Towards a better theory of tourism experience? A response to Gnoth and Matteucci

Citation

McCabe, S. (2014), "Towards a better theory of tourism experience? A response to Gnoth and Matteucci", International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCTHR-04-2014-0026

Towards a better theory of tourism experience? A response to Gnoth and Matteucci

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

The main proposition underlining Gnoth and Matteucci’s discussion piece is that despite an enormous effort to understand the nature and qualities of tourist experiences, theory building has stagnated due to an inability of tourism research to grapple with experiences as “lived”. While we have a relatively deep understanding of the motivations and outcomes of tourist experience, there is very little evidence we can point to regarding the experiential character of tourism. Because tourism is becoming a universal need particularly in developed, globalised economies, which appears to be strongly linked to well-being and self-development, tourism has the capacity to become a unique field of inquiry. Yet, this is incomplete without a more detailed and thorough examination of subjective experiences. In focusing on the behavioural perspective on experience, Gnoth and Matteucci develop a tourist experience model (TEM) that seeks to provide a framework to encapsulate all forms of experience types. The TEM is ambitious in this sense, and the authors present a compelling case; however, some clarifications and questions inevitably arise as a consequence of these lofty goals.

The main questions concerning the TEM model are that in positioning tourist experience solely within a behavioural perspective, we cannot embrace all the important psycho-social elements that influence behaviours. Second, in seeking to reduce all forms of tourist experience into essential archetypes, naturally a critical reader asks questions concerning the totality of experience-types covered. Third, Gnoth and Matteucci ground their analysis of tourist experience in relation to the situations in individuals' everyday lives. This is an important strand of tourist experience theorising; yet, in this reader’s opinion, the theoretical basis for locating tourism as a disjuncture from everyday life is questionable. Thus, the motives, goals and actions and activities that drive experiences underpinning the model come into question. Fourth, the authors present a detailed discussion of the types of experience drawing on a wealth of empirical research and theory on tourist experience that does not originate from the behaviouralist approach, but encompasses anthropological, sociological, postmodern theory and much more. One way of reading this is as a positive cross-disciplinary analysis, whereby findings from research in different disciplines are brought to bear on the problems identified in another. Indeed, in this author’s view, attempts at theory building in tourism have suffered from a lack of a cross-disciplinary approach, and for tourism in particular, a recurrent missed opportunity has been the lack of a more explicit and coherent attempt to bring sociological and psychological perspectives in closer alignment. Yet, the authors do not go far enough to clarify the scientific basis for transfer of knowledge from one disciplinary context to another.

However, these questions and criticisms are not an attempt to deny the important contribution of the authors for their attempt to critique the current theory in tourist experience. Their position piece adds some important theoretical ideas from behavioural perspectives, particularly existential phenomenology to develop theory on the tourist experience. For example, in positioning the tourist experience as a psychic system, which is characterised by autopoiesis, literally a self-maintaining system, Gnoth and Matteucci offer an interesting take on the reasons why tourists continually repeat behaviours. It is more complex than the simplified idea of customer learning and habit, and their thinking helps to understand the boundedness through which tourists seek unfamiliar or novel experiences. Thus, we cannot simply utilise a rational decision-making behaviour theory to understand tourist experience because tourists do not singularly evaluate destination features and attributes in isolation from their goals and perceptions of the activities in which they are engaged in the destination.

The TEM is developed on the basis that all tourism can be reducible to four archetypes of experiences: pure pleasure, rediscovery, existentially authentic exploration and a knowledge-seeking experience. The archetypes are based on two dimensions, the configuration of consciousness directed towards tourism experience and the types of the activity engaged in by tourists. Thus, tourism experience is a function of consciousness and activity. Repeatedly practiced forms of experience relate to “being”, whereby experiences are sought that are known and can bring equilibrium. This is related to familiarity-seeking behaviours, with novelty confined to variety. If the tourist undertakes repeated activities, but has an existentially authentic perceiving mind, then this leads to a rediscovery type of experience. This is related to familiarity seeking behaviours, with novelty confined to variety. If the tourist undertakes repeated activities but has an existentially authentic perceiving mind, then this leads to a re-discovery type of experience. These types of experiences are inner-directed, and the tourist is concerned with the “self”, including hedonistic, and self-gratifying goals. If, however, tourist experiences are “becoming” types, they are exploratory and involve learning. This might be incremental and applied from socially acquired norms to new environments (destinations), a knowledge-seeking experience or completely experimental, carrying experiencing into the existentially authentic realm of being in becoming a holistic experience.

