Robert Caruana
Introduction
Understanding tourism as a marketing process is a matter of perspective (Tribe 2009). A common, if not the common view, tends to think of marketing communications as information about attributes of the ‘tour product’ such as price, quality, luxury, location etc., which are integrated into tourism choices. In this psychological view of tourism (Mannell and Iso-Ahola 1987), the nature of marketing communications is information. The process is a cognitive one, based on stimulus and response. And the role of marketers herein is to channel the information to the correct tourist segment as effectively and effi ciently as possible. The key purpose of marketing communications is to connect to salient tourist motivations and enhance their propensity to choose between products, brands or destinations across the tourism market (Smith 1994).
Though evidently practical for marketers, this view of communications obscures certain assumptions about the nature of tourism as well as the role of tourists and marketers. How, for example, do tourists come to know what a certain category of tourism means in the fi rst instance? How are they able to establish one meaningful choice context from another? How do they come to an understanding of the very different social practices that one type of tourism (e.g.
luxury cruise) involves when compared to others (e.g. backpacker)? Is the only outcome of com-munications a marketing one – consumer choice – or are there wider social implications?
Attempting to answer some of these questions requires an alternative way of conceiving the nature and role of marketing communications. Adopting a discursive perspective (Dann 1996;
Matthews 2009) on tourism, this chapter illuminates the socially constitutive nature of commu-nications in tourism markets, the role of commucommu-nications in shaping knowledge for tourists and the role of marketers in mediating this process. The chapter will also give special consideration to how a discursive perspective illuminates relations of power between tourists, markets and other constituents represented in the ‘tourism product’ (Morgan and Pritchard 1998).
Tourism communications as a discourse
Central to the ideas discussed in this chapter is that discourse, as the purposive use of language in constituting social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Fairclough 1995), plays a key role in organizing the ways in which tourism can be interpreted as a social practice. At its core,
this perspective acknowledges a conceptual link between language, knowledge and social practices – of which tourism is one discursive domain. In a Foucauldian vein, how we know/
interpret/conceptualize social subjects (tourists) and social practices (tourism) is organized in discourse. Discourse is able to do this because it is more than just a technical device – i.e. it is not just a collection of words that carry practical instructions. Discourse carries, conceals and (re)constitutes socio-cultural and ideological conventions which frame not only how a certain social practice is organized but who is involved, what roles they can take up as well as what actions can be done by and to them. Taking marketing communications as constitutive of social knowledge about tourism raises a number of pertinent questions; how does tourism discourse
‘operate’ in marketing communications? Through what social mechanisms does this occur?
What role do marketers assume in this process? What are the (un)intended outcomes of this?
This chapter will attempt to engage with these questions, pointing to potential research agendas for tourism scholars. A sensible starting point is to consider marketing communications as a tourism discourse.
Marketing communications as tourism discourse
Tourism is not an a priori category. The form that tourism takes, how tourists conceptualize different types of holiday and how they interpret themselves as subjects of them, is fundamentally entangled in tourism discourse (Matthews 2009; Norton 1996). Tourism discourse doesn’t ‘refl ect’
this process. It is this process. It is actively constitutive of the possible types of tourism available, the spaces where it can (and can’t) occur, the categories of people who can (and can’t) take part and the kinds of relations through which tourism is practised. In this sense, marketing communications doesn’t merely point to the menu of available holiday choices. It is a social practice that plays an active, formative role in defi ning and mediating choices for tourists in the fi rst place. As Caruana and Crane (2008) illustrate, marketing communications actively construct, organize and manage ‘choice arenas’ for the tourist, providing socially meaningful forms of knowledge that helps tourists adopt identity-positions in the tourism market. So what exactly is discourse then? What discursive properties enable interpretations of tourism choice? And where does discourse occur?
