an interview with Michael Hall
the third in our series, part of our 'Tourism Interviews project'
Following our interviews with Greg Richards and Richard Butler, this week we feature Michael Hall’s reflections.
Professor Hall holds the position of Distinguished Professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has published prolifically and with great authority on tourism for some decades. For scholars of tourism, he will need no introduction.
Here are his frank reflections, in response to TH:TM’s questions. We’d welcome your own views on Michael’s answers. (Free) subscribers to the substack can comment beneath the interview.
(A short accompanying piece on Michael’s interview features in The “Good Tourism” Blog.)
Various authors have set out different ‘platforms’ and perspectives over the last 50 years. Jafar Jafari set out advocacy, cautionary, adaptancy, knowledge-based, and public platforms (Jafari, 1990, 2001, 2007) . Do you think the perspectives and writing from the experts generally, accurately reflected the ‘state of the debates’, and the reality, of tourism as it developed? With the benefit of hindsight, do you think ‘tourism studies’ got it right?
Trying to figure out whether tourism studies got it right depends on where you’re coming from. I think that much of the writing about platforms and turns is much more normative than what is often admitted. Personally, I have never been a fan of Jafari’s platforms or work and I find that much of the ‘debate’ is somewhat artificial and homogenised and doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. I think there is probably less genuine debate than ever before, especially in the various journals of record, which is disappointing. Use of rejoinders and commentaries has diminished over time and it is often difficult to get people to write such pieces, I believe because some worry about the consequences of criticism another’s work. And I’m not sure how much comment on TRINET or other platforms counts as part of such debates, although maybe it is better than nothing.
For me, as an Australian and with a PhD in geography, and working mainly in Australia and New Zealand although with my feet (toes?) in other countries as well, I have seen the gradual obliteration of the recreation and leisure institutional heritage of tourism and its dominance by business thinking and business schools. There are still some hold outs but over time, from an institutional perspective, the various competition for resources between departments and the increasingly corporate vision of universities and higher education has pushed tourism studies down a business path. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be examining the business of tourism – we should. It is just that other approaches and perspectives have gone into the background. Plus, because of institutional change, that has often come to mean working with or for business, rather than more critical perspectives of what business does. But maybe much of my attitude comes from a much more Idealistic notion of what the university and scholarship should be rather than what it is!
For me it is important that there are a range of perspectives, including with respect to method, and debate between them in tourism studies, but I don’t really think that is the case. There is far too much focus on impact factors and journal ranking, as well as meeting the methodological requirements of editors, some of which are worryingly narrow. All of this means that we have far too little rigorous research on sustainability and behavioural interventions, hardly anything on policy, and instead far too many studies that look at the effect of a variable to the nth degree and seem somewhat divorced from the reality of people who are tourists or who work in the industry or in the communities that have become destinations.
I also think that maybe because of the overall politics of academia and, maybe, possible lack of intellectual self-confidence there really hasn’t been enough attention to the distinctive sociology of tourism knowledge and the extent to which tourism is a legitimate field of study in its own right – like migration studies. I have always argued that tourism is, or should be, the social science of voluntary temporary mobility, with all that entails. However, I somehow think that I’m a bit of a loner on that one! I agree that disciplinary spaces are simultaneously fluid and institutional but I think it is important that tourism researchers lay claim to their own space, and for more than functional means, but to genuinely engage in the intellectual challenges that tourism provides, as well as the associated social and environmental challenges. And arguably these are so great I think intellectual leadership is needed more than ever in tourism studies. But it doesn’t come from revisiting Jafari’s platforms!
Is there a book – any book, fiction or non-fiction - that profoundly shaped your thinking about tourism as a human activity? Tell us just a little about it, and why?
