Abstract
Using resolution-based dialectics, sustainable tourism is contextualized as an evolving synthesis arising from the need for the capitalist-based mass tourism thesis and the ethics-based alternative tourism antithesis to amalgamate because of internal contradictions that limit their contribution to development. That this synthesis is skewed to mass tourism is accounted for by the four alternative tourism contradictions of unrealistic and unrealized expectations, functional incompleteness, the growth implications of success, and nonreciprocal accommodation. Mass tourism, faced with a prime contradiction of self-destruction, is experiencing limited paradigm nudge characterized by the opportunistic adoption of practices that complement the dominant capitalist paradigm. Opportunities for expanding the ethical bridgehead in mass tourism created by adherence to corporate social responsibility policies derive from the integration of alternative tourism products within mass tourism destinations and itineraries, accompanying possibilities for transformational tourist learning, and the reassertion of indigenous rights. The desired outcome is termed “enlightened mass tourism.”
Introduction
The construct of sustainable tourism emerged during the early 1990s and has since become increasingly established as the dominant paradigm informing the planning and management of the contemporary global tourism sector. Paradoxically, beyond consensus on the basic rhetoric about improving quality of life for present and future generations as per the influential Brundtland Report (WCED 1987), details about definition, objectives, implementation and assessment of sustainable tourism and its parent construct, sustainable development, have remained contested (Hall 1998; Weaver 2006). This owes in part to the great diversity of destination and stakeholder settings, and the associated persistence of conflicting perceptions about sustainable tourism’s core identity as either profit-focused mass tourism or ethically based alternative tourism. Dialectical discourses that position these two modes of tourism as contrasting but potentially complementary ideal types, accordingly, can provide a useful framework for understanding, contextualizing and positively influencing the evolution of sustainable tourism by resolving these outstanding areas of contention.
Using a dialectical framework, this discussion paper contends that sustainable tourism is necessarily evolving as a synthesis of mass tourism and alternative tourism, and that this process is heavily skewed in favor of the former because of not just its greater gravitational pull but also to the more fundamental contradictions inherent in the latter. The dominance of mass tourism in this synthesis is regarded here as not just logical and probably inevitable but also desirable as long as “sustainable mass tourism” crystalizes into viable and credible “enlightened mass tourism.” It is argued that this crystallization depends on the integration of a meaningful ethical component, and that this integration in turn can be facilitated by the infiltration of alternative tourism impulses that would belie its asymmetrical contribution. The paper begins by outlining the dialectical approach and its presence in tourism discourses during both the presustainability (<1990) and sustainability (>1990) eras. The contradictions that underlie the relatively small contribution of alternative tourism to sustainable tourism synthesis are then presented, along with the adaptations experienced by mass tourism. Finally, the actual and potential contributions of alternative tourism are considered.
Dialectics
“Dialectics” can refer to formal schools of philosophical thought with their characteristic dogma and protocols (e.g. Hegel’s dialectical materialism), but also denote, as in this paper, a generic mode of reasoning that aspires to enlightenment through self-conscious and open critique. Such critique “asserts that the nature of being cannot be adequately accounted for only in terms of [the] ontology of presents and positives” but must also implicate absences and negativities (Botterill and Klemm 2005, p. 4). More transparently, dialectics describe how tension between two contrasting perspectives—usually positioned as a currently dominant thesis and an antithesis that challenges this thesis—is resolved through the gradual emergence of a hybrid synthesis which resolves the major contradictions that are innate to each perspective and fuel their collision. Critically for the present discussion, the synthesis is not necessarily a mathematical or “midway” compromise between the thesis and antithesis but ideally represents a higher-order reality that unequally absorbs, completes, and transcends its parent dualities (Carr 2000). The synthesis, over time, may itself congeal into a new conventional thesis that again invites a new antithesis as its own contradictions become apparent.
