is an expression describing the working of “the tourist’s mind at a systems level”. The explanatory phrases elaborating on this terminology are

physical activity is of importance only in how it challenges the mind into becoming active. The systems level makes it possible to include all activities as isomorphous and differentiate all tourists’ experiencing at some fundamental qualities.

The communication circle for whom these sentences are constructed is presumably the world of graduate and senior scholars in tourism. As a test case, these sentences and the whole paragraph were shown to six academically bright graduate students and they were asked to explain what was being said. They struggled. The most common view was that the remarks referred to an abstract construction of elements of a systematic human consciousness rather like the old Freudian id ego, superego concept. Most agreed, perhaps taking the phrases too literally, that the mind is always active and monitoring that state may or may not have anything to do with the stimulus of a specific physical activity. This mini test is placed as evidence that it is difficult for this court to know what is meant by these phrases, and indeed whether the students are substantially correct or misled.

Further documentation on this charge of word abuse abounds. One more term will suffice in the time and space available for this courtroom-style adjudication. The term “role authentic experiencing” is introduced as a vital contrast to the term existential authentic experiencing. The charge here is that this is an overly verbose and elaborate construction. The term appears to describe routine behaviours which follow predictable scripts. Enacting everyday behaviours and the process of undertaking and thinking about those behaviours would appear to be all that is required. It is not clear that the meaning of authentic here is in line with the way the term is used in the expression existential authenticity.

The defendants are also charged with ignoring parallel literature. It is curious that a paper written about experiencing and experience does not grapple with the prior use of this term in tourism models and beyond that in business and management. The work of #B2 in the late 1970s is cited. Nevertheless, from the 1980s onwards, many tourism researchers have been considering the centrality of tourists’ experience to boost the fuller understanding of the phenomenon they study. #B4 made such points in The Holiday Makers, as did #B7 in The Ulysses Factor and #B10 in The Tourist Experience. All these books with this theme were quite widely read, while at even more popular level #B9 articulated the concept of the experience economy in the world of American and then global business. These Harvard-based authors followed their foray into the world of experiences with a subsequent business advice book on authenticity. None of this work is mentioned, not even in passing. Importantly, these bypassed traditions live on in the work by #B5 on The Tourist Experience and in the European work of #B1 as well as in further applied treatments of the components of experience proposed by #B11 and others.

The most obvious omission in all this work is the parallel and perhaps competing models of experience presented by Pine and Gilmore and built on Baerenholdt and colleagues and Schmitt’s work. The former identifies entertainment, educational, aesthetic and escapist components of experience, while the Schmitt derived work built by #B8 offers co-acting sensory, physical, relationship, cognitive and affective dimensions in an orchestra-linked analogy. It might have been useful if the work was acknowledged and its relationship to the present effort appraised.

The work also omits any kind of cross-national or cross-cultural references. There is abundant evidence that people from different places think differently and that the very structure of minds is a complex conditioning process (#B6). The defendants do use some cases from different circumstances, but the focus of their paper portrays a mental architecture describing a Western consciousness forged in a capitalist social world. For a phenomenological approach rich in emic understanding and context, this is a charge of neglect which will be impossible to counter.

The final charge is arguably the most serious. A claim is made that the proposed model identifies phases and developments, as well as strategies and heuristics that take the tourists’ potential travel career or self-development trajectories into consideration. This sounds appealing, but the model is a static four-cell depiction of the alignment of four tourist types along two dimensions. The dimensions are being–becoming and human being–person. The being–becoming axis is co-labelled activity, while the human being–person axis is also depicted as the consciousness axis. The evidence for an easy-to-use model or conceptualisation of what the defendants have in mind here is obscured by the further scattering of terms around the quadrants. The re-discover central grouping has written below it, consolidating, recreational, repetitive and self-directed. The diagonally opposed category of knowledge seeker has exploratory, extending other – directed above it. Possibly these terms are meant to be descriptions of the activity axis but they sit in the proposed space effectively also labelling the cells. A similar confusion applies to role authenticity which is nearest to egoistic pleasure seeker and existential authenticity which is adjacent to holist. The major distinction made in the paper between experiencing and the outcomes of experience appears to be merged in this diagram, and, extrapolating from the text, it appears that the axes describe the experiencing process and the groupings of outcomes. Researchers do not need to be ardent positivists to see that these terms and processes can be subject to a major charge – it is the charge of how to validate the constructed model. How do you think about, check, interpret, consensually validate with whatever methods and tools you care to choose the proposed processes and experience outcomes? The case for the prosecution rests.

