New directions in the sociology of tourism

This review article starts with an examination of the shifting nature of tourism discourse from the 1960s up to the present, and then focuses on seven topics that we consider to be on the forefront of current developments in the sociological study of tourism: emotions, sensory experiences, materialities, gender, ethics, authentication and the philosophical groundings of tourism theories. We find that in recent years the sociology of tourism was marked by three general trends: the growing application of specific novel theories from other fields to tourism, the examination of new facets of touristic phenomena and an intensified inquiry into the status of tourism as an intellectual or cultural project. We conclude that while the application of a range of novel theoretical perspectives and facets largely reflects the postmodern move away from binary thinking and concepts, the sociology of tourism still makes little contribution back to the discipline of sociology, and will need to address important emergent topics such as deglobalization and current nationalistic movements towards isolationism, to do so.