As a mode of reasoning, dialectics have been employed in fields as diverse as biological psychiatry (Petronis 2004), history (Degler 1987), law (Imwinkelried 1994), orthodontics (Moss 1997), and organizational behavior (Carr 2000). In the latter, constructively engaged dialectics are resolution based rather than conflict based, and consciously seek to distil and amalgamate the essential good in both thesis and antithesis. Accordingly, these dialectics are associated with the positive implications of radical innovation, nonlinear thinking, continual renewal and transformation, creative tension between opposites, and management frameworks that favor flexibility and tolerance over dogmatic lock-in effects and insularity (Carr 2000).
In dialectical reasoning, opposing views and their foundational assumptions are often positioned as “paradigms,” and Cohen (1973) makes a direct link between dialectics and paradigm shifts, which are products of sociocultural forces and not purely the periodic result of incremental scientific progress as Kuhn (1970) argued. Illustrating this connection between dialectics and paradigms is Grönroos (1994), who described the movement from the long taken-for-granted 4P marketing mix to relationship marketing as a paradigm shift. Both are contrasted as opposite ideal types, and alleged contradictions in the former are juxtaposed with the “resolutions” of the latter. Synthesis, notably, is recognized in the admission that the four Ps remain inherently useful and need to be integrated into the new relationship paradigm. The construct of paradigm is relevant to this discussion because it captures and implicates the broader worldview (e.g., capitalism or social justice) that envelops a particularity (e.g. tourism), thereby moving the debate beyond the particularity itself.
Sustainable Tourism Dialectics
Dialectical modes of reasoning have been applied explicitly but sparingly to contemporary tourism contexts. Murray and Graham (1997), for example, examine the interplay between “tourist” and “pilgrim” on a religious pilgrimage route in Spain, while Williams and Van Patten (2006) interrogate the inherent tensions between “home” (mobility) and “away” (rootedness) that are being blurred in an increasingly multicentered world. Dimensions of tourism exclusivity and inclusivity, and their resolution through synthesis, have been explored by Botterill and Klemm (2005), while the transformation of Japanese outbound tourists from organized mass tourists into free-and-independent travelers (FITS) has been framed as a dialectical process by Takai-Tokunaga (2007). Implicit dialectical engagement is more common, and illustrated by Weaver and Lawton (2002), who found that contrasting “hard” and “soft” ecotourism ideal types are reconciled symbiotically by “structured” ecotourists who attain maximum satisfaction by accessing hard ecotourism activities during the day (e.g., a long hike in the semi-wilderness) and soft ecotourism services and facilities at night (e.g., a gourmet dinner, massage, and comfortable bed). The implicit resolution here is that the latter restores the ecotourist for more “hard ecotourism” hiking the next day.
Presustainable tourism era <1990
The most obvious macro-level or paradigmatic dialectic in tourism, and the one most clearly imbued with broad sociocultural and ideological implications for destinations and stakeholders, positions mass tourism as thesis, alternative tourism as antithesis, and sustainable tourism as the emergent synthesis. Partial articulation of this dialectic is evident in the “platforms” of Jafari (2001), whose post–World War Two “advocacy platform” positioned mass tourism as a potent economic stimulant for peripheral destinations (Mings 1969). This perspective (or thesis) was mostly unchallenged until the early 1970s, when the attendant contradictions were identified in often virulently polemical ways (Britton 1982; Harrigan 1974; Turner and Ash 1975). The tourism area life cycle (TALC) model of Butler (1980) epitomizes this “cautionary platform” by highlighting what might be called the “prime contradiction” of laissez-faire mass tourism, that is, its tendency to breech the ecological, social, and economic carrying capacities of host destinations as it progressively degrades and devours the assets that fostered its initial success. The subsequent “adaptancy platform” of the early 1980s posited alternative tourism as an option allegedly better “adapted” to achieving positive outcomes for destinations because of its ethically imbued focus on empowering local communities (Dernoi 1981; Gonsalves 1987; Holden 1984). Because of alternative tourism’s ideological alignment with the cautionary perspective, it does not constitute a synthesis, but rather combines with the former to provide the antithesis of this contemporary tourism macro-narrative.
