tourism as status of leisure

---after reading "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure"

Without doubt, tourism is a very important phenomenon in contemporary life, whether from the point of view of economic significance, social, cultural and environmental influences, and the role it plays in the personal life. As its impact touches upon all the difference levels of the society - from the marco to the micro, and it involves a variety aspects of the world from transportation to international relationships, it is no surprise that this phenomenon has attracted research interests from a range of disciplines - sociology, psychology, geography, social psychology, economice - just name a few. And now, it also became one of the attractions for computation, since, you know, computing is supposed to be everywhere (Well, what do you think of the term "ubiquitous computing"). As a natural result, the definition and meaning of tourism, and its relationship with other concepts such as leisure are neccesary fuzzy and controversial.

The paper "Behavioral conceptualization of tourism and leisure" seeks conceptual clarification of tourism as well as leisure by examining the relationship between these two. By limiting its discussion around the behavioral aspects of these two areas, it focuses on the proposition that tourism might warrant "special status" within a leisure context.

As for leisure, this paper proposes that while there are different concepts of it, such as a work/non-work dichotomy, a state of being, state of mind and a multidimensional construct, one conceptual strand threads through all the above conceptualizations - that is "freedom". Also leisure is examined in relation to many aspects of life such as family life cycle, and Kelly has made an important contribution to characterize the multidimensional nature of leisure, from leisure "core", which involves relatively accessible, low cost, low effort, and often home-based activites, to a balance to "core", which require significant effort and are senstive to resource difficulties such as education and income. Conceptualizations of tourism are as varied as leisure. Smith states that tourism "does not have a real, objective, precise, and independent existence", but is "to a significant degree, whatever we decide it will be". It has been defined as an industry, tourists' behavior, as well as geographic tour from a "generating region" to a "destination area" via "transit routes". So the interdisciplinary nature of both tourism and leisure is acknowledged and to integrate a large number of perspectives into a highly complex framework is required for both fields of study.

Then this paper seeks common ground between these two fields at the level of individual behavior, especially from the demand side of the phenomena. Demand of travel has often been analyzed in terms of two sets of factors: travel facilitators that enable person to travel and travel motivators that help explain why people who are able to travel actually choose to do so. According to the paper, while it is mainly social economic factors that contribute to the former, the "pleasure" represents a motive for behavior. And this facilitator for travel has its parallel in Kelly's dialectic analysis of leisure. Thus at the behavioral level, there is room for the investigation of common social, economic, and political factors that may effect all forms of leisure behavior, including tourism. And in behavioral terms, there seems little neccesity to insist on a major distinction between tourism and leisure phenomena.

The paper also argues the distinct differences of social theoretical treatment of these two fields reult from iedological thrust of researches into these two areas - one is dominated by industry needs, profit, and development goals and another is from "welfare" concerns, not due to the "nature" of these two phenomena.

Finally, it suggests that a potential starting point for the behavioral synthesis of tourism and leisure is through conceptualizations of leisure that integrate into the context of everyday life. By developing such an approach, the relationships between leisure and tourism could than be clarified by progressive research into the way in which they affect and are affected by the process occuring along three planes, which are "life line", "family" and "work" respectively. At the same time, a further avenue of enquiry that could lead to the production of a more synthetic behavioral account of tourism and leisure would be to develop a "motivtional matrix" for all leisure. This matrix could in turn be connected to the ongoing development of an overall lifestyle in which various motivational needs are met through unique mixes of leisure, family, and work careers.