However, the arguments then seem to become less clear. The extent that the authors clearly elucidate the differences between a behavioural perspective and that offered by existential phenomenology or sociology is limited, and so all types of empirical research from a broad range of directions is brought to bear on the discussion of how these archetypes relate to observed forms of tourist behaviour. The paper makes an important point in that we must try to find ways of recognising that tourist experiences are subjective processes, unfolding over time. Additionally, while Gnoth and Matteucci argue that emotion is fundamental to tourist experience, there is little sense of how the emotions are theoretically related to the experience as being or becoming. Researchers in the consumer psychology field of tourism studies are exploring new methods to explore and measure the links between emotion, destination choice and tourist experience (#B3; #B4; #B8). However, this critique focuses on the need to integrate sociological understandings of tourism into the psychological understandings. In this regard, the work of #B9 is central to the argument.

In The Phenomenology of the Social World, Schutz argues that it is only through subjective meanings that we can construct an objective world. Social phenomenology was concerned with how experience is constructed in the context of human action, the individual’s context and reality construction. By focusing on the special qualities of leisure time in tourism, we miss an important quality. Gnoth and Matteucci refer to the work of Kelly, who was writing on this nexus between the social and the individual. He argued that leisure, and by extension leisure tourism, is, first and foremost, a human action. As such, tourism is perceived as a state of consciousness. Consciousness consists of directed attention, information processing and meaning production (#B5, #B6). Kelly states human action is both existential and social, and thus tourism as a human action both contains and produces meaning. Tourism is motivated action, but the qualities of tourism ensure that not only are immediate sensory experiences implied but that motives are goal directed (#B11). It is in this sense that tourism has an existential dimension. Simultaneously, Kelly argues that leisure is profoundly social in both context and orientation. This is well understood in tourism in that tourist’s choices and behaviours are often linked to identity formation and maintenance, but they are essentially social, and so tourism is deeply culturally embedded and is a product of the social system. Leisure is socially determined, but just as the social system is a product of human action, social actors and experiences can influence leisure patterns in the society. Kelly argues:

Leisure, then, is best understood in a dialectical framework that includes both the existential and the social dimensions. Leisure is situated action. It is contextual but not determined, encultured but not static/it is not existential or social, but both. The relationship is not fixed, but dynamic (1989, p. 92).

Thus, focusing on the experience dimensions without the social context of the tourist or the social interactions which provide the tourist experience with its meaningfulness and facticity seems disingenuous.

I simply do not agree that tourism offers a unique sense of “differentness” to everyday life. As Dumazedier argues:

We should be mistrustful of any systematically established relationship between work and leisure. Such a relationship does sometimes exist, but sometimes it does not, or is of much less importance than other relationships (#B1, p. 528).

There are many ways in which people escape “pre-scripted” roles, going to the cinema, for example, offers a form of escape, as do video games, spiritual events or learning experiences (such as art classes, cookery courses, dancing, learning to play a musical instrument and so on). Perhaps the most common form of escape is through the use of intoxicants such as alcohol and recreational drugs. Martin Amis has said in a recent documentary that the English get drunk on holiday because they feel insecure around continental Europeans who are “much more sophisticated and advanced”. Writing as an English man, I can relate somewhat to this point of view. Most of our European neighbours speak more than one language, including English, and even at this basic level, English people can feel uneducated and uncultured in comparison.

However, Amis recognises that the culture of drinking in England is one that is far from as a response to the rigours of everyday life and simply a replication of culturally entrenched behaviour at home, starkly in evidence in every English town and city on any given weekend. Incidentally, Amis argues that we drink at home because we feel insecure about our position in the world “They drink to forget their glorious past, and reconcile themselves with their reduced present” (from Martin Amis’s England, BBC4 23/03/2014. Quoted from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10715753/England-according-to-Martin-Amis.html) Of course, this chimes well with Gnoth and Matteucci’s behaviouralist position that our actions are learned and routinely rolled out on holiday each year, but in this sense, the activities we participate in are less as a consequence of a need to escape everyday drudgery as individually, culturally and socially entrenched.