Butler (1992) and Weaver (1991), among others, adhere to dialectical reasoning if not format by positing alternative and mass tourism as polarized ideal types featuring paired contrasts such as small/large (scale), local/nonlocal (control), linkage/leakage (economic impact), allocentric/psychocentric (markets), and unique/generic (attractions). However, although Weaver (1991) explicitly speculates on the respective status of mass and alternative tourism as dialectical thesis and antithesis, the engagement here and in Butler’s (1992) more critical assessment evolves no further toward constructive synthesis. That initial critique of alternative tourism (elaborated below as specific contradictions), however, was instrumental—in conjunction with the Brundtland Report’s late 1980s popularization of “sustainable development”—in opening the way for the emergence of sustainable tourism as the missing though implicit synthesis.
Sustainable tourism era >1990
Mass and alternative tourism have long coexisted uneasily under the rubric of sustainable tourism, with the “sustainable” and “development” components of the parent construct already evoking contradictory impulses (Butler 1999). Some researchers accept both as legitimate if distinct manifestations. Hughes (1995), for example, distinguishes between “technical” and “ethical” approaches to sustainable tourism, while Hunter (1997) positions it as an adaptive paradigm with “weak” and “strong” manifestations respectively implicating highly modified and relatively undisturbed locales. Weaver (2000), similarly, situates “sustainable mass tourism” and “deliberate alternative tourism” as poles of a virtuous destination development continuum. Pro-poor tourism, a manifestation of sustainable tourism, is regarded by Harrison (2008) as compatible with either small-scale or large-scale tourism activity.
More sustainable tourism discourses, however, adhere essentially to one perspective or the other, co-opting sustainable tourism as a synonym for mass tourism or alternative tourism, respectively. Higgins-Desbiolles (2008), for example, equates sustainability with social justice through radical transformation and paradigm shift, alleging like Schilcher (2007) that options such as “fair trade tourism” and “pro-poor” tourism are partial, cynical, and misleading attempts at reform by mainstream tourism that ultimately reinforce the ideological and technical status quo. Many of those privileging mass tourism as sustainable tourism, however, emphasize the advantages conferred by scale, including influence over the supply chain and the ability to create specialized sustainability units, exploit sophisticated marketing channels, and generate sufficient output to rationalize activities such as recycling and on-site alternative energy production (Clarke 1997).
Less common are indications of synthesis. Gonsalves in the 1980s was foresighted in declaring that “the real test of these ‘alternatives’ will be their ability to influence mainstream tourism” (1987, pp. 11–12). Clarke (1997), though still regarding mass tourism and alternative tourism as “two interpretations,” noted an emerging pattern of convergence where progress toward sustainability is occurring “through the twin processes of further development of ideas inherent in their own interpretation and by adaptation of ideas found in the other” [italics added] (1997, p. 229). This was regarded as the then-most recent or fourth stage in the evolution of sustainable tourism, following (1) the positioning of mass tourism and alternative tourism as polar opposites, (2) their positioning as poles of a continuum, and (3) movement of mass tourism toward sustainability. Hardy, Beeton, and Pearson (2002), similarly, described sustainable tourism as a convergence between economic development and environmental conservation. Synthesis is more implicit still in Jafari (2001), who associated the sustainability era with a fourth or “knowledge-based” platform that positions tourism holistically as a single system in which the three earlier platforms all inform, in distinctive ways, its scientific analysis.