It is probably best to think of discourse as the process of ‘meaning-making’ – or knowledge-construction – that occurs in tourism text(s). This conceptualizes marketing communications – not as fl ows of information but as a socially constituting ‘cultural text’. This textual process of meaning-making happens through the interaction of linguistic, discursive and socio-ideological practices (Fairclough 1995), in which tourists and marketers are both involved. At the linguistic level, we observe the role of formal textual features such as tourism metaphors, narratives, juxtapositions and myths (Johns and Clarke 2001) that make up the ‘texture’ of marketing communications. It is the operation of these textual features of tourism discourse that, in turn, organize discursive processes that create subjects (identities), practices and relations that might be adopted by tourists. Much of this dimension of discourse involves creating identity positions, practices and relationships that tourists can (dis)identify with (e.g. defi ning the category
‘independent traveller’ as someone who acts autonomously, engaging in tourist relations that appear authentic, whilst avoiding ostensibly ‘commercial’ ones). Finally, that tourism discourse contains socio-ideological features acknowledges that discourse doesn’t occur in isolation from wider social conventions.
Discourse doesn’t just appear either in an advert or in the tourist’s own mind. Crucially, the process of producing and interpreting tourism discourse is facilitated by its ‘interdiscursive’ nature (Fairclough 1995). Tourism discourse is woven into local tourism texts (e.g. travel guidebooks,
Tourism communications: discourse and power adverts etc.) from wider social discourses. These wider macro-social discourses (e.g. hedonism, nature, otherness, authenticity, autonomy, gender or independence) are drawn upon by marketers (and tourists alike) in the process of establishing tourist meaning/s in local texts. In this vein, Johns and Clarke’s (2001) study of boating holidays revealed how tourist narratives (linguistic), created ‘liberated’ identities (discursive), by drawing upon wider discourses (socio-ideological) that were re-worked into personal accounts of their holiday experiences:
The myths used by respondents in this study derive from popular and commonsense sources, but were sometimes intensely personal in their interpretation. They included forms from postmodern society, such as ‘nature’ ‘adventure’ and ‘good fun for adults and kids’, but also concepts such as ‘otherness’ and ‘activity’.
(Johns and Clarke 2001: 356) That the study involved the analysis of photographs as part of the tourist’s discourse, points to another core feature of this discursive view of marketing communications – the centrality of the text.
Marketing communications as a tourism text
Knowledge of tourism is produced, mediated and disseminated through texts. Texts, then, are the central subject of analysis (not the subjective minds of tourists, agents or marketers). Here, postcards, tourists’ diaries, travel fi ction, corporate as well as tourist-board adverts, brochures, photographs and websites are broadly conceived of as textual sites (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002;
Bhattacharyya 1997; Caruana et al. 2008; Caruana and Crane 2011; Markwick 2001; Salazar 2006; Urry 1990). Taken in their broadest sense, even tourists’ verbal accounts can be considered as texts in the sense that they utilize textual devices such as narratives, metaphors and myths (Johns and Clarke 2001) in rendering the holiday experience meaningful. Crucially, these texts are sites of cultural production and meaning-making, in which tourism is defi ned and created as a certain kind of social practice. In the context of this chapter then marketing communications are cultural texts that constitute the social meanings of tourism. The advertising campaigns of National Tourist Boards are littered with such cultural texts, attempting to infuse a given country with cultural meanings appealing to the international tourist imaginary (exotic, adventure, cultural, primitive, erotic, untouched etc.) (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002; Borgerson and Schroeder 2002).
Websites too are considered as texts in which cultural meanings create interpretations for specifi c market segments (Caruana and Crane 2008) whilst signifying differences between other segments. Texts not only produce cultural meanings but they are responsible for disseminating them throughout tourism markets and reinforcing, as well as transforming them, over time.
