Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
6.2 Modes of ordering
6.2.2 Cowboys, civil servant, visionaries and professionals
The examples of Langhout and ten Broeke in the above might suggest that tour operators have a particular way of doing and that all employ the same strategies to perform tourismscapes.
Historically seen, they indeed perform a role and employ strategies, as already set out by Thomas Cook. Tour operators play an important role in the performance of tourismscapes by creating passages,7 connections between the material and immaterial elements in the heterogeneous order that enable swift transportation (Peters 2003: 325).
Starting in 1841, the first major travel agent and tour operator – Thomas Cook – organized excursions by train, first to destinations in England and Scotland, then later to other European cities and eventually all around the world. Cook initiated innovations and developments that served to produce what we have called here tourismscapes. For example, Cook initiated organized travel overseas beginning with visits to Paris, Brussels and Cologne. Moreover, Cook was responsible for a number of important innovations. His innovations included:
… the provision in advance of tickets from different forms of transport or for transport in different countries; the supplying of guides and other material indicating appropriate sites and scenes to view; the initiation of conducted tours, first to Britain and then in Europe and finally worldwide;
the negotiation of block bookings and payment by a single bill for transportation and later for accommodation; the development of the railway coupon, paper tickets bound together so enabling passengers to book and pay for their entire journey in advance; the similar hotel coupon bought in advance in one’s own currency and accepted by establishments approved by Cook; the initiation of circular notes which were exchangeable at hotels, banks and ticket agents and were an ancestor of travellers’ cheques; the organization of luggage so that it was sent in advance and did not travel with the passenger across Europe; and the initiation of independent inclusive travel with an all-inclusive, modestly priced tariff and the itinerary organized in advanced. (Lash and Urry, 1994: 263).
So Cook prefigured today’s tour operators, and his visionary work even led Lash and Urry (1994: 261) to suggest that twentieth-century organized capitalism might be better described as
‘Cookism’ rather than ‘Fordism’ (see also Franklin, 2001; Appelman, 2004). Moreover, as Peters (2003: 324) argues, Cook was a ‘heterogeneous engineer’ building his contingent orders (trips) by interlocking railways and trains, hotels and restaurants, steamboats and harbours, travellers cheques and vouchers, as well as teetotalism and colonialist presuppositions. Similarly, Langhout and ten Broeke are heterogeneous engineers. However, as we have seen, their definitions of the situation, their subsequent practices and the way they interconnect to others (people and things) differ substantially.
These differences result not only from the way their modes of ordering ‘externally’ support other modes of ordering, but also from the way particular modes of ordering ‘internally’
co-Chapter 6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
perform. In other words, although at first sight an organization may have a single ‘culture’, as perhaps expressed in a ‘mission statement’ or in a less obvious way, in particular practices or the absence of them, a second look often reveals different views, interests and practices, even if they are based on shared assumptions of how things should work out. As Hirsch and Gellner (2001: 4) continue, despite a governing ethos, many organizations experience, at the same time, entrenched factional ‘warfare’ between constituent parts.
To exemplify this co-performance as well as warfare, I once again follow Law (1994; see also Bruin, 1997 and Ploeg, 2003). In ordering his book Organizing Modernity, John Law went to a single organization to investigate how different modes of ordering structure what goes on there.
Organizing, he suggested, depends partly on ordering things – words, but also materials, desks, paperwork, computer systems – in an entrepreneurial manner, but vision or charisma are equally important, as are vocation and even administration. These various modes of ordering include, exclude, depend on and combat one another’ (Mol and Law, 2002: 9). Following Law, one could argue that tour operators (but not only tour operators) consist of cowboys, civil servants, visionaries and professionals. Not that they are persons or personal attributes: they present strategies, different and often mutually conflicting principles and practices.