It is argued here that mass and alternative tourism are indeed converging out of necessity, but that the process is asymmetrical and heavily skewed toward mass tourism. Options affiliated with deliberate alternative tourism—that is, alternative tourism that is not simply the preregulatory exploration and involvement stages of the TALC (Weaver 2000)—have disproportionately attracted the attention of academics and NGOs but remain marginal and ineffectual as on-the-ground realities. Proposed alternatives such as “just tourism” (Hultsman 1995), “justice tourism” (Higgins-Desbiolles 2008), “hopeful tourism” (Pritchard, Morgan, and Ateljevic 2011), “slow tourism” (Lumsdon and McGrath 2011), and the “value-full” platform (offered by Macbeth [2005] as a successor to the knowledge-based platform) all reflect the noble aspirations of their originators but have yet to demonstrate autonomous momentum, and in this author’s opinion are unlikely to do so. Rather more traction is apparent in the specific subsectors of volunteer tourism (Conran 2011; McGehee 2012; Wearing 2001) and community-based tourism (Jones 2005; Okazaki 2008; Scheyvens 1999), although the alternative tourism credentials of both, as discussed below, have been increasingly questioned.
Alternative tourism contradictions
The failure of alternative tourism to gain independent traction in relation to mass tourism can be attributed to the combined influence of at least four major internal contradictions, as described below. The normative status of mass tourism also contributes to asymmetrical synthesis through its unequal “gravity” effects, but this is the usual status of an existing thesis and not a contradiction per se.
False hopes—Unrealistic and unrealized expectations
Advocates contend that alternative tourism sustainably and ethically facilitates quality of life dimensions otherwise undermined or impeded by the dynamics of mass tourism. These dimensions include community and personal empowerment, gainful and reliable employment, improved material and psychological well-being, stronger socioeconomic and cultural structures (e.g., cultural “authenticity” preserved), and a healthy physical environment. Such contentions are naïve. Critics have questioned the extent to which these benefits have been realized, citing for example the intrusive and disruptive nature of contact between tourists and residents (Macleod 1998), conflicts between and within communities over the distribution of benefits (Ranck 1987), and egotistical visitor motivations that thwart altruistic outcomes (Wheeller 1993). Risks of local negative impact increase as visitors seek out remote and fragile destinations (Butler 1992), and such trips impose high per-capita global environmental costs through distended carbon footprints (Becken and Hay 2012). Butcher (2007) alleges that NGOs supporting community-based projects exhibit imperialist tendencies by tying aid to the maintenance of traditional lifestyles, regardless of resident aspirations. Poor financial performance and ongoing reliance on NGO aid exacerbate this dependency (Salafsky et al. 2001). Insufficient scale is a broader dilemma given its associations with failure to generate substantive economic development (Butler 1992; Jafari 2001).
A growing willingness to question the foundational moral high ground is apparent within the adaptation literature itself. McGehee (2012), for example, maintains that volunteer tourism has potential to effect mass social change but acknowledges the contradiction that voluntourists self-identify as emancipators yet are mostly privileged elites who exercise dominance over the “voluntoured.” Guttentag (2009) emphasizes the performance of substandard work by ephemerally involved voluntourists, managerial elitism that neglects local opinions, and the promotion of dependency on sponsors. The issue of managerial elitism in particular speaks to the reality that alternative tourism, like its conventional counterpart, must be financially viable. Salazar (2012), exposing the divergence between the rhetoric and practice of “community-based” tourism, describes how “local” guides in Tanzania are difficult to train or retain and may not be members of the communities tourists assume them to come from. Sebele (2010) cites evidence from Botswana to demonstrate how such tourism often confers very limited tangible benefits to local residents, at the cost of donor dependency, marginalization of locals’ voices, and constraints on traditional uses of communal land.
Incompleteness
Claims of autonomy and distinctiveness are undermined by the generally unacknowledged extent to which alternative tourism is embedded within the conventional whole tourism system and associated support systems (Leiper 2004). Pearce (1992) correctly doubted whether alternative tourism could exist anywhere without the support mechanisms of mass tourism, including transportation, the media, and financial transaction networks (the latter again necessitated by the imperative of financial viability). This unavoidable integration and dependency, and the high proportion of overall trip time and expenditure that accrues to those mechanisms, indicate that while alternative tourism situates logically from a structural destination perspective as a distinct counterpoint or antithesis to mass tourism, it concurrently positions as a minor appendage of mass tourism from a holistic systems perspective that implicates not just the time spent consuming the product but also trip planning and transit. Alternative tourism, accordingly, is functionally incomplete by itself and cannot exist independently. Truly alternative global transportation and financial support mechanisms that would promote such independence are not a realistic prospect.