The defendants’ counsel

The nub of these criticism is a travesty of academic boundary crossing. Let us consider the first set of points raised about language use. It can be submitted that writers in sociology and the philosophy of experience always write this way. Evidence from a text and topic linked to tourism study but not cited by the defendants can be considered. The book of interest is #B12 book Eclipse of the Self, which is concerned with portraying the development of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity. Zimmerman (1981:169) writes,

Heidegger moved towards his mature concept of authenticity as releasement in the process of developing his notion of the Augenblick. Releasement minimises the role played by individual will in becoming authentic and emphasizes instead that releasement from self-will is a gift.

This citation can be submitted as evidence that the defendants, like their sociological and philosophical colleagues, are writing in a style with neologisms and an European awareness of concepts and acceptable communication genres which lie outside the education of many tourism scholars, including the kinds of graduates used in the test case. If the work is confusing it is because the language and style are unfamiliar, and not because the language does not make sense.

The assertion that the defendants have ignored parallel literature is a misdirection of attention. It would be good to consider other cultures of course but the world is large, time is limited, life is short and it is not realistic to lay the charge of failure to consider the minds from those in the East and elsewhere. In a modest-length piece of work it is also not possible to include the extensive scholarly record which feeds contemporary issues. The charge is further weakened by the tourism literature which the defendants do cite, much of it favourably, as useful illustrations of the four-cell model. We can refer here to the work of Daniel on dance by, of Carr on gender differences and of Uriely and Wang on experience and authenticity. It can be further suggested that these authors build on the missing references and lines of thought highlighted by the prosecution.

For the charge that the model lacks precision and needs further elaboration to convince readers of its usefulness, there are two counterarguments. The work presented is an early attempt to clarify key concepts in a challenging field. It may not be the final definitive work and is therefore a useful interim step along the way. The second point of defence rests in asserting that a broadly conceived model offers opportunity and stimuli for others to test and enhance the work. Stimulating studies and research is a valuable goal and does not always need all component parts of a system to be fully described. In the world in which tourism and other academics work, there is a premium on new ideas and innovative approaches; they certainly are unlikely to be and do not always have to be complete solutions. The defendants’ counsel suggest that the adjudicating panel reject all the charges, and contrary to any residual negativity emanating from those charges, the defendants are awarded “damages” or at least given some public acclaim for progress on a difficult topic.

The court’s decision

After considerable deliberation, the court returns the verdict of guilty on the first charge and not guilty on the second and third accounts. In offering the guilty verdict on the issue of confusing language use, a lack of clarity of expression and the failure to communicate clearly with possible audiences, the decision is that there is not enough attention to the knowledge base and skills of a potentially wide range of readers. Individual topics could be introduced with a little more context and care, and the work could be checked with those less familiar with the specific sub-discipline terminology. The judgement is made that the ambiguity of some sections of the work will polarise contemporaries and graduate students, and only a few very experienced colleagues will benefit. The charges of ignoring previous work and parallel work are dismissed, as the case is made that they are indirectly incorporated and are, in some ways, directed more at category schemes to classify experience outcomes rather than attending to experiencing itself. The opportunities for cross-cultural extensions and for changes to the model are appealing opportunities rather than charges requiring condemnation. The court spent much time debating the value of the figure and the supportive text. The view was taken to let this instance pass and to warn the defendants that subsequent explication of this figure will be needed. Otherwise it is unlikely to be cited, applied and consulted. The saving argument was that it is novel and offers a stepping stone, possibly a marked point of departure, for stimulating other work. The case is closed, the defendants liberated from the burden of being exposed to this trial and they are encouraged to work with their critics to hasten the progress of holiday tourism research.

Philip Pearce
Philip Pearce is the Foundation Professor of Tourism at School of Business, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

References

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