Definitely no tourism book. I thought Urry’s The Tourist Gaze was wonderfully written but just wrong; while from an analytical and more positivist perspective, Stephen Smith’s early works were very good. Linda Richter’s work on the Politics of Tourism in Asia was a good read but didn’t have much of a theoretical framework. If anything, the most influential works for me came from outside of what would be described as mainstream tourist studies books. So Alfred Runte’s various works on the US national parks and the role of the railroad companies in establishing both parks and tourism was very influential in my own PhD and my longstanding interest in wilderness and tourism’s role in conservation. I would also probably give honorable mentions to historian Donald Worster’s work on Romantic Ecology on the social construction of ecological thinking as well as, more recently, to Dean Bavington’s tremendous examination of resource management and the issues associated with managerial ecology. As a geographer I would also have to note the work of people like Tim O’Riordan and Bruce Mitchell in the resource management area as well as Yi-Fu Tuan’s various works on landscape and place. However, intellectually, I think that the works of David Harvey and his longstanding engagement with capital and contemporary social, economic and environmental crisis have influenced me the most. Apart from the sustained rigour and sensibilities of his analysis, it is also exciting to read someone over time so that you can see how their ideas develop and you observe their own struggles to best express what they want to say. To Harvey I would also add the writing of Stephen Lukes on power who has influenced me all the way from my undergrad through to the present in helping to explain why things happen. While, as someone who also has a background in ecology and biogeography, the works of Edward Wilson from island biogeography through to consilience and ecosystem thinking are vital, although some of his work on sociobiology is a bit more controversial. I would probably also add that the lives of naturalists Darwin, Hooker, Wallace, Leopold, and Muir have always been of interest. And I have credited elsewhere a 1973 National Geographic article on John Muir which I read as being the starting point for me for my interests in conservation and, then, tourism.
In terms of non-fiction, I would have to say Pico Iyer and, to a lesser extent D.H. Lawrence. Both beautiful writers with much to say about travel and place and the social relationships that exist in the travel experience, while apart from their works I also loved the writings of Bruce Chatwin. I would also confess that travel and encounters with the other is also full of the absurd, so I think that Spike Milligan’s war memoirs and Clive James’ experiences as an Australian in the UK fill that bill. And, I must admit that I miss seeing new works from Clive James terribly as, like us all, he always acknowledged that he was all to human but was still able to take delight, happiness and hope from small things.
In recent decades we have had various ‘turns’ and ‘platforms’ relating to localism, ethical behaviour, social justice, decolonisation and degrowth, amongst others. Do any of these strike you as either particularly insightful or particularly limited in their approach?
Well I’m interested in all those things myself so I clearly have to say yes!!! But to be honest I don’t find them particular insightful because I regard them as being obvious. In the sense that I can’t believe that we shouldn’t be concerned with ethical behaviour, social justice or decolonisation. For me, they should be fundamental to what tourism and tourism studies is about, and any form of development or study for that matter. They have always been of concern to me and I find it pretty damning that they are not of concern to others. I have said in the past that tourism studies is the study of rich white people by rich white people, because to travel you have to be relatively time and money rich, and for so long the academy was dominated by wealthy, white, and usually, males. It is a bit better now – but some of the underlying issues have not gone away with respect to analysis, topics covered, and being genuinely critical, and acknowledging who is looking at who.
I grew up in Margate, at the time mass tourism was shifting from there to Spain, and I also grew up in a family when any form of domestic travel was a big thing (International travel came much later or was tied to migration). But I have never really had the feeling that domestic travel by ‘common’ people, is much of a focus for tourism academics, instead, even though domestic tourism is the mainstay of tourism, the academic focus is on the more exciting and ‘sexy’ international travel. There is just insufficient research on and assistance for increasing access to tourism and travel and social justice issues.
Localism is interesting, but we also need to understand it in the context of globalisation and contemporary space-time distanciation and compression. When living in Margate a daytrip, say for a drive in the country, was regarded as an adventure. After my family migrated to Australia a holiday, if we had one, would be a five hour drive and 5-6 days at a holiday camp. These days that would be localism! As I once asked why do we have to travel so far or so fast to be happy? I don’t know, but I think it is partly to do with consumerism and being convinced (?) that it will make you happy. I love seeing friends around the world when I travel but I am perfectly happy being local and, if I could afford, I would love having a small holiday house nearby so I could cook, walk, read, spend time with my partner and those others I care for and go fishing, and I would be very happy. So maybe it is also generational and having particular expectations. However, at the same time, from a more academic perspective, it means we have to have a far better grasp of the social practices and habits of tourism.