Growth paradox of success
The idealized temporal discourse of alternative tourism imagines a steady but small flow of allocentric visitors gaining fulfilling personal experiences in culturally and environmentally authentic destinations where they are warmly welcomed by local residents. Visitation numbers maintain equilibrium over the long term and tourism does not function as an agent of significant change—success in essence is equated with the absence of growth. Paradoxically, such nongrowth “success” scenarios frequently presage a deliberate growth trajectory as satisfied visitors convey positive information about these places to others through word-of-mouth and social networks, and destination managers willingly strategize to sustainably accommodate the resultant growth in demand. Weaver (2012) describes an “incremental” growth tendency in which deliberate alternative tourism destinations such as Bhutan, Dominica, and the Galapagos National Park have moved toward sustainable mass tourism through incremental and spatially selective increases in carrying capacity, their managers and planners now deeming growth itself and associated increases in revenue as indicators of success. Travel agencies, tour operators, airlines, and other brokers are complicit in these transformations, which are facilitated by the aforementioned degree to which alternative tourism is already integrated into conventional mass tourism systems. Destinations within countries are even more susceptible, being constrained (unlike protected areas and small countries) from establishing visitor quotas or other formal barriers to visitor entry.
This success-induces-growth scenario is distinct from the Trojan horse paradox of Butler (1992), which holds that alternative tourism in the exploration and involvement stages of the TALC establishes conditions that invite more intensive but less benign forms of tourism. Such assumptions are predicated on conventional conflict-based dialectics that situate intensification as a transition to unsustainable mass tourism, rather than on a resolution-based framework that perceives incremental growth as one legitimate type of movement toward higher-state synthesis through sustainable mass tourism. Moreover, growth is often accompanied not by the appearance of new and more sinister types of tourism but by the intensification or adaptation of existing sectors.
The growing identification of backpacking with mass and conventional tourism illustrates this phenomenon (Larsen, Øgaard, and Brun 2011; O’Reilly 2006; Scheyvens 2002; Spreitzhofer 1998) as does the recognition of “soft” ecotourism as a form of mass tourism (Collins-Kreiner 2011; Kontogeorgopoulos 2009; Weaver and Lawton 2002) and the “mainstreaming” of ecotourism (Buckley 2009). Coghlan and Noakes (2012), similarly, cite the apparent magnitude and growth of volunteer tourism, as well as its creeping commercialization and sophisticated product packaging, as evidence of comparability and compatibility with mainstream mass tourism. Indeed, with one industry source (cited in Butcher and Smith 2010) alleging volunteer tourism to involve about 1.6 million volunteers per year with a “monetary value” of over US$2 billion, it may be inevitable that managerial mass tourism–type frameworks will need to emerge to cope with this expanding collective scale.
Nonreciprocal accommodation
Butler (1992) describes how alternative tourism products can readily transition to mass tourism through simple expediencies that facilitate and accommodate growth, while mass tourism cannot easily transition to alternative tourism owing to the facilities and systems already in place to accommodate high volumes of visitation. Alternative tourism, therefore, is incapable of replacing mass tourism as a solution to the actual or potential problems created by contemporary levels of tourism demand (Clarke 1997; Wheeller 1991). Alternative tourism characteristics, however, can easily be incorporated into mass tourism without sacrificing the latter’s essential identity as mass tourism, while alternative tourism products (regardless of their connections with mass tourism intermediaries) cannot accommodate mass tourism characteristics without compromising their basic identity as alternative tourism. In both scenarios, a lack of reciprocity is apparent that advantages mass tourism as the two paradigms move toward synthesis.