Enterprise (cowboys) tells stories about agency, which celebrates opportunism, pragmatism and performance and making pragmatic sense of all its components. Cowboys demand enterprising performances, pragmatism and successes. Enterprise tells of the need to scramble for resources and the need to perform these resources. It tells of competition, of the need to mount a performance that impresses those upon whom the enterprise depends (banks, shareholders, transport companies, hoteliers, etc.). In enterprise, people are practical. They make hard choices (see Law, 1994: 75 and 169), as for example ten Broeke did when he decided to defer further operations.
Talking with tour operators8 reveals stories of ‘small margins’, ‘fierce competition’ and having a ‘demanding job’, of processes of horizontal and vertical integration, and of intense negotiations with airlines and hotels about prices, conditions and allotments. As one respondent stated:
In the last couple of years increasing competition has considerably changed the rules of the game; price is the main instrument for competition. As a consequence we have to streamline our organization, take bold decisions, dismiss some staff members, negotiate hard with suppliers and – if possible – decrease the number of middle-men and agents.
Administration (civil servants) routinizes, picks over the details, worries about formalities, dilutes and diverts. It tells of and generates the perfectly well-regulated organization. It tells of people, files and machines which play allotted roles, it tells of hierarchical structures of offices with defined procedures of ordering exchanges between these offices; it tells of the organized and rational division of labour; and it tells of meticulous management as the art of planning, implementing, maintaining and policing that structure (ibid.: 77). The need for administration is clearly reflected in number of linkages a tour operator has with its suppliers. For example, a middle-sized Dutch tour operator with 26,000 clients reported that it has contacts and contracts with around 8,000 different accommodation owners.
Administration sustains itself in booking procedures, files, paperwork, vouchers, computer programs and travel organization schemes (TOSs). As one of the respondents recounted:
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119 We used to be a creative, innovative company. However, in order to cope with growth and complexity and to ‘canalise our lunacy’, at one time we decided to streamline our activities by filing all our travel products and schemes in a so-called TOS. It states exactly the sequences of actions to be followed in the process of selling and performing a trip and facilitated the workflow in the company. However, the TOS became an end in itself and a source of power for the bureaucrats in the company and hampered all innovations. If we wanted to quickly put a new product on the market, officialdom told us to wait until a TOS was produced.
So the TOS as a writing device, coordinating different actors, became inscribed with power and became a source of action. It indeed became an ‘acti-gramme’ (Callon, 2002: 1999). But in its absence it also became a source of inaction, as particular units within the company were unwilling to act in the absence of a TOS. And although the TOS has been replaced by more sophisticated computer systems with linked front and back offices, entering all the necessary data is still a specialized, time-consuming and complex task of ‘administration’, and administration and its devices, computer, booking and reservation systems generate obduracy as well as predictability.
Similarly, the half-yearly publication of the brochures configures the workflow in a tour operator and even the rhythm of product development and innovation. And as the printing, distribution and storage of brochures is expensive, every page in a brochure has to pay off, which leaves little room for experimentation. To overcome this rigidity, tour operators increasingly employ a mixture of strategies; obviously, more frequent use of the Internet, or a combination of an annual brochure (providing information about the destinations) and the Internet (providing specific information such as departure dates, prices and travel itineraries), as well as quarterly magazines containing the latest product news.
Vision (visionaries) tells of the charisma and grace, of the single-minded necessity, of the genius and transcendence (Law, 1994: 79) of the pioneers in Dutch tour operating, some of which still pull the strings. Vision tells of the way in which visionaries cut themselves off from mundane organizational matters, of the way in which practical matters are either immaterial or actively stand in the way. Vision is profoundly elitist (ibid.: 80) and can even take the form of exclusion.
Vision embodies and performs a difference in quality, a difference between those who are graced and those who are not (ibid.: 118).
Although vision in tourism does not come up to the mark, respondents report visionaries in the form of early adaptors of, for example, the Internet, like Langhout or FOX Travel; experiments with new ‘brands’ like Robinson; and of a director of a tour operator who took over the role of product development and took his family on a bike tour through France, and discovered that families on a biking holiday cover relatively short distances and like to be taken care of. Others
‘organize’ vision. For example, one tour operator invited a Belgian trend watcher to discuss the future, while another started a think-tank to develop a vision on the travel agents of the future:
TUI-NL came up with a plan for the future of travel agents and discerned three formats:
expert (like the ones we know now), express (for ticketing) and experience (combined leisure, travel, experience, information and documentation). The third variant was tested in a pilot in Amersfoort: ‘Central Station’. However, ideas were quickly overtaken by the introduction and diffusion of the Internet and Internet-based tour operators and travel agencies.