The dominant interpretation of tourism as freedom is the cumulative outcome of a history of tourism texts that have normalised tourism as the social practice of ‘being away’, ‘escape’ and
‘getting away from it all’. Of the most iconic tourism text – the postcard – Urry (1990) notes how they traditionally drew upon other popular discursive critiques of work, city life and economic labour. Postcards (re-)constructed work and city life as the negatively motivating
‘social toils’ to which beach holidays were presented as the fun, healthy and above all liberating tonic. These textually situated cultural meanings are rarely fi xed or uniform, highlighting the dynamic nature of discourse in texts. The meaning of freedom, for instance, has been found to vary across tourism markets, such that freedom is constructed for ‘hedonist tourists’ as avoiding work, for ‘independent travellers’ (‘backpackers’) as evading inauthentic, commercial tourists and for ‘ethical tourists’ as avoiding harmful tourism choices (Caruana and Crane 2011). In this sense
tourism texts can re-work discourses (e.g. on freedom) into specifi c local contexts refl ective of particular tourist groups that marketers want to communicate with. When we begin to think about tourism in this way, we acknowledge the ‘situatedness’ of tourism texts and the role of marketing communications in mediating potential interpretations of tourism practice through discourse.
‘Cultural brokers’ and the ‘situated text’
Earlier in this chapter it was noted that conceptualizing marketing communications as a dis-course had various implications, including, as discussed now, how we think about the role of marketers. A fundamental facet of discourse is that it produces intended or ideal interpretations for particular audiences (Fairclough 1995). More than just a text about tourism meanings, tourism texts are thus both ‘purposive’ and ‘situated’ – they are cultural repositories of meaning that are organized with a specifi c audience and ideal interpretation in mind. One tourist may produce a text (e.g. postcard or narrative) for interpretation by another tourist (Johns and Clarke 2001). A local guide may reproduce a text (e.g. about authenticity or tradition) for a foreign tourist to interpret (Salazar 2006). A tourist board or travel agent may produce a text for the international tourist (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002). That we consider marketing communications to be a kind of ‘situated text’ – produced to be read in a certain way by a particular audience – radically transforms our understanding of tourism marketers and the mediating role of their communications with tourists. More than just informing an audience about the attributes of a given tour product, marketers become infl uential cultural mediators over tourism knowledge and practice for that audience, rendering the ‘choice arena’ for a given tour product culturally relevant, plausible and desirable (Caruana and Crane 2008).
Thinking in line with Cheong and Miller (2000), it is thus possible to consider the role of tourism marketers as ‘cultural brokers’ (rather than product informers). This implies that marketers have some kind of authority in defi ning how, where, why and by whom tourism is practiced by tourists and others. Bhattacharyya (1997) evidenced how writers of the popular tourism publication Lonely Planet played a key role in mediating the ‘backpacker’ tourist’s interpretation of India, providing guidance on what subjects and objects are of value to the tourist, how tourists should interact with local communities and (of some controversy) how to behave as an
‘independent’ category of tourist: ‘In this regard, the analysis concludes that this guidebook serves a primary function as mediating tourists’ experiences in India in ways that reinforce both certain images of India and certain relationships with indigenous inhabitants’ (Bhattacharyya 1997: 371).
This implies that such forms of marketing communications are not just about where to go, what to see and do when on holiday, but, more fundamentally, how to go, how to see and do tourism, and indeed how to interact with other constituents of the tour product (guides, reps, local people, as well as other tourists). Travel writing, as a genre of tourism texts, becomes a powerful representational space for tourist knowledge of social practices and relationships (Santos and Rozier 2009). As an author of this tourist knowledge, marketing practitioners can (unwittingly) become powerful ‘cultural brokers’, authorizing legitimate social practices and relationships that tourists and others can have.
Crucially, this ‘cultural authority’ over tourist practices and relationships has impacts that extend beyond the creation of a particular travel ethos for the tourist to interpret. This brings us to the second major component of this chapter: considering the relations of power produced in tourism discourse. For as Bhattacharyya (1997: 388) goes on to show, in defi ning an ‘indepen-dent’ travel ethos for backpacker tourists, guidebooks represent local people in coercive practices and relations, often being ‘portrayed as a passive, non-participating, non-autonomous object
Tourism communications: discourse and power of observation . . . where their “unique human qualities and agency are not represented”’.
Consequently, whilst a discursive approach to marketing communications reveals how cultural knowledge is produced for tourism markets, it also illuminates how they are implicated in rela-tions of power between various constituents of the tour product. This suggests that marketing communications can be ‘read’ in ways that privilege certain tourism constituents (e.g. tourist) whilst marginalising, subverting or excluding others (e.g. workers or local communities), thus opening up tourism discourse to critical research agendas with a focus on power.