Mass tourism adaptations
Alternative tourism therefore presents formidable contradictions that impede its own autonomous self-realization and necessitates integration, albeit on unequal terms, with mass tourism. What then is occurring within mass tourism itself as it moves toward synthesis with alternative tourism in order to redress its insidious prime contradiction? It can be argued that associated changes may be positioned along a continuum ranging from those closely aligned with the dominant capitalist paradigm to those more clearly related to the “pure” ethical motivations of ideal-type alternative tourism. Epitomizing the former are the increasingly ubiquitous linen reusage signs displayed by hotels, which are inexpensive to implement but attract high consumer participation if properly designed, and subsequent short-term and substantial cost savings in energy and labor (Goldstein, Cialdini, and Griskevicius 2008; Mair and Bergin-Seers 2010). Also leaning toward this pole are the various “environmentally friendly” incremental innovations in operation and design, such as the installation of solar panels, which are proving to be increasingly cost-effective as the prices of conventional and nonconventional resources converge (Gross, Leach, and Bauen 2003). Such changes are aptly described by Weaver (2012) as examples of opportunistic or pragmatic environmentalism given their demonstrably favorable short-term bottom-line outcomes.
The other side of the continuum accommodates initiatives that in varying degrees privilege ethical considerations over profit maximization. These include less frequently adopted policies and programs that support the welfare of local communities and the environment, foster customer awareness and education, go beyond basic compliance with official regulations, and disclose social and environmental performance (Henderson 2007). Notably from a synthesis perspective, such ethics-based initiatives may be inspired in some cases at least by awareness of the prime contradiction but often justified to internal stakeholders (e.g., shareholders) by the longer term financial benefits they are expected to yield through positive image-building and improved employee morale and retention (Auld, Bernstein, and Cashore 2008). In contrast, the more pragmatic environmental initiatives are made appealing to external stakeholders (e.g., consumers and government) through the promotional rhetoric of ethical responsibility.
Practices from both sides of the spectrum fall under the rubric of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which can be loosely defined as the active, voluntary, and self-regulated participation of business in activities—beyond existing laws and consumer demands—which improve the environment, society, and economy (Garay and Font 2012). As such, CSR, in theory, recognizes social responsibilities to diverse stakeholders and thereby transcends the fundamental capitalist principle of having return-maximizing responsibilities to shareholders only. Various studies have affirmed the rising importance of CSR within the tourism industry (de Grosbois 2012; Henderson 2007; Inoue and Lee 2011; Sheldon and Park 2011). But contributing to this growth is also empirical evidence of a positive relationship between participation and financial performance (Inoue and Lee 2011) and changing consumer attitudes (see below). Recognition of the prime contradiction may also be implicit. One membership survey of a peak U.S. industry organization (the TIA), for example, yielded very strong agreement (6.24 on a 7-point scale) that CSR is crucial for the long-term survival of the industry because of its dependency on environmental and sociocultural assets of destinations (Sheldon and Park 2011). Yet, although a 2010 survey (de Grosbois 2012) found that almost three-quarters of the largest 150 hotel companies expressed some level of CSR involvement on their websites, only one in three provided stated commitments to one or more specific goals, and there was minimal evidence of disclosure or participation in certification schemes based on third-party verification.
According to Zadek (2011), this lack of breadth and depth indicates a second stage of CSR articulation, moving beyond “first generation” contributions to society that do not risk commercial success, to the “second generation” integration of CSA into long-term business models and strategies that increasingly engage the ethically privileged side of the spectrum. “Third generation” articulation, where major social and environmental issues are directly addressed by company actions, is not yet evident at the collective level, and it therefore cannot be speculated whether it constitutes an inevitable paradigm shift that embeds major ethically informed actions into the corporate DNA. The second generation, in contrast, still entails practices that are justified by expectations of shorter- or longer-term profits and as such accord to basic capitalist premises. Weaver (2007), accordingly, characterizes the CSR engagement of the contemporary tourism industry as opportunistic “paradigm nudge.”
