Show description

And who has ownership of its representation and meaning? It will be argued that, for the greater part, the answers to these questions are found in the First World: in businesses, governments, transnational institutions, scholars, environmentalists and new socio-environmental organisations. Sustaining profits Arguably, global economic restructuring and development are the most pertinent factors in the study of globalisation. Indeed the motor behind global economic change is the need for the growth of capitalism – new opportunities, new markets and, for tourism, new destinations – in other words the imperative for sustained growth and profitability.

Post-Fordism provides one way of capturing the processes of global restructuring and the qualitative changes in the organisation of both production and consumption (Allen, 1992), changes which have been alluded to above and will be expanded upon below. The regime known as Fordism (taking its name from Henry Ford’s assembly lines making mass-produced cars) characterised the major capitalist economies for the best part of the twentieth century. It expresses how economies of scale are ensured by goods which are mass-produced and mass-consumed.

They also recognise the importance of Third World countries in these changes, arguing that ‘the development of “alternative tourism” in some developing countries’ (1994: 274) is a clear example of post-Fordist tourism. We will return to this argument in Chapter 4 in discussing the shape of new tourisms that have emerged. Others have argued that capitalism is undergoing such profound changes that there is a third industrial revolution underway built on the internet. Rifkin (2014) suggests that consumers are increasingly becoming producers –’prosumers’ as he refers to them – the tourist equivalent of undertaking a long journey, writing a travel book, setting up a travel web-site and supporting and guiding others on similar journeys.