Chapter 6 Modes of ordering tourismscapes
Clearly, not only Thomas Cook but also Langhout and ten Broeke were inventive. All three, however, could not perform without enterprise or administration9. And all three are criticized for being creative in their own particular way. Cook was criticized by the London establishment, which initially depicted Cooks’ tourists as vandals, a vulgar mob, ‘mental patients’ or the ‘hordes of Cook’ (Peters, 2003: 92; Lash and Urry, 1994; 263). Ten Broeke got bad reviews for being too romantic; he was frequently accused of capitalizing on cheap sentiments by advocating his tours as ‘fair’ and ‘sustainable’ (Baaijens, 2000a), while Langhout is criticized for being too ‘pert’ and not being a member of the Netherlands Association of Travel Organizations (ANVR).
Vocation (professionals) tells about the proper character of certain kinds of work. The famous
‘Men from Cook’s’ (see Peters, 2003) – local employees who helped travellers to solve their problems – already exemplified the way in which vocation is an expression of embodied skills (Law, 1994: 81), of the tacit knowledge acquired during the course of a professional training at one of the numerous training institutes scattered all over the world, which comes to shape both perception and action. However, vocation also tells that book learning is important, but so too is hands-on experience, practice and tacit knowledge. As a respondent explained:
There is no training institute that can teach you how to get hold of accommodation. Buyers are bred in the company and have a lot of experience in the destinations. They are first and foremost negotiators.
So vocation also tells about personal skills, as in the case of John Kanafunzi, a local guide working in Tanzania for Multatuli Travel. Baaijens (2000b), who describes the last trip organized by Multatuli Travel to modules of the Cultural Tourism Programme, states that Kanafunzi:
… knows the Netherlands and the world of development cooperation and he is an important link between us and the people we meet on the road. It is not by accident that John is our guide;
Multatuli insists that a local guides every trip. And not just a local, but a strong personality, someone familiar with tourism and development cooperation. If such a person is not around, there will be no trip. (Baaijens, 2000b; author’s translation)
And although ‘professionalism’ in the tourism industry has been much debated, evidently all work is skilled in its own right. What eventually is sold by tour operators is a product of the ordering of vocational puzzle-solving, which is secured by the working of administration to make sure that the bills are issued and paid (Law, 2002: 5). Thus, tour operators are full of trained professionals:
product developers and managers, financial officers, marketers, tour guides, buyers, telephonists and the like.
Obviously, we cannot be sure that there are four modes of ordering in tour operators. Perhaps there are more or fewer, as the imputation of patterns of ordering to complex empirical circumstances is always defeasible (Law, 2001: 6; see also Law 1994: 87). But we can be sure about multiplicity, about the coexistence of different modes of ordering or different styles of justification which may overlap and interfere with one another and reveal partial connection (Mol and Law, 2002).
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For example, enterprise exerts pressure on vocation, as staff members are increasingly being held personally responsible for business results. Vision might inspire enterprise; enterprise or administration might impede creativity, but also channel creativity into a product that meets demand. Administration maintains professionalism and vice versa (see Law, 1994: 90). What is more, multiplicity allows continuity, which means that were a tour operator to depend on one mode of ordering alone, it would run the risk of annihilation. Vision, as we have seen in the above, needs to be backed up by administration and vocation if it is to guide ideas. Equally, administering requires vision in order not to expire.
Therefore, asking what a tour operator really ‘is’ does not help, as it is a network of different worlds and is full of places of ordering: bookkeeping, reservations, guiding, marketing, selling and buying, and managing the heterogeneity of ordering (ibid.: 43).