Alternative tourism contributions
Paradigm nudge in conventional mass tourism entails the strategic (if not cynical) incorporation of ethical impulses into corporate planning and management, and there is some evidence that this incorporation has been at least partially influenced by exposure to alternative tourism. Many of the codes of ethics adopted by mainstream corporations and the World Tourism Organization, for example, have their genesis in codes devised by pioneering alternative tourism organizations (Gonsalves 1987; Holden 1984). Conscious efforts were made during the 1986 International Conference on Third World People and Tourism, for example, to establish new channels of dialogue between industry and alternative tourism providers, and formal interaction between these two groups was featured during the International Tourism Fair of 1987 in West Berlin (Gonsalves 1987). The Workshop on Alternative Tourism, organized by a coalition of ecumenical groups in 1984, targeted the tourist industry as a prime group to reach through tour guide seminars, workshops on alternative tourism, educational films for transit tourists, and displays and exhibitions at trade fairs (Holden 1984). During the mid-1980s, the European advocacy group TEN (Third World Tourism European Ecumenical Network) produced a series of “New Angle” films depicting modes of responsible tourist behavior in destinations such as Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Mexico. These were shown on airlines such as Lufthansa on relevant international flights. It was also alleged that more than 1.5 million copies of TEN’s Sympathy Magazine were sold to “travel agencies, transport firms and to individual orderers” (Gujer 1988, p. 18).
This issue of alternative tourism influence on mass tourism has also entailed confrontational approaches involving boycotts, protests, and publicity of perceived harmful practices (Gonsalves 1987; Gujer 1988; Holden 1984; Lea 1993), but neither the immediate nor lasting effects of either the collaborative or confrontational approach have yet been investigated systematically. While our suspicion is that the influence has been negligible, there appears to be several additional and potentially more effective avenues through which advocates for (aspirational) alternative tourism can help to expand the ethical bridgehead established through the formalization of CSR policies, thereby proactively increasing its contribution to the emerging sustainable tourism synthesis.
Integration into mass tourism
One opportunity occurs in the degree to which alternative tourism attractions situate as niche components within or accessible to mass tourist destinations and itineraries (Butler 1992). Weaver (2000) superimposes a transect over the Gold Coast of Australia and its hinterland, suggesting that the densely developed resort strip of the coastline could aspire to the sustainable mass tourism model, while the farther reaches of its hinterland are suited to a deliberate alternative tourism model that interacts synergistically with the coastline. Such “sun-plus” structures (Bramwell 2004a) are also evolving and have great potential in the pleasure peripheries of the Mediterranean (Bramwell 2004b) and Caribbean (Weaver 2001), justified commercially by their capacity to diversify customer choice and attract new markets. For similar reasons, large tour operators, cruise lines, and other mass tourism businesses incorporate alternative products into their itineraries. The German mega-tour operator TUI has long pursued this strategy to attain competitive advantage (Sastre and Benito 2001), while cruise ship lines such as RCL and Carnival offer boutique onshore excursions that have superficial alternative tourism characteristics. An operational variant has been identified in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Van der Duim (2011) argues that the community-based model is being supplanted by a collaborative approach involving joint ventures between local communities and private tourism corporations.
Conflict-based dialectics emphasize the role mass tourism contact plays in contaminating and degrading the alternative tourism products with which it comes into contact. Resolution-based dialectics, in contrast, consider how alternative tourism products can potentially “contaminate” and reform their mass tourism counterparts, evoking Cheong and Miller’s (2000) thesis that power in tourism systems is not confined to the obvious “big players.” The transformational learning possibilities conveyed during focused or incidental exposure to alternative tourism interpretation and experience (Coghlan and Gooch 2011; McGehee 2002), for example, may have a contagion or infiltration effect on mass tourism where the affected tourists then reinterpret their resumed mass tourism activity in terms of their contact with the former. If a critical mass of such questioning is achieved and the market demand for ethical conduct increases accordingly, ethical reform then can become a matter of short-term rather than longer-term financial imperative, and “enlightened mass tourism” is a realistic possibility. Presently, industry is not compelled to do more than is demanded by a clientele dominated by superficial environmentalists who express concern for environmental and social issues but are not inclined to address these issues through any behavioral changes that are inconvenient or risky (Weaver 2012). However, CSR and associated codes contain powerful rhetoric that opens the way to deeper reform should enough consumers call businesses to task on it.