Which leads me to degrowth! The name is not a good seller for the idea and some of the writing and work associated with it is far too esoteric to have affect. That said getting a better balance between supply and demand is essential. It is partly why I prefer to use steady state tourism to degrowth, but that never caught on, so degrowth it is, at least for now. It can be made to work. We need to encourage decision-makers to think differently and not just use crude visitor numbers as metrics, but think in terms of costs and benefits and overall yield. I can come up with tourism scenarios of more trips but less environmental impacts and emissions, by not travelling so far or fast. Will it work??? Possibly, but the airlines may miss out somewhat and I think there are too many entrenched interests and attitudes to overcome, but maybe it is a start. Although, to be sanguine, given the mess we have with climate and global environmental change, it is probably going to be too late.
The term ‘overtourism’ became de rigueur during 2017. Google trends suggests that its rise to prominence followed much publicised, but small, protests in Barcelona, mirrored by other expressions of discontent in Venice, Amsterdam and elsewhere. It soon became a point of reference in the media, in academia and in global tourism organisations such as the WTTC. What do you make of this ? What does this newish term mean to you ?
To me it was another example of following fashion. This is not to say that it wasn’t a significant issue for Barcelona and Venice and elsewhere, but it just became a new bandwagon to jump on. The concept had been around in various forms throughout the history of tourism but particularly since the late 1960s on. What was once carrying capacity or the ‘golden hordes’ is now overtourism.
Overtourism is perhaps easier to say or think about than carrying capacity but, it to, will go through an issue-attention cycle and fade away I think. The response of the WTTC, the UNWTO and various governments is also really as expected. Techo-rational solutions are usually proposed but they do not deal with the underlying issues of consumption, contestation for space, and justice. Furthermore, when the economic and employment situation is so tender or fragile the opportunities for degrowth are even less, given that so many governments and political parties are hooked on growthism and they cannot see otherwise of dealing with the problem. As I have argued elsewhere it means that they frame the problem in a certain way which means that it can only be “solved” in a particular way as well. Which would be fine, except that it is not solved! So we need a paradigm shift, but I cannot see one coming soon given the reactionary nature of most high level decision-making.
In the nineteenth century Thomas Cook and others of his era championed the growth of leisure travel, and connected it to a sort of humanism – tourism’s growth represented the fruits of modernity that should be made more widely available to all. Today travel tends to be discussed more in the context of a culture of limits – as if we have reached the upper limit of what our planet and its inhabitants will take, environmentally and culturally. Where do you stand on the question of societal limits and future possibilities ?
I think it is more a case of environmental and planetary limits rather than societal limits. Societal limits tend to arise more from intolerance and the rabid right wing nationalism that is unfortunately more common these days. That is not to say that there are not issues of capacity as there are, but they are things that can be managed. I’m thinking more of societal limits in terms of being visited by the other, the xenophobic reaction to ‘bloody foreigners’.
Thomas Cook and others did champion travel as a kind of humanism, although in his case it was also a temperance inspired mission as well – which clearly failed! The notion of it being available to all was always a lovely idea but the inequality to access to tourism just reflects the wider inequalities in our societies today, except now it’s also overlain with racism and nationalism as well.
There is, I think, a substantial difference between environmental limits and cultural limits. In the case of environmental limits we are already passed a number of planetary tipping points and, frankly, the environmental future is looking very messy indeed. Cultural limits are a different issue though and have much more of willingness to accept difference. As has always been recognised, tourism with respect to culture and heritage has always been as much of a force for good as it can be a negative. And we get much more damage, I think, as a result of the entwinning of culture and its presentation with the mis-use of power, the politicisation of heritage, history and identity, and commodification, as well as perhaps an unwillingness to recognise the fluidity of culture and the invention of tradition(s).
The environmental future I find very glum, we are causing extinctions and biodiversity loss at an appalling rate, and while tourism provides a justification for conservation, it is nevertheless still causing damage from emissions and other factors. There really are environmental and planetary limits to follow if you do not want rapid global environmental change. It is that simple. However, the societal limits are embedded in a whole range of other politics. Given the resurgence of right wing nationalism and the capacity of contemporary neoliberal capitalism to continually adapt, the social future looks rather bleak to me, and tourism is wound up within that with respect to other debates about mobility and migration, but in ways that the tourism academy never really address.
For me the reality is that the tourism academy doesn’t deal with the inherent politics of tourism in a wider societal context nor its place in contemporary capitalism. That is also why I now think that tourism needs to engage in degrowth and right-sizing, which doesn’t mean less trips at all, but does mean considering alternative tourism futures where we perhaps don’t travel so far or so fast and, when we do, we pay the real cost of travel.
