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Annals of Tourism Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/annals
A new approach to understanding tourism practices
Bertine Bargeman ⁎ , Greg Richards
Breda University of Applied Sciences, Academy for Leisure and Events, Mgr. Hopmansstraat 15, 4817 JT Breda, the Netherlands
A R T I C L E I N F O
Associate editor: Konstantinos Andriotis Keywords:
Tourism participation Practice theory approach Actor-context dichotomy Interactions
Ritual chains
A B S T R A C T
In spite of renewed attention for practices in tourism studies, the analysis of practices is often isolated from theories of practice. This theoretical paper identi fies the main strands of practice theory and their relevance and application to tourism research, and develops a new approach to applying practice theory in the study of tourism participation. We propose a conceptual model of tourism practices based on the work of Collins (2004), which emphasises the role of rituals in generating emotional responses. This integrated approach can focus on individuals interacting in groups, as well as explaining why people join and leave speci fic practices. Charting the shifting of individuals between practices could help to illuminate the dynamics and complexity of tourism systems.
Introduction
Much attention has been paid recently to the ‘practice turn’, and practice theories have increasingly been utilised in the social sciences and tourism studies (Cohen & Cohen, 2019; RØpke, 2009; Spaargaren, Weenink, & Lamers, 2016). As de Souza Bispo (2016) explains, the practice turn emerged in the 1990s, based on the idea that a practice is an organized constellation of human activities.
Important aspects of human life were seen not as simply the activity of individuals, but as practices, or the organized context-related activities of groups of people. The practice turn represented a move away from structuralism (also reflected in the poststructuralist turn in leisure studies (Rojek, 1995)), but is also marked by a concern to understand the role of practices as recursive producers and products of social structures. In the analysis of practices, agency and social structure are seen as having a reciprocal in fluence on each other (Giddens, 1984; Lamers, van der Duim, & Spaargaren, 2017; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001). Based on the definitions of Reckwitz (2002) and Nicolini (2012), Lamers et al. (2017, 56) describe practices as routinised ‘doings and sayings’ performed by knowledgeable and capable human actors (carriers of the practice), involving material objects and infrastructures.
Renewed interest in practice theory is particularly signi ficant in the field of tourism and leisure studies, the relevance of which has arguably been diminished by a focus on consumption and individualism (Arai & Pedlar, 2003). Focussing on the individual and the consumption of tourism may mean we lose sight of the context of tourism consumption, and the role of individual actors in (re) producing the structures that constrain their travel behaviour. Practice theories o ffer a potential means of overcoming the actor- structure divide, and tourism and leisure provide interesting fields in which to study such interaction (see de Souza Bispo, 2016;
Lamers et al., 2017; Ren, James, & Halkier, 2019). Indeed, tourism and leisure activities often provide the examples of social practices in the mainstream social science literature, as evidenced by studies of practices such as winter sports, cooking, music and film (Shuker, 2017; Southerton, Olsen, Warde, & Cheng, 2012; Thorpe, 2011; Turner, 2002).
Tourism scholars have often referred to practices, as in Jaakson's (2004) analysis of cruise ship passengers on a port visit, hosting as a social practice (Janta & Christou, 2019), the studies by Conran (2011) and Lacey, Peel, and Weiler (2012) of the interactions
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.102988
Received 7 September 2019; Received in revised form 9 May 2020; Accepted 19 June 2020
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