Assertion of indigenous rights
A second opportunity derives from the contemporary rights movement of indigenous peoples. As argued by Weaver (2010), the most recent stage of indigenous tourism development involves the increasingly pervasive extension of indigenous rights and privileges into ancestral lands lost long ago to outside colonization. Best articulated in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, this is manifested in protected area co-management schemes, and in consultative processes that require developers to incorporate input from “traditional owners.” Involvement of indigenous people with casino development and other questionable tourism activities belie for some the contention that such input is inherently ethical (e.g., Fennell 2008), but there still appears to be an opportunity for tourism development to be modified through mandated exposure to a more holistic paradigm that values stewardship and harmony with nature, as described by Hollinshead (1992). Such exposure, however, is currently incipient, and the full extent of its influence and impact remains speculative.
Conclusion
The dialectical mode of reasoning provides a logical and useful framework for analyzing the contemporary tourism megatrend of sustainable tourism, which it is argued here situates as an emerging synthesis of the mass tourism thesis and the alternative tourism antithesis. Major contradictions inherent to both mass and alternative tourism necessitate this synthesis, and resolution-based dialectics, more specifically, are attractive because they aspire to a constructive synthesis that embodies the best qualities of its parent paradigms and transcends the contradictions that limit the potential of each as a stand-alone entity. Conventional laissez-faire mass tourism is fatally flawed by a prime contradiction of self-consumption as per the tourism area life cycle concept, while alternative tourism is faced with four distinct internal contradictions that render it unviable as an autonomous construct. These involve unrealistic and unrealized expectations, functional incompleteness associated with dependency on and integration within mass tourism systems, the tendency of success to foster growth, and nonreciprocal accommodation wherein alternative tourism cannot assimilate mass tourism characteristics without compromising its own core identity as alternative tourism. These contradictions, and accompanying gravity effects, foster asymmetrical synthesis in favor of mass tourism, which is moving toward synthesis through tentative “paradigm nudge” that opportunistically incorporates financially lucrative reforms consistent with the parent capitalist paradigm.
But is this sufficient to resolve the prime contradiction of its self-destructive tendency? How much of the alternative tourism/ethical impulse must be integrated to do so? There is some evidence that paradigm nudge has been influenced in a minor way by alternative tourism, but advocates of the latter could increase its contribution to synthesis—potentially inducing paradigm shift—by exploiting its presence inmass tourism destination hinterlands and itineraries. Transformational tourist learning is one way in which its influence could infiltrate mass tourism, expanding the ethical bridgehead created by current CSR practices and, perhaps more importantly, formal rhetorical commitment to CSR principles. The reassertion of indigenous rights over ancestral lands is another process that can abet this expansion. The desired outcome is enlightened mass tourism. Here, all tourism situates within integrated large-scale systems where the continuing necessity of financial viability is qualified by parallel ethical imperatives. More specifically, it is when ethical reforms produce demonstrable short-term financial benefits through consumer advocacy that Clarke’s (1997) fourth stage in the evolution of sustainable tourism, or convergence of mass and alternative tourism, is likely to be superseded by enlightened mass tourism as a more productive and beneficial fifth stage that may be termed amalgamation. As for this attendant combination of financial and ethical imperatives, the degree to which this represents in the longer term a workable symbiosis or a new contradiction remains to be seen. In the interim, the proposed findings provide a basis for recontextualizing questions of sustainable tourism definition, scale, indicators, measurement, and assessment.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper emerged indirectly from funding received through the Australian Research Council (ARC) for Project DP1093557, titled “Enabling Tourism/Conservation Symbiosis by Engaging Protected Area Visitors in Focused Lifelong Activism.” I was the sole recipient of this grant.