Another aspect of this question of the existential nature of tourist experience is that of the irreducibility of tourism with an escape from everyday identity positions. While the role theory (#B2) offers a very useful theoretical framework for understanding how we present ourselves to others in social situations, identity positions are simply not that fluid for most normal (i.e. socially and psychologically well-adjusted) people. Personality and attitudes are perhaps much less malleable than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. We may use holiday tourism as opportunities to introduce some “fine tuning” to our identities, but it seems less likely that they can be shaped by a two-week break in Ibiza, even if it did entail a lot of Yoga! However, the recent work in the field of social tourism has indicated that even a modest domestic holiday can bring life-changing transformations for people in difficult situations and very low levels of tourism experience (#B7).

Furthermore, there seem to be more deeply rooted factors why tourism cannot be considered an escape from everyday life. This is because of an innate desire to follow in the footsteps of significant other people in either a historical context or amongst our peers. This is what #B10 calls metempyschotic tourism. Metempsychosis refers to the routine and pervasive repetition at the heart of all tourism. Derived from sociological and anthropological theory, Seaton argues that metempsychosis is an “ideological dynamic, driving and structuring the behaviour of tourists” (2002, p. 136). Seaton develops his discussion around four theoretical positions on metempsychotic persona and repeated journeys. Ritual repetition in tourism can be seen as archaic sacred ritual, as “the final fate of modern man doomed to find that all apparent novelty is eternal recurrence” (#B10, p. 150) as inescapable because the tourism industry reproduces semiotic language of tourism experience in their produces and marketing and as interpellated through pre-constructed repertoires, roles that tourists adopt. Seaton argues that tourism discourse is most often built around a “paradoxical promise of novelty and discovery within the parameters of the already valorized and authenticated” (#B10, p. 138).

Thus, repetition is ingrained throughout all tourist experience and in part therefore not determined by the conscious mind. Ritual repetition is:

[…] an embedded structural force in all tourism […] all tourist behaviour is activated, constructed and enabled fundamentally as repetitive imitation of historical role models that are multiple, implicit and unconsciously adopted. (2002, p. 138)

Seaton proposes that there are 12 archetypal personae that can represent all forms of tourist experience. While not necessarily agreeing with Seaton’s typology, the point is that sociological and anthropological theorising can also powerfully contrast the behavioural rationale for repetition in tourism behaviour and not based on theory of mind and action. The behavioural perspective is also limited by the expectation that theory in psychology will lead or lend itself to deductive reasoning.

Gnoth and Matteucci provide an interesting and informative phenomenological basis for advancing theory on tourist experience. The TEM provides an important framework for understanding the behavioural perspective, and their efforts to explain types of experience as consciousness, human action and subjective process provide a theoretically driven and rigorous explanation. However, in casting the tourist experience as separate from the social and distinct from everyday life is an important omission. There is a need not simply to emphasise one perspective which has been overlooked in tourism, but to integrate theory and combine perspectives to generate more compelling theoretical assertions and which will then lead to a more convincing thrust for classification of tourism as a distinct field. In this author's opinion, however, tourism is more contextually unique than theoretically distinct as an area of human action. We need to press for tourism to be hailed as a unique and interesting context for all kinds of theoretical explanations.

Scott McCabe
Associate Professor in Tourism Management/Marketing and Head, Division of Marketing, Nottingham University Business School, Nottingham, UK

References

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Schutz, A. (1932 [1972]), The Phenomenology of the Social World, Northwestern University Press, Illinois.

Seaton, A.V. (2002), “Tourism as metempsychosis and metensomatosis: the personae of eternal recurrence”, in Dann, G.M.S. (Ed), The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, CABI, Wallingford, Oxon, pp. 135-168.

Sirgy, M.J. (2010), “Toward a quality-of-life theory of leisure travel satisfaction”, Journal of Travel Research, Vol. 49 No. 2, pp. 246-260.

About the author

Scott McCabe is Associate Professor in Tourism Management/Marketing at Nottingham University Business School, where he is currently Head of the Marketing Division. Scott McCabe can be contacted at: mailto:scott.mccabe@nottingham.ac.uk