International Volunteer Tourism. Stephen Wearing

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       Commodification and the Tourism Industry

      The system of production within the tourism industry is now considered one of the world’s most powerful driving forces.

      Stear et al. (1988: 1) provide this definition of the tourism industry: ‘[a] collection of all collaborating firms and organizations which perform specific activities directed at satisfying leisure, pleasure and recreational needs. It includes only those firms that are purposefully performing specific production and marketing activities which are directed at the particular needs of tourists. To be a firm within the tourism industry the firm must have a vested interest in tourism [and] do things to cause tourism in terms of both its volume and its qualitative aspects.’

      Through mergers and concentrations, companies considered a part of the tourism industry have become agents of an interconnected network penetrating many sectors. The transnationals of tourism utilize strategies of capital internationalization in a system of tourist production that has evolved into network companies who operate globally (Coles & Hall, 2008). Decisions for whole regions or countries are made inside one company. This system aids the integration of regions and communities into the international whole as the host culture, society and identity become mass products when this form of tourism enters a country. These forms of international tourism are a powerful force in the universalization of culture and society. To accept it means not only the welcoming of foreign vacationers and their currency, but also means access to international planning, technology and finance, entering the world economy and approaching world modernity. One cannot understand volunteer tourism without this view of reality.

      Marketing articulates supply and demand within a market economy, and societies embracing international tourism are plunged into this international system. Unlike other industries, the ‘products’ of the tourist industry are a pastiche of formerly homogeneous elements amalgamated by advertising for tourist consumption. Combined symbiotically they include services (lodging, dining, transportation, recreation), culture (folklore, festivals and heritage) and less palpable things such as hospitality, ambience and ethnicity. International tourism promotion, aimed at economic development, requires every location to offer something unique. By this logic, each country or region must produce and publicize its unique identity, with each ‘new recognition’ signifying superiority. Widespread marketing research determines what this image should be, matching aspects of local identity with the desires of its potential clients. The seduction of identity defines the seductive attributes and crystallizes them in an advertising image such that even locals may eventually recognize themselves in it (Carpenter, 1973).

      Significantly here, it must be asked whether contemporary tourism offers an over-determined capitalist form of escape or a site of struggle and resistance. Is it folly in this respect to view tourist experience as paving the way towards self-realization or ‘consciousness raising?’ (Rojek, 1993: 212; McGehee & Norman, 2002). The separation of this problematic notion is fundamental to the conjunction of tourism and its commodification in the consideration of personal development as an element of alternative tourism. If the subject, ‘the self’, and ‘consciousness raising’ are themselves open to contrasting and changing interpretations, the opportunity may exist to move beyond consumerism, commodification and determinism in looking at volunteer tourism experiences.

      Mass tourism appears to operate efficiently in the market system, particularly where there are few or no regulations to infringe on operations. A range of authors suggest that this is leading to unacceptable impacts on social and cultural values in some developing countries thus threatening the sustainability of tourism itself (Butler, 1991; Lea, 1993; Robinson & Boniface, 1999; Archer et al., 2005; Holden, 2008). If the market system is seen as dominating the entire process of tourism, then all experiences may be predicated on this approach. However, if areas of difference can be identified, then the possibility exists for approaches to, and provision of, alternative forms of tourism and its attendant infrastructure to be explored.

      In a market system, economic principles provide the primary means of measurement and the organizational epistemologies, which orient and subtend the tourism system as a whole, despite varying regional differences in emphasis. In contrast, but operating necessarily within such a system, alternative forms of tourism reprioritize these operational principles. It is the conflict of interests engendered between these approaches that can often lead to a mutually exclusive operating environment. Fundamentally, tourism in the market economy uses and exploits natural resources as a means of profit accumulation in the commercialization of the human desire to travel.

      The arguments surrounding modernity suggest that in the capitalist society of the early 21st century, commodification of experience occurs to an overwhelming extent, and in this respect, the promise of obtaining intrinsically satisfying experiences habitually eludes us. Commodification, within this argument, constructs needs that are fundamental in a consumer society, relying on and constructing unsatisfied need in order to foster demand (Baudrillard, 1970; Giddens, 1991: 172; Wearing et al., 2005).

      Simmel’s insights into the modern metropolis illustrate this process. For Simmel (1978), the ‘metropolis’ is the epitome of industrialized society, characterized by a personality type, the division of labour through production and consumption, and dominated by monetary exchange. Human beings living within it are subjected to an increase in nervousness, requiring the development of psychological defence mechanisms to distance the shock experience of urban existence, including, for example, the encounters with innumerable persons in СКАЧАТЬ