Tourism communications as a discourse of power
Notwithstanding the various conceptions in socio-political theory, it is necessary here to provide a summary outline of the notion of power and what this means for understanding marketing communications in tourism. In more ‘structuralist’ views, power has been thought of as a dialectic system of domination (e.g. Karl Marx), in which the choices and actions of one group are invariably limited by another dominant group within a hegemonic system. Here the system (e.g.
capital) subjects the individual to alienating forms of incarceration, fi xing them into positions of disempowerment that they cannot readily shake off (e.g. proletariat). In this view, power is seen as an omnipresent structural feature of social systems such as tourism markets, rendering marketing communications a social mechanism that refl ects an entrenched touristic system of control and domination. Other ‘post-structuralist’ views do not take power as a given, structural axis of ‘the system’ but as a process or ‘negotiated order’ of (dis)empowerment. In particular, the process of creating social identities, practices and relations for tourist interpretations is seen to allocate privileges, resources and freedoms to some agents that are denied to others (Thurot and Thurot 1983). Crucially, in this view, marketing communications is seen as a discursive process that transforms relations of power in the process of constructing tourism knowledge. In the remainder of this chapter, we will consider the role of marketing communications in the allocation of social identities, relations and practices through tourism discourse that has both enabling and ‘limiting effects’ for tourism constituents.
Norton (1996) shows how marketing communications represent an ideal version of Africa for the tourist – as exotic and primitive – but in quite restricted ways that distort and confi ne how tourists might otherwise interpret their relationships with cultural and natural entities:
Although the accounts of East Africa developed by tourists are rich in aesthetic detail compared with the archetypes promoted in tourism marketing, they are partial accounts which are unable to draw on discourses which are hidden from them, such as the history of civilisation and slavery in East Africa, economic and political differences between ethnic groups, and historical and contemporary struggles against the expropriation of park land.
(Norton 1996: 369) Thus, by augmenting knowledge of tourism, the discourse of marketing communications precipi-tates ‘masking effects’. By creating an ideal representation of a holiday and the identities and relations operating in it, other (perhaps more candid if less appealing) versions are hidden, restricted or altogether expunged from it. However, whilst marketing communications precipitates relations of power, it is not necessary to conclude that these are fi xed, absolute or immovable. Power is not (as in the Marxian view) unidirectional or totalizing. Under a broad discursive view, it is organized in ways that negotiate, but not dictate, relative power for agents to exercise certain choices. Tourists, locals and other constituents may contest, reject, negotiate and even transform the discourse of marketing communications (rather than enact it mechanistically!). In this sense it is better to speak
of marketing communications as a process of ‘discursive struggle’ (Livesey 2001) between various tourism agents represented in the discourse. In the remainder of this chapter we highlight two axial relationships that might prove fruitful for tourism researchers with critical research agendas:
relations of power between tourists–markets and between tourists–others.
Power in tourist–market relations
Of the research that has been undertaken in this area, there has tended to be a focus upon how tourism constrains others, principally local people, guides and the environment. This section considers the less frequently debated power relations to which the tourist is subjected. For, whilst Cheong and Miller (2000: 371) suggest power relations are ‘omnipresent in a tripartite system of tourists, locals, and brokers’, they note that the tourist is ‘frequently vulnerable’. To what, though, are they vulnerable and how does a discursive perspective on marketing communications help illuminate this ‘vulnerability’? In the context of the ideas forwarded in this chapter, two key, connected points can be illustrated here. Firstly, tourists themselves can be subjected to power relations, which though varied in source, often stem from the market and potentiate certain limiting effects on them. Secondly, in the process of constituting tourism knowledge, the discourse of marketing communications both contributes to and obscures these constraints.
