The Managerial Gaze

The Development of Tourism Education

The development of tourism as a field of study and research has taken place in the context of the fairly continuous growth of tourism itself and an expansion of higher education. Between 1970 and 2010, student enrolments in higher education in the United Kingdom increased from about 600,000 (Office for National Statistics 2002) to 2.4 million (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2011). Likewise, in Australia students increased from 161,455 in 1970 to over 1.2 million in 2011 (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs 2001; Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education 2012a). This expansion has allowed tourism to develop as a significant part of the academy in most of the developed world. In the United Kingdom, enrolments into degree-level programs grew from about 20 in 1972 (Airey 2005) to 9,000 in 2011 (Walmsley 2012). In Australia, following the introduction of the first program in 1978, the number had grown to 61 in 2005, before declining to 41 in 2010 (Breakey and Craig-Smith 2008, 2011). In China, from the first tourism program in 1978, by 2010 there were 967 tertiary-level education institutes offering degree-level provision and recruiting 596,100 students (Yang and Song 2011; Xiao 2000).

This period of sustained development, however, now seems to have faltered, at least for much of the Western world. For, while tourism itself appears to have recovered its growth trajectory (United Nations World Tourism Organization 2012), briefly interrupted by the economic recession begun in 2008, universities seem to be facing a much less certain future. In this environment, tourism, along with all other parts of the academy, is facing greater scrutiny. Its student recruitment base seems much less secure and increasingly it needs to justify its position as a field of education and research. While higher education around the globe has experienced profound changes over the past two decades, the origins of change go back much further to the general expansion of universities that started in the West in the 1960s. In summary, the development of a mass higher education system, which is largely driven by the need for an educated workforce and a neoliberal agenda (Ayikouru, Tribe, and Airey 2009), has brought with it a greater level of scrutiny and accountability as well as the emergence of hierarchies of universities, emphasising the need for quality when searching for justification in university provision.

Two external changes are particularly relevant when contemplating the position of tourism in the academy. First, and possibly most important, is the change to the method and levels of funding. Not only has funding become tighter but, through the introduction of fees, students (and their parents) have increasingly become responsible for funding universities rather than the taxpayer. In the United Kingdom for example, the government now provides no funding for teaching in universities for the arts, humanities, or social sciences. For its part, Australia is well recognized internationally for turning higher education into an export commodity, with international full-fee-paying students effectively subsidizing the real cost of tertiary education for domestic students. The number of overseas students grew from 18,207 (4% of all students) in 1988 to 332,577 (27.2%) in 2011 (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs 2001; Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education 2012a). During this time, the share of university revenue derived from government funding declined from around 80% to less than 50%. In 2010, student contributions accounted for about 35% of university funding, with international students providing roughly half. However, the proportion of the funding varies widely between disciplines, with students undertaking units in tourism and management contributing 84% of the funding for their studies (Lomax-Smith, Watson, and Webster 2011). Likewise, in China, Li (2004) reports that government funding for higher education has declined while universities have turned to multiple sources of funding (tuition, donation, and revenues from university-affiliated enterprises). No matter which country, the implications of this change are that if the programs on offer are not attractive to students in terms of their quality and reputation, or in other terms, such as their subsequent employment prospects, they will not attract students and hence will not be able to cover their costs.

The second external change is that the provision offered by universities is increasingly subject to internal and external scrutiny, for quality and more recently for impact. The subsequent publication of results from such scrutiny in the form, for example, of student surveys, reviews of teaching, and assessment of research outputs now frequently form the basis of league tables. These immediately inform senior university managers, prospective students, and the world at large about the reported quality of the provision. It is tempting for managers wishing to improve the position of their university in global league tables to drop poorly performing subject areas in favor of stronger ones. These external developments have created the impetus for more careful scrutiny of fields of research and education. Student recruitment, student quality, teaching quality, research income, research outputs, research impact are just a few of the metrics used by university managers and government officials. For a relatively new area, like tourism, which is still establishing its position in the academy (Airey 2008b), some of these metrics pose a particular challenge.

Along with these external influences, tourism within the academy has also been changing. Prominent in the changes have been the developments in the curriculum and pedagogy—developments that are continuing to come under scrutiny in current studies (Belhassen and Caton 2011; Busby and Huang 2012). In a broader sense, a number of studies have reflected on the extent to which tourism as a subject of study has “come of age” (Airey 2005; Council for National Academic Awards 1993) or “matured” (Airey 2008a, 2008b) as a part of the academy. As indicators of this maturity, Airey (2008b) points to student numbers, to the general consensus about the curriculum, to the growth in research outputs in top-quality journals, and to the deepening of research. A reflection of this is found in China, where the disciplinary status of tourism has been upgraded by the Ministry of Education. Despite this optimism, Fidgeon (2010) claims that increasing competition for students in the United Kingdom has resulted in efforts to differentiate between programs by focusing on specialist aspects of tourism and measures to incorporate the subject into business studies. He also draws attention to the closure of programs where demand is now inadequate. The same developments have been observed in Australia, where a number of factors have combined to place downward pressure on demand from international students, resulting in a number of stand-alone tourism schools and programs being subsumed into larger organizational units (Dredge et al. 2012). At the same time, in Australia, policy and regulatory reforms have allowed a number of technical and further education institutions and private education providers to establish new degrees. In brief, tourism in the academy has not only grown, developed, and in some ways strengthened but it has also come under pressure and scrutiny. The important question now, for this article, is how does it compare with other subjects, and during a time of greater scrutiny and possible rationalization, how strong is its case for continued development in the academy?