Global international tourism has increased massively, from around 55 million in the mid 1950s, up to 1.5 billion today. One could see this as inspiring, or perhaps frightening and unsustainable. How do you see it?
In one sense I see it very much as unsustainable. Trouble is the international tourism figures are too crude a metric but, of course, it is what we tend to use because it is easy. The critical thing is just the total amount of travel miles that are being clocked up, the total distance that is being covered. It isn’t so much the amount of international travel by number of trips that is the problem but it is the increase in the total distance of travel for both individuals and in aggregate that has occurred over the years which is the problem. That, and also people are moving faster – which all adds up to more energy consumed and more emissions.
I would also probably find it inspiring at a social level if travel was more equitably distributed and accessible – but it is not. Much of the total distance travelled is undertaken by a small number of people who don’t pay the real cost of the impacts of what they do. These are the people who should be at the forefront of trying to make aviation and international tourism more sustainable, while overall mitigation and adaptation should be central to quality tourism development.
Covid-19 hit the two things tourism and hospitality rely upon hard: travel and conviviality. A variety of ‘lessons’ have been mooted, from the need to travel less and value the local, to a need to get back to growth. What, if any, are the ‘tourism’ lessons that societies should learn from the experience of Covid-19 ? (300-1000)
I’m not sure any real lessons have been learned from COVID-19 unfortunately. At least not good ones. And certainly not to travel less. There may be more value for the local but that doesn’t necessarily mean travelling less, it is just that they may appreciate their local area more and what it has, but turning that into substantial changes in behaviour is extremely unlikely in the main. Some people may be put off by travelling a little because of health concerns but for many there will be pent up demand for travel.
The real lesson that should be learned is that the risk of the pandemic was always there, and other pandemics are waiting on the horizon. Pandemics are inherent to life on Earth, it is just that high speed mobility and humanity’s destruction of nature now make them more likely and impactful. Similarly, there are other types of social, environmental and economic risks on the horizon. Overall, the level of risk awareness, management and preparedness in tourism at the high levels is pretty appalling. In small business it is understandable, as they often are more concerned about the next customer coming through the door than the long-term, but in major organisations at regional, national and international level it is just bizarre. I think for me it does not auger well for the future, which is becoming more environmentally and politically risky, that the level of foresight was so poor and therefore the willingness to mitigate many of the risks was absent from policy-making or there was an unwillingness to implement them. In the case of pandemic like events it could be better biosecurity control. In the case of climate change it is reducing emissions and developing appropriate adaptive responses. But, unfortunately, the pandemic, like climate change, just reinforces that responsible government agencies and ministers, together with international and national tourism bodies just do not have the effective and willing leadership to undertake long-term measures, even though the evidence often clearly shows they are economically positive in the long-term. Instead, we are stuck with short-termism and a failure to see the big picture, i.e. how pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss and the economy, and tourism as well of course, are connected to each other.
More than a couple of decades ago Jafari, and others, suggested that ‘tourism’ scholars should look to engage with and publish in the journals of other disciplines and fields. It is often commented upon that academic fields and disciplines can end up like silos, insulated from developments in related fields. How do you see the state of tourism related scholarship? Where should we look for inspiration?
It would probably be one of the few things I would agree with Jafari on! I think that we should publish where we publish because we want to communicate our ideas to an appropriate audience, as simple as that. I completely agree about the problem of academic and intellectual silos and it is vital that we break out of them and that lines of communication and knowledge exchange be established. In order to deal with many contemporary problems we need to try and use different ways of framing and understanding them. However, the issue here is that often our education system lets us down. We have too many people specialising too soon and who are not sufficiently literate in a range of knowledge areas. For me you ideally need to be able to speak at least some of the language of other fields. Unless you can have a common language to communicate in, it is always going to be that much harder to multi-disciplinary or even post-disciplinary work, so yes, we need to engage in a bunch of other areas. Unfortunately, some of the current systems within universities work against that. There’s often too much pressure to publish in some journals and not others because they don’t fulfil a certain metric, even though the journal may be the most appropriate audience. Some of the actions by some universities, for example, to get their staff in certain journals or be first listed author, are just plain against the spirit of research cooperation and intellectual development, and in the long run do more harm than good.
For me a lot of the stuff being published in tourism journals is just plain boring (and I’ll include