As a social practice tourism is uniquely promoted as a form of freedom. Yet you only have to sit in a crowded airport, watch an episode of Holidays from Hell or read a travel magazine deriding the package tourist, locked away in their mainstream hotel, enclave or tour bus, to recognise that tourism is also a potentially constraining activity. Scholarly research is beginning to reveal a paradox between the liberatory, transcendental properties presented within the tourism view (gaze) and the potentially incarcerating and alienating realities hidden within (Bruner 1991; Caruana et al. 2008). An interesting case in point is the ‘Independent Traveller’.
As an icon of travel heroism, autonomy and adventure, this segment of the tourism market is often promoted as being one of the most liberating, least institutionalized, forms of tourism.
A whole range of travel texts from postcards to diaries to billboards and certainly guidebooks (e.g. Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Fodors, Footprints) will attest to this. However, whilst texts promoting this type of tourism often frame Independence in terms of freedom from institutional environments such as home, work and/or classically, from commercial tourists, they may conceal new forms of coercion for the tourist, ‘Though the backpackers repeatedly express a desire to distance themselves from fellow Israelis and from state-related organizations, they routinely follow similar itineraries during the trip, fi nd themselves in, or seek, the company of other Israelis, and spend a good deal of their time in Israeli “enclaves”’ (Noy 2004: 81).
Whilst ‘independent travel’ – like other forms – is promoted as a practice about shaking off institutional constraints, this suggests the mere substitution of one set of institutional constraints for another. It is not uncommon, according to Huxley (2005), to fi nd backpackers hanging out in ‘backpacker ghettos’ reproducing backpacker culture, visiting the same places, doing the same things and sharing the same commoditized cultural stories about their ‘off-the-beaten track’,
‘on-a-shoestring’ experiences. In sum, actual tourism realities deviate from tourism representa-tions of tourism discourse promoted through marketing communicarepresenta-tions. How though are these contradictions and constraints not problematic for the tourist?
Bruner (1991) points to a discrepancy between representations of tourism in discourse and the reality of the tourist experience:
Tourist discourse promises the tourist a total transformation of self, but the native is described as untouched by civilization and as frozen in time. The hypothesis here is that
Tourism communications: discourse and power despite these claims, the very opposite occurs in experience, that the tourist self is changed very little by the tour, while the consequences of tourism for the native self are profound.
(Bruner 1991: 238) Marketing communications can promote knowledge of tourism as radically self-transforming and liberating for the tourist, whilst simultaneously concealing its profound lack of it. This masking effect of tourism discourse is interpretively developed by Caruana et al. (2008) who perform a critical discourse analysis of the guidebook The Rough Guide to Spain. In their close reading of the text they identify three persistent themes of independent travel that the book communicates uniformly to the reader as ‘value for money’, ‘inaccessibility’ and ‘inauthenticity’.
The text promotes a powerful cultural myth of the Independent Travel identity as someone who assertively avoids inauthentic people and places, defi es inaccessible spaces and hunts for bargains.
They go on to argue that this myth of independence obscures the role of the guidebook (and by proxy the market) in engendering dependency upon it – i.e. as a ‘toolkit’ for how to be independent.
Thus tourism discourse present in marketing communications is capable of foregrounding a strongly autonomous perspective on tourism (for interpretation by tourists) whilst concealing the paradoxically mediating role of the market in facilitating this. This is not only relevant to the Independent Travel market.
Marketing communications both create and obscure power effects on tourists across different segments of the market, though according to Caruana and Crane (2011), these play out in different ways, take varied forms and are connected to specifi c contexts. For marketing communications promoting hedonistic tourism (they analyze a ‘Club 18–30 youth holiday’
brochure) the discourse foregrounds the tourist in a set of cultural practices that liberate them from coercive institutions of work and enable them to ‘party’ with other hedonists. Yet the view on hedonism promoted is very specifi c and is found to narrowly defi ne what hedonism means (sex), who is involved in it (only other ‘hedonic’ tourists) and importantly how it can be achieved (drinking in nightclubs or ‘playing’ by the swimming pool). Here marketing communications idealizes a version of hedonism as a basis for tourism knowledge which actively encourages (and even requires for its success) that the tourists gather only in prescribed places and subscribe to predefi ned modes of practice with other tourists. The potential content, location and mode of other forms of hedonism are largely closed-off from the tourist’s interpretation by the discourse.