Quality in (Tourism) Higher Education

The substantive heart of this article is situated in the theory and practice of quality in higher education. The term quality has several common aspects. It is often used as a measure of how well a good is made or a service is rendered or indeed how either is perceived by consumers. “Fitness for purpose” is generally central to debates about quality. In fact, a whole industry is devoted to quality as evidenced by concepts such as “Total Quality Care,” and symbols such as kite marks provide heuristic guides to quality. In tourism itself, there are many such symbols such as the star ratings of hotels (quality of accommodation) or the blue flagging of beaches (quality of environment), and more recently a range of Web 2.0–enabled consumer ratings of quality as exemplified by TripAdvisor. Quality also projects its own scale, aligning itself at the top end with excellence and implying its polar opposite of inferiority. Peters and Waterman’s early work “In Search of Excellence” (1984) heralded a research stream that has progressively made excellence more conceptually and theoretically sophisticated.

Just as Ritz Hotels or La Gavroche are commonly perceived as top-quality providers, so in higher education Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge carry similar accolades. So what does the term quality in higher education mean? At a global level there are three main indices that purport to measure and compare university quality. These are the Academic Ranking of World Universities (the Shanghai Ranking), the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Each of these has a slightly different view of quality. The criteria used by The Shanghai Ranking include Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals awarded to staff and alumni, researcher citations in 21 key subject categories, articles published in Nature and Science, and an institution’s per capita academic performance (Liu and Cheng 2005). The QS World University Rankings uses, among other indicators, academic peer review, recruiter review, faculty–student ratio, and citations per faculty. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings has a more finely tuned methodology that includes the ratios of international to domestic staff and students, teaching and research reputation surveys, doctorate awards, undergraduates, income and papers per academic staff member, degrees awarded, and citation impact.

Turning the focus to tourism higher education, a good starting point is to consider the Tourism Education Quality System of the United Nations World Tourism Organization. This is a quality assurance system specifically for education institutions (United Nations World Tourism Organization, n.d.). The system appoints external auditors to evaluate the management systems and operations deployed by institutions. The audit is guided by information provided by the institution on five key areas: public and private sector employers, students, the curriculum and pedagogical system, the faculty and the management. More recently, The International Centre of Excellence in Tourism and Hospitality Education based in Australia has also emerged as an international accreditation body that provides “confidential benchmarking and raising awareness of the quality of our accredited members to future students” (THE-ICE 2012). Accreditation is based around self and peer review that focuses on an institution’s mission, goals, and aims and how these are delivered through its programs, graduate attributes, facilities, teaching staff, internationalization policies, and industry engagement.

In the United Kingdom, there have been national subject-level reviews of quality. Tribe (2003, p. 28) describes the outcomes in 2000/1:

The HLRS&T [Hospitality, Leisure, Recreation, Sport and Tourism] subjects performed well in Subject Review and in its summary the QAA [Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education] notes: “The successes of the subjects are reflected in the grades awarded which average 3.4 [on a scale of 1-4] across all aspects and visits.” (Quality Assurance Agency 2001, p. 1)

The Quality Assurance Agency review evaluated how well institutions met their own aims and objectives for the subjects in terms of curriculum design, content, and organization; teaching, learning, and assessment; student progression and achievement; student support and guidance; and learning resources and quality management and enhancement. More recently the Australian Government has established the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which is tasked with evaluating the performance of higher education providers against a new Higher Education Standards Framework. Within this framework, learning standards are being developed for most disciplines, including tourism (Dredge et al. 2012).

National student surveys such as the Course Experience Questionnaire and the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement in Australia and the National Student Survey in the United Kingdom have been used to evaluate levels of student satisfaction. In a somewhat similar way, in China, the quality review mechanism is characteristic of competitions for excellent subjects and/or excellent programs at the institutional, provincial, and national levels. Notably, competitions for excellent programs call for different indicators ranging from student feedback, facilities and resources, experiential learning or internship, as well as employment prospects. A similar review and award mechanism is implemented in the evaluation of research projects.

