Contemporary Tourism: Diversity and Change: 8 (Tourism Social Science Series) - Hardcover

Cohen, Erik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0080442447 ISBN 13: 9780080442440

Publisher: Elsevier Science, 2004

Synopsis

For individual actors in economic activities (ie. production, exchanges), conventions and structures represent two different types of opportunity or constraint. Conventions refer to values, rules and representations that influence economic behaviour. Structures refer to patterns of resource interdependencies existing among members of any social system. This book contributes to the current rapprochement between economics and sociology. It examines the fact that individuals use rules and interdependencies to forward their own interests, while living in social environments where everyone does the same. The authors argue that to construct durable organizations and viable markets, they need to be able to handle both. However, thus far, economists and sociologists have not been able to reconcile the relationship between these two types of constraints on economic activity. "Conventions and Structures in Economic Organization" seeks to bridge this gap and should appeal to students and scholars in both economics and sociology, offering them new ideas about how they can cooperate in unsuspected ways to combine their interdisciplinary efforts.

About this title

Review:

"This is a valued retrospective, very important reading for undergraduates in gaining perspectives of the development of critical debates in tourism. Postgraduate students will similarly find a number of arenas of valid commentary in this work in order to gain the trajectories of knowledge, and to be able to reflect on contemporary turns of debates and interpretation."
-David Crouch, University of Derby, TOURISM MANAGEMENT (in press)

Synopsis:

This volume brings together Cohen's principle articles on the sociology of tourism, published over the last three decades. Part one collects his major theoretical papers, starting with the pioneering articles of the 1970's, which contributed to the opening of the field of tourism for social science research, up to the recent work on the ongoing process of change in contemporary tourism. Part two features the author's work on the many-sided interfaces between tourism and other domains - such as religion, crime and language. Part three includes several case studies, representative of diverse aspects of the author's empirical research. The introduction places the author's work in the context of the development of the field, while the concluding chapter outlines the challenges that future developments in tourism will pose to its study.

About this edition

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0080442447
• ISBN 13: 9780080442440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 398