How do these issues carry across to the question of power relations between tourists and others?
Power in tourist–other relations
In light of the centrality of ‘otherness’ to tourism (Cave 2005), it is no surprise that marketing communications infl uence relations of power between tourists and other constituents involved in the tour product. Urry (1990) argues that one feature of modern tourism markets, fuelled by the growing desire for authentication, is for the tourist gaze to increasingly fall onto the backstage lives of other people (workers, locals, families etc.). Tourists don’t just want to visit a destination; they want to immerse themselves in it as cultural participants in the lives and ways of others. The emergence of community, volunteer and cultural holidays, factory, plantation, ‘backwater’ tours and
‘homestays’ are refl ections of this more intimate encounter with others. As modern tourism markets continue moving in this way (from viewing to participating), the potentiality for relations of power is likely to intensify. This fi nal section outlines how marketing communications play an important representational as well as concealing role in shaping power relations in tourism discourse.
As a constituter of social knowledge about subjects and relations, discourse ‘hails to us’ as certain kinds of subjects (Parker 1998) to adopt certain practices and relationships with others.
For as Mellinger (1994: 756) points out, marketing communications enables subjects to be positioned in tourism discourse in different ways, creating negative representations of some subjects and empowered ones by others: ‘Analysis of these photographic images reveals that specifi c iconographic strategies were employed by postcard photographers to culturally inscribe black bodies with “Otherness.” . . . These images positioned black subjects in a racist regime of representation that constructed subjectivities for those depicted and identities for their viewers’
(Mellinger 1994: 756).
A similar observation is offered by Schroeder and Borgerson (2002: 578), who identify the role of marketing communications in constructing ‘the other’ within ‘typifi ed representations, especially those that are racist or sexist’. In later work they trace the historical construction of sexist categories in the marketing of Hawaii to North American tourists. Relations of power were organized within a ‘paradisal’ discourse used consistently in marketing communications about Hawaii.
Images invariably depicted young, beautiful, semi-naked indigenous females lying pensively (and always unaccompanied) on a beach. In many, but not all cases, the empowered subject is implied as the (viewing) young white American male, looking for romantic relationships with their submissive indigenous female subjects. Other images were more explicit, placing the intended viewer in the ‘paradisal’ images, perhaps holding a surf board or a local woman’s hand. Whilst marketing communications have the capacity to represent subjects and relations in a particular way within a (e.g. ‘paradisal’) discourse, they can also hide subjects and relations (especially those incongruous with the ideal image). Schroeder and Borgerson (2005) underline the importance of
‘absent subjects’ in this ‘paradisal’ discourse, such as the lack of children, elderly, families, local communities and crucially, Hawaiian males. They conclude that these absent subjects reinforced the tourist’s interpretation of the sexual availability of indigenous women and the economic and cultural disempowerment of (invisible) Hawaiian men as well as others (families etc.).
Much research into power in tourism–other relations tends to take wealth disparity and cultural distance as a proxy for power asymmetry, such that studies often favour investigations of rich ‘Western tourist’s’ and foreign ‘third world’ others. Power, though, is everywhere being shaped in a wide range of marketing communications, and often in the least obvious places.