These reviews provide the basis and some of the evidence for the various league tables that seek to rank universities and academic subjects. In the United Kingdom, for example, the major UK newspapers, The Guardian, The Times, and The Independent, provide such subject league tables. The Guardian methodology is strongly influenced by student satisfaction. It measures overall student satisfaction, student satisfaction with teaching, student satisfaction with feedback, student–staff ratio, spend per student, entry score, value added, and career prospects after six months. The criteria used by The Times and The Independent are broadly similar but also scrutinize research quality. In Australia, there has been a great deal of resistance from academics to league tables, and most rankings published by the media are focused on research-based institutional-level rankings rather than subject areas. In response, the Australian Government introduced the My University website in 2012 to provide students with course information and fees, student demographics, student satisfaction and graduate destination survey results, student services, and campus facilities. The website does not provide league tables but allows students to compare up to three courses at a time. Similarly, The Good Universities Guide provides some comparative data on tourism degrees but stops short of offering a ranking (Hobsons 2012).

In summary, in practical terms, there are a variety of measures that examine the quality of higher education. These operate at the institutional level, at the national subject level, at the institutional subject level, and even at the international level. Each measure adopts a different method. There are some common elements but some emphasize research, some emphasize student satisfaction, and some emphasize peer review. Most provide the basis for the compilation of league tables but none provides a secure basis or any real analysis or commentary on how tourism as a subject compares with other university subjects.

Quality as a Contested Concept

The fact that each of the systems described in the previous section interrogates quality in a different way alerts us to the fact that quality is a slippery concept. There is no universal or absolute standard for quality. This notion of the contestability of quality is taken up by a number of authors. For example, Tam (2010) notes that quality “is a highly contested concept and has multiple meanings to people who conceive higher education and quality differently” (p. 7). Barnett (1992) identifies major stakeholders in the quality debate as including governments, institutional managers, heads of department, lecturers, students, and employers, noting that “[their] different approaches are testament to the point that quality is a contested concept” (p. 45). So even the seemingly innocuous idea of quality as being “fitness for purpose,” introduced earlier, becomes meaningless under further examination since there is no universal agreement on the purposes. We are therefore thrown back into a postmodern jumble of relativism with many competing purposes and no apparatus for judging which purposes are superior. However, the challenges posed by this relativist problem are circumvented by this article since a pragmatist view of quality is adopted by focusing on the managerial perspective. To explain this, the next section brings together the concepts of managerialism and the gaze in order to develop the idea of the “managerial gaze” featured in the article’s title.

The Managerial Gaze

Ayikouru, Tribe, and Airey (2009) provide ample evidence for the rise of managerialism in higher education.

Managerialism conjures up the image of universities as businesses as opposed to conventional sites of autonomous knowledge. . . . Here universities increasingly have to replicate business-like practices whereby they have to compete with each other for students, the best professors, and also a share of the ever-diminishing state budget. (p. 198)

They additionally explain how managerialism has developed during a period of ascendancy of neoliberal ideology. Elaborating on Barnett’s (1994) “discourse of operationalism,” Belhassen and Caton (2011) argue that the “the seat of epistemic power” is shifting from universities to the public sphere, resulting in increasing government intervention motivated by economic interests.

Introduced by Urry (1990) following the work of Foucault, the idea of the gaze is well established in tourism. Urry (2002) opens the second edition of his book with a quote from Foucault (1976) describing the medical gaze. Against this, Urry compares the tourist gaze:

This gaze is socially organised and systemised as is the gaze of the medic. Of course it is of a different order in that it is not confined to professionals supported and justified by an institution. (p. 1)

The managerial gaze developed in this article is also socially organized and systemized. Put simply, it is the gaze of vice chancellors, principals, rectors, and others in higher education institutions. As such, it is more like the medical gaze than the tourist gaze in that it is a professional gaze, supported and justified by institutions. The important thing about the gaze in relation to quality in higher education is that different people have different gazes. Their gazes are directed toward different aspects of quality where they see different things, and in seeing different things they formulate different conceptions of quality. Indeed, within education, we could also conceive of other competing gazes—the student gaze, the researcher gaze (Tribe 2006), and the industry gaze among others.

The idea of the gaze is closely associated with the Foucauldian notion of discourse. Usher and Edwards (1994, p. 85) describe discourses as “regimes of truth,” giving as examples “medicine, psychiatry, and other forms of disciplinary knowledge.” Discourses are important because they are difficult to detect, everyday, powerful linguistic conventions that define and confine the limits of the sayable (Foucault 1974). Within discourses, certain statements and speech patterns and moves become sanctioned as valuable while others are marginalized and excluded. Discourses thereby establish boundaries of what can and cannot be said (often tacitly) and through this process of sanctioning and denial, exercise power toward a particular end. The managerial discourse of quality similarly creates an including and excluding regime. It provides and sanctions the rules for what counts as quality and what does not, offering an authoritative voice about quality whilst marginalizing and silencing alternative versions. The question here is how tourism appears in the discourse that permeates the managerial gaze.

Learning and Teaching

Matters relating to learning and teaching catch the eye of the managerial gaze for two main reasons. First, the recruitment of students is a key source of income. The changes noted above whereby funding is increasingly coming directly from students, sometimes via government-sponsored loans rather than from public support, is emphasizing this. More than this, student recruitment is a source of income that has long-term stability in that students enrol for up to four years and, unlike income for research, it is not immediately committed to large items of capital expenditure. In this sense, it gives flexibility to managers. The second reason is that the reported quality of learning and teaching has a direct bearing on the perceived quality and hence reputation of the institution and its ability to recruit numbers of high-quality students in the future.

There are three key questions for senior management for any subject area. What is the level of recruitment? What is the quality of the students? How satisfied are the students? For tourism, the answers from the published data are mixed. In terms of overall recruitment, in the UK tourism does not reach the levels of the popular areas represented by subjects such as business studies, which accounted for 63,000 undergraduates in all years in 2010–2011 (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2011) or psychology or design studies with about 50,000 students each. Nevertheless, with 21,500 students, it compares reasonably well with subjects such as economics, 26,600; sociology, 25,800; and mathematics at 25,000 and certainly outperforms human and social geography with just over 9,000 undergraduates. In Australia, where many tourism students are enrolled in degrees in business studies, not all of them appear in the statistics under the tourism category. Partly as a result, the 8,000 all-year enrolments appear very small against more than 260,000 enrolled in business and management, 119,000 in humanities and social sciences, or even the 78,000 taking sciences, but against economics with about 12,000 or the 3,500 taking mathematics, it is not insignificant (Hobsons 2012). The fact that 43% of tourism enrolments in Australia are from overseas is likely to be positively perceived by university managers because funding from full-fee-paying international students can be used to cross-subsidize the cost of educating domestic students.

On a much different scale, there were more than one million students studying tourism at 1,968 higher and professional educational institutions in China in 2010 (China National Tourism Administration 2011). The information does not allow for comparisons with other subjects at higher education but the secondary vocational schools provide a point of comparison, where for 2011 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2011) tourism services accounted for about 750,000 students which was slightly smaller than transport, culture and arts, and education but small compared to more than 3 million in each of manufacturing and information technology, and over 1.5 million in each of medicine and health, and finance and trade.

Tourism is on weaker ground when it comes to entry scores. In the United Kingdom, grades in preuniversity qualifications are awarded points. As summarized in one of the published league tables (Independent 2012), the average points for undergraduate entry in 2012 for medicine was 516.8 and for mathematics was 402.9. The entry points for tourism was 258.8. This is also low compared with other subjects such as economics, 372.2, or business studies, 312.6. There are some similarities with the Australian context where the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) is used to compare school-leavers for admission to tertiary courses. The ATAR is a number between 0 and 99.95. Based on a sample of 15 universities with tourism programs, the mean score was 64.7. This is far lower than medicine (94.3) and below economics (72.9) and accounting (67.7), but is closer to business and management (65.7), sciences (65.1), and humanities and social sciences (63.7) (Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education 2012b). However, these figures are distorted by comparing subject areas for only 15 universities with tourism programs. As a result they exclude most of the prestigious universities, which typically do not offer tourism and have the highest entry scores.

In China, it is difficult to compare tourism with other subjects on these grounds. Entry scores vary from year to year and more often by annual entrance exam results of a province and by categories of universities than by programs per se. For undergraduate degrees, Category I institutions (or key universities) set the highest entry score, followed by Category II and III. In general, Category I and II institutions offer partially subsidized programs, in which students pay lower tuition fees than those in Category III institutions, where programs are largely self-financed. However, some indication of the position of tourism can be identified within one disciplinary category at one university, where high entry scores usually are associated with provision designated by the state and/or province as “key programs” and those with bright employment prospects for their graduates. In this regard, tourism compares poorly against other business administration programs such as financial management, accounting, and marketing. The change noted earlier by the Ministry of Education to upgrade the disciplinary status of tourism may alter this position. Tourism will no longer be placed as a secondary study area under business administration (Xiao 2000). This move will have policy implications in terms of resources and allocations of students as well as entry scores.

The third key metric that often forms a part of the league tables for universities relates to student satisfaction. As noted already, a number of administrations now operate satisfaction surveys on a national basis. This is true in both the United Kingdom, where the National Student Survey gathers data from all undergraduate students in their graduating year, and in Australia, where Graduate Careers Australia surveys students four months after graduation. More recently in China, universities such as Tsinghua and Remin have also started to benchmark students’ learning experience and satisfaction via the International Student Barometer. Here, tourism in the United Kingdom performed reasonably well in 2011 (Independent 2012), with an overall satisfaction level of 3.9 on a five point scale. This is the same as for economics and medicine, slightly below 4.0 for sociology and mathematics but above 3.6 for business studies. In Australia, tourism performs a little less well compared with some other subjects. Graduate Careers Australia (2012) reported that 72.2% of tourism management students agreed that they were satisfied with their course. This compares with 79.0% for sociology, 76.0% for biological sciences, and 75.5% for mathematics. Students were rather more satisfied than those taking accounting (68.2%) or banking, finance, and related fields (68.4%). In other words, tourism is not significantly out of line compared with other subjects.