Returning to Caruana and Crane’s (2011) study of tourism freedom, one of their case studies explores relations of power where ‘the other’ can equally be thought of as a tourist or even a working tour representative (i.e. not a classically ‘vulnerable’ indigenous population). Their case study of hedonistic tourism discourse (marketed in a brochure) observes the construction of a highly liberated self who, freed from the ‘slave-like’ incarceration of work, is able to engage in unencumbered sexual relationships with other ‘like-minded’ hedonists (other tourists). On one relational axis, the care-free, sexually-charged ethos promulgated in the brochure potentially disobliges tourists from moral responsibilities towards sexual partners, rendering other tourists vulnerable (e.g. to abuse, violence and/or sexual disease). The relations through which freedom is portrayed elevates one tourist’s sexual licence (freedom to have sex) over another’s liberty (freedom from sexual harm). On another relational axis, the ardent anti-work ethos that anchors the ‘hedonic myth’ co-opts tour reps into the sexualized relations being celebrated. The postures, expressions, clothing and activities of this (working) subject group are almost indistinguishable from the tourist subject, thus the interpretation ‘we’re all hedonists!’. Why, you might well ask, is this a problem? Despite being on low pay, short-term contracts and deployed in highly-charged emotional labour and tasked into humiliating ‘performances’ (e.g. ‘striptease’), tour reps, argue Caruana and Crane (2011), are the subject of a double-incarceration, required to act as ‘sexually available hedonists’ whilst also carrying the implicit tag of ‘enslaved worker’ so derided by the hedonist ethos. How though do these tensions and contradictions in tourist–other relations not destabilise the tourist’s interpretation?
Tourism communications: discourse and power By constructing a particular view of tourism with endorsed social practices, the idealized version, perhaps unwittingly and implicitly, comes to represent the version offered to the tourist’s interpretive repertoire. One depicted reality hides another. A place, event or people that becomes marked out as a sign of tourism interest becomes the subject of a fi xed, legitimate and eventually
‘normal view’; even to the extent that tourists are more engaged with the ‘paradisal reality’ of Hawaii than with the actual place itself. This ideal view, as a basis for the appropriation of the tourist’s cultural knowledge, potentially marginalizes other interpretations of a destination. As a result, marketing communications may construct a discourse of freedom and transcendence to represent a space where there is also coercion and constraint of others (Coles and Church 2007).
More than this though, items, events and subjects that don’t fi t the construction privileged in marketing communications are extricated (sometimes very explicitly) from the tourist’s gaze. In the texts employed by travel agent marketers, guidebooks, guides and even tourists themselves, certain subjects and relations are selectively edited out – being replaced by the idealized representation. Tourist boards, seeking to present their country’s touristic assets in the best possible light to an international tourist audience, may well (mis)represent subject relations in this way:
The relationships between the two cultures in New Zealand are represented as trouble free:
‘like two distinct wines, the cultures co-mingle while retaining their individual distinctive-ness’ (NZTB 1996:8). The reality of Maori as largely urbanized people suffering high levels of intergenerational unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates are carefully avoided by the contemporary tourism discourse.
(Ateljevic and Doorne 2002: 662) In this sense tourism discourses employed in marketing communications are only ever partial and incomplete representations (Norton 1996), whilst often claiming quite the opposite, i.e. to be an authority on how things really are (e.g. ‘see the real Spain’ or ‘meet authentic local people and their traditions’ etc.). Is misrepresenting subjects and relations the only issue here? Is the only outcome at issue here an interpretive one?
In the broad conception of discourse outlined here, there are important connections between the knowledge, identity and practice of tourism. In short, how a place comes to be commonly known, frames what kinds of subjects tourists can become in that space and accordingly, how they should act in the other’s regard. Thus the knowledge of tourism that is represented in a given tourism text has the capacity to infl uence how tourists then do things to/with/for/against others on holiday. Various authors have made this connection between tourism discourse and knowledge/practice. Revisiting Bhattacharyya (1997) above, the Indian travel guidebook infl uenced the traveller’s view of what is of value and signifi cance, what can and should be done and how travellers should interact in regard to local populations, to the extent that it places the traveller above important moral conventions and rules that local people are strongly subject to.
Thus marketing communications can place tourists above important socio-moral sanctions that would otherwise govern behaviour in those spaces – they can be amoralizing: ‘Engendered by spatial discourses, the dominant tourism culture is essentialized and marked as a neutral activity, hardly ever questioned, yet assumes a distinct set of values and expectations’ (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002: 663).
Discourse employed through marketing communications can be argued to disempower not only human others but ecological others too. As Johns and Clarke (2001) observe, tourists discursively construct emancipatory boating identities whilst readily overlooking the environ-mental destruction and water pollution caused by their ‘free roaming’ diesel boats. Once again,