This relative success in student satisfaction may in some ways reflect the attention given over many years by tourism teachers to the development of the curriculum and to their approaches to learning and teaching. As a relatively new field of study, Tribe (2005a) draws attention to the emphasis given to developing the curriculum and the field of study (2000, 2006). Recent initiatives such as the Tourism Education Futures Initiative (Prebezac 2012) and the BEST Education Network provide plenty of examples of innovation in learning and teaching, many of which are published in the three journals devoted to learning and teaching in tourism. In Australia, teaching innovation is also acknowledged through a national system of citations and awards. In this regard, tourism appears to perform no worse than other disciplines, with several tourism academics being recipients of national citations and awards. So in terms of learning and teaching, tourism is able to present strengths in student satisfaction and in volume of recruitment, or at least it is not lagging behind competitor subjects in the managerial gaze. It is on much weaker ground when it comes to the overall quality of the students as measured by previous academic attainment. Here, any manager concerned with the academic reputation of their institution is likely to take a critical stance.

Research

Tribe and Airey (2007) suggest that tourism research has “come a long way since the first developments in the mid-1960s” (p. 3). They point to the extent to which it has broadened its coverage and extended its methodological approaches and research techniques. The development of research has attracted a range of writers over the past few years (Xiao and Smith 2006; Riley and Love 2000) with an underlying message that tourism is maturing into what Tribe (2005b) describes as a “fledgling post-modern field of research”(p. 5). To some extent, this is reflected in the development of related research journals and it is confirmed by tourism being upgraded by the Ministry of Education in China, as noted, above and more specifically becoming a named subject area in the 2013 national assessment of research in the United Kingdom. Previously, it was subsumed within business or leisure.

This background provides a broadly positive view of tourism’s potential contribution to a university’s research profile. For a minority of elite institutions, this is true. However, the results of the most recent assessment of university research in the United Kingdom in 2008 (Higher Education Funding Council for England 2009) provide a rather less positive view. While the panel recognized improvements since the previous assessment in 2001, they still identified tourism research as relatively weak, with a limited amount of top-rated work offset by a long tail of mediocre outputs:

Overall the majority of outputs were rated as of international standard or above, a significant improvement since 2001. However the number of world-leading outputs was relatively small and largely confined to articles in the most highly-rated journals in this discipline. . . . As in the last RAE [Research Assessment Exercise], . . . research in this field lags behind the development of mainstream management theory. (Higher Education Funding Council for England 2009, pp. 8–9)

Such comments do not endear the subject to senior university managers.

The picture is also somewhat troubling in Australia where, in the Excellence in Research for Australia initiative, a total of 16 units of evaluation (UoEs) for tourism were put forward in 2012 compared with 24 UoEs in 2010 (Australian Research Council 2010, 2012a). The decline is largely the result of senior managers making a strategic decision not to put forward fields of research that were likely to perform poorly. The number of tourism UoEs compares with 24 for marketing, 36 for business and management, 27 for mathematical sciences, 32 for biological sciences, 38 for studies in human society, and 33 for economics. UoEs are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being at world standard and 5 being well above world standard. No tourism UoEs received a score of 5 in the 2012 rankings, although 50% of units were ranked at or above world standard. For the tourism units, the average rating of 2.4 was lower than most other areas of business and management. The performance was also below the average rating for economics (2.8) and studies in human society (2.7) and well below mathematical (3.3), biological (3.3), and medical and health sciences (3.1). Tourism only scored 1.5 in terms of esteem compared with 25.6 for business and management, mainly because the field has very few national research fellowships.

Viewed through the lens of other metrics, the picture is also uncomfortable. In terms of research funding, the major funders provide little support. In the United Kingdom, out of 5,332 awards made by the Research Council (Economic and Social Research Council 2012) between 2000 and 2011, only 29 or 0.5% related to tourism. In China, the position seems even worse, with only 123 projects or 0.066% of the funding of the National Science Foundation being for tourism-related projects during 2000–2011 (China Tourism Academy 2012; Liu 2008). Similarly from 1993 to 2009, a total of 17,153 projects were funded by the National Social Science Foundation in China, out of which only 1% (172 projects) were tourism related (Zheng and Qiu 2010) . In Australia, between 2003 and 2012, only eight Research Council grants were recorded for tourism out of a total of 4,564 grants (Australian Research Council 2012b). For the prestigious Discovery Project Grants, the four awards are tiny compared with 1,340 for biological sciences or 189 for human sciences or 86 for business and management. Even transport, which is a very small research area in Australia, managed to secure nine such grants. To some extent, these figures might understate the picture for tourism because such research is also included under other subjects. In part, this reflects a view among researchers that the success rate for projects is better if they are submitted under subject areas other than tourism. But even allowing for this, the performance is not encouraging for senior academic managers.

In terms of journals, only three tourism journals out of 80 make the top A* position on the ratings list of the Australian Business Deans Council (2012). In their latest list, the Association of Business Schools (2010) in the United Kingdom only ranks two tourism journals out of 24 in their top category, with 10 or 42% falling in the lowest category. This long tail of weaker journals is more pronounced than in all but two of the other subcategories of business studies. Psychology by comparison only has 5% of its journals in the lowest category. In terms of citations, even these top-ranked journals hold relatively modest positions. According to Scopus (2012), the most cited paper in Annals of Tourism Research has a citation rate of only 355. This compares with the journal Cell, which achieves the highest rate of more than 8,000 for one of its papers. For impact factors, the picture is more positive in the context of business-related journals, where the Annals of Tourism Research (3.616) and Tourism Management (2.571) have now gained places in the top quartile, with Annals in the top 10. The highest in this field is the Academy of Management Review at 6.169. But outside this field, these metrics are low compared, for example, with Cell at 32.403 . Turning to individual scholars, a search on the Scopus database shows that very few in tourism achieve an H index score of more than 15. This compares with scores of more than 50 in other fields.

A further point of comparison with other fields of study is that tourism research and educational associations are generally small in size. Currently in terms of active membership, the International Council for Hospitality, Restaurant and Institutional Education is probably one of the largest with 1,250 members. The Travel and Tourism Research Association has about 650 tourism researchers and destination marketing professionals as active members; the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism has some 300 members from about 49 countries or regions; the Asia Pacific Tourism Association has more than 300 members from 20 Asia-Pacific countries or regions; and the Council for Australian University Tourism and Hospitality Education has 163 associate/student members in addition to its 26 member affiliate/chapter members. Comparatively, in an early survey of the American physics specialties in the 1960s, Anthony, East, and Slater (1969) reported that acoustics had about 1,000 members, and nuclear physics and optics each had around 2,000 members, whilst the biggest specialty of physics—solid state physics—had over 3,000 members. In this regard, tourism research associations are not even comparable to its sister field of recreation and leisure studies, of which National Recreation and Park Administration for example has more than 3,000 members.

Taken together, this represents a worrying picture especially at time when tourism education in developed countries is being downsized and rationalized. Of course, in part this reflects some of the problems of using quantitative metrics to measure research, but as Law and Chon (2007) report, a number of these research metrics are perceived to be important to university managers and decision makers. The scale of the differences and the fact that metrics like this are easy for university managers to use in making comparisons in their search to enhance their reputation mean that tourism researchers cannot afford to ignore them.

Impact

There are no generally agreed or recognized indicators of the impact of academic endeavors on the outside world. The 2013 assessment of research in the United Kingdom seeks to examine the impact of academic research based on expert reviews of case studies. Impact here is defined as an “effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (Higher Education Funding Council for England 2012, p. 48). It is too early here to include the outcomes of this exercise and in any case impact can go well beyond this definition and in some respects it does not lend itself to easy identification, let alone measurement. The impact on graduates and on their employment and career prospects is, however, one area where impact can be assessed. At the other extreme, the impact on practice, public debate, and attitudes present significant assessment difficulties.

Starting with graduate employment, recent figures (Hobsons 2012) for Australia suggest that at 34%, the unemployment rate for tourism students four months after graduation was not greatly out of line with those from other subject areas, for example, 25% for mathematics, 32% for sciences, 41% for accounting, and 30% for economics. The big exception is students from medicine, with an unemployment rate of 5%. The figures from the United Kingdom (Guardian 2012) are rather less favorable, with only 45% in employment or further study six months after graduation compared with 99.5% of graduates of medicine, 66% for economics, 67% for mathematics, and 56% for business and management studies. Of the employed tourism graduates in the United Kingdom, only about one-half were actually employed in the tourism sector itself (Walmsley 2009). As far as salaries are concerned, the data from Australia (Hobsons 2012) suggest that a starting salary of A$40,000 lags well behind A$46,000 earned by graduates of business and management or the A$56,000 of medicine graduates.

Given their identification with a particular area of activity, it could be expected that impacts of the academy would be felt widely in the world of tourism practice. In reality, links with the world of practice are generally poorly developed. Cooper (2006, p. 48), for example, indicates the extent to which tourism has been slow in adopting “knowledge management” partly because of the gap between researchers and the sector and partly because of a “hostile knowledge management environment.” Several other authors, in noting a growing emphasis on the impact of research, have pointed to the lack of tourism industry and practitioner engagement with academic research outputs (Thomas 2012; Xiao and Smith 2010; Frechtling 2004). This weakness is also revealed in some of the major recent studies prepared by or for governments and other bodies (Deloitte 2008; United Nations World Tourism Organization 2009; Goldin 2010; Thomas 2012) in which there was little if any input from the tourism academic community. With this background, it is not surprising that tourism does not appear among the areas of interest of the top 100 public intellectuals (Infoplease 2012) who bridge the gap between academia and the world at large. In brief, therefore, although the metrics are very imprecise and restricted, those that are available do not provide an encouraging picture for university management that their tourism departments are at the forefront in influencing their world.

With the attention given to comparative metrics and league tables, it is not surprising that annual world rankings of universities have now become a staple component of the academic repertoire. This raises the question about how tourism fares at this macro level. Based on the three major world rankings referred to earlier in this article, some 35 universities that appear in the top 200 of at least one of the rankings includes a tourism program and/or research. Some 22 of these are ranked in the top 200 in all three rankings. However, only 6 universities in the top 50 of at least one of the rankings contain tourism. The equivalent figure for the top 100 is 12. In other words, while tourism has a presence among the top world universities, it is not prominent. Perhaps more significant is that the top universities do not necessarily house the top programs or research for tourism. For example, of the 35 universities with a tourism presence in the top 200, only 8 of these are ranked in the top 20 tourism programs (Park et al. 2011). In some ways, this confirms one of the themes that emerges from this analysis, which is that the performance of tourism is not always at the same level as other subject areas even in their own institution.

Conclusions

This article opened with a number of questions, above all concerned with how vice-chancellors, rectors, and principals assess the subject of tourism. The stark conclusion is that there are many reasons to think that, on the basis of the readily available indicators, such institutional leaders would arrive at a critical view when comparing tourism with other fields across a range of different metrics. Of course, there are exceptions. Tourism in some institutions is performing strongly. However, alongside these elite centers, the subject also suffers from a long tail of relatively poor performance. This represents a big challenge for the tourism academy. It is a relatively new subject area, it has expanded and developed quickly, and its potential strengths in quality of research and teaching have become well established at some centers. But these strengths have yet to permeate the whole academy. There is certainly a question about the survival of some of the mediocre centers in areas where rationalization is taking place.

Above all, institutional managers have two main concerns: income and reputation. The future of any subject, in part at least, depends on how well it contributes to these. In terms of income, tourism has had a continuing strength in being able to attract students. This has varied from year to year and country to country, but generally it is now in a position where overall it has become a contributor to the academy, similar to many of the other social sciences. With this in mind, reports of a decline in admissions identified earlier are a concern. However, its real and immediate problem lies more in its contribution to reputation. In this, the work in developing the programs and in terms of achieving good levels of student satisfaction puts the field in a sound position. This is a real contribution by the tourism academic community. The long tail of students with relatively low entry scores, weak research outputs, and difficulties in attracting research income pose the greatest challenges, to which must be added the curious apparent weakness in links with the broader community.

One of the problems that is apparent from this study lies in the quality of the data that are available. Given the data difficulties, it is perhaps not surprising that, even at the most superficial level, the managerial gaze itself may lack any real accuracy. For some countries, and at the level of individual subjects, we now have some of the data required to inform decisions relating, for example, to student enrolment, quality, satisfaction, and employment and we have information on research funding, journal ranking, and citation. But even where the data exist, it is not always possible to arrive at consistent comparisons. One of the dangers that come from a lack of consistent cross-subject data is that subject specialists restrict their view to their own subject area. This has been a problem for tourism for, as Tribe (2006) has noted, the truth about tourism is still mainly told by similarly situated researchers. The danger is that in not recognizing where it stands among other subjects, tourism can end up with a very distorted view of its position in the academy.

Where the data do not exist or the information is simply unmeasurable in any meaningful way, the managerial gaze can be totally distorted. The data problems are compounded when it comes to international comparisons. Here, there may be no data or they are collected using different definitions and on different bases. At a time of increased globalization of higher education when universities are competing for students and funding across the world, this is becoming a serious weakness. Consistent measures of student recruitment, student employment, and research funding to stand alongside the existing journal metrics would go some way to clarify the international position of tourism in the academy.

The data uncertainties against a setting of rationalization and the inevitable comparisons among subject areas all point to the need to make and win the case with the academic managers. It is against this background that the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom has started an initiative to make the case for the social sciences. The focus for this is a series of reports and associated publicity to provide examples of what social scientists have done and can do to support knowledge about and provide responses to various challenges in, for example, well-being, aging, crime, sustainability, sport, and leisure. In short, they have focused on the impact of the social sciences on their world.

One of the issues highlighted in this article is the apparent inadequacy, at least in terms of readily available information, about the impact of tourism scholarship on its world: the impact that flows from the educated students and the impact that comes from research. This perhaps represents the biggest contemporary challenge for tourism in the academy. The senior managers know and have ready access to some of the metrics that they use to form their gaze, and if these are vital to the immediate finance and reputation of the university such as student enrolments and research rankings, they will be prominent in forming that gaze. What they lack is the bigger picture and the longer-term perspectives. This sets three challenges for those in the tourism academy. First to ensure that the metrics themselves compare well with other subject areas; second, to highlight the strengths of tourism not captured by immediate published metrics; and third, to work to broaden the managerial gaze itself.

Actions

These three challenges set an important agenda for the next phase in the development of tourism within the academy both at the individual and institutional level as well for the subject as a whole. The first, related to the existing metrics, can be summarized as attention to performance on the items that are being measured. Here the tourism academy can and must improve. An urgent need is problem recognition. In the teaching and learning realm, large parts (the long tail) of the tourism academy attract poor-quality students and produce graduates who inevitably struggle to find employment. In the research realm, many parts of the academy unknowingly promulgate inferior research by internalizing performance metrics. The convenience sampling of internal peer comparison means that we are in danger of misjudging ourselves to be excellent. The action required here is better education of the tourism academy, more self-critique, and more engagement with elite research outside of our tourism academic bubble. Collaboration with colleagues from leading institutions outside the tourism field provides one avenue for broadening our understanding of research quality and impact. We need to learn, to compare, to understand what is meant by teaching and research excellence, and to improve our performance.

We also need to take a lead in ensuring that we compile and publish key metrics for our subject area. Here subject associations such as ATHE and CAUTHE can play a key role. But even with their efforts, data are patchy, particularly at the international level. We need an international umbrella organization of subject associations, and one of its key tasks should be to coordinate and encourage the establishment of a comprehensive international-quality data set for tourism higher education.

We also need to ensure we fight for recognition and representation in every strategic institution of higher education—by this we mean research councils, research assessment panels, “mother subject” academic societies, and the like—for this is where the rules for excellence are determined. For example, in the UK Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, tourism was not mentioned, peripheral, and had to answer to the rules of the Management research panel. For the 2013 exercise, tourism is in the title of an assessment panel, has two representatives on that panel, and has contributed to the rule-making of that panel. This significant advance resulted from effective lobbying by individuals and the national subject association.

A greater shift in views about tourism within the wider academy is more likely to be achieved by responding to the second challenge, by highlighting and developing the strengths of tourism not captured by immediate published metrics. As noted earlier, student satisfaction with their programs is generally in line with other subjects, as are examples of teaching innovation and national citations and awards for teaching. This points to a direction that has been picked up and developed by initiatives such as the Tourism Education Futures Initiative and the BEST Education Network referred to earlier. At their heart, such initiatives are about positioning today’s education provision to meet future challenges. For TEFI, this has meant bringing to the fore in education programs a set of values that provide students with the foundation to meet the uncertainties presented by the future: these values have been distilled as ethics, stewardship, knowledge, professionalism, and mutuality (Sheldon, Fesenmaier, and Tribe 2011). The importance of this is to place educational institutions in a position to be leaders in societal and tourism industry shifts and to create responsible leaders for the future. Tourism of course is not uniquely placed for such developments, but as a relatively new field of study that is not set in tight disciplinary boundaries (Tribe 1997), it does lend itself well both to drawing on a broad range of topics and issues and to using a wide range of approaches and methods of research. Together these make tourism well suited to provide the sort of educational experiences that will meet the challenges of a world of increasing complexity. Using tourism as a vehicle, not just for students’ immediate employment needs but for bringing together a whole range of challenges that are present in the practice of tourism, from ecological and environmental issues to effective managerial practice and ethical behavior, provides the subject with a setting that is well placed to provide the kind of education that is needed for future leaders.

This is not easily measured by existing systems but it provides the subject with a powerful case to be a part of the academy. However, attracting quality students to the field remains a challenge, and differing industry and academic aspirations regarding graduate skills and capabilities impacts on the employability of graduates. In some countries, there has been a shift away from the more liberal education articulated here toward a more vocational and business-oriented curriculum. This erosion of the curriculum is a concern, and urgent action is needed to redress this issue by “redisciplining” the tourism curriculum. Therefore, the challenge of making the case for tourism as a legitimate and distinct area of study still remains, but broadening the focus and articulating how graduates can contribute to a better world provides a strong starting position.

The third challenge is about broadening the managerial gaze. As explained earlier in this article, the focus here has been on the managerial gaze and the various metrics and indicators that are likely to be readily available to managers and are used to make decisions about institutions. Given the competitive world of higher education and the prominence of league tables based on metrics, this is not surprising. But here tourism can progress an agenda that is not just relevant to itself but also surely to all academics and all subjects. The action required here is for tourism to join forces across the disciplines and national boundaries of universities, for there has been a relentless colonization of university agendas by neoliberal management by simple objectives (i.e., metrics). We urgently need to redress this balance and recapture a deep and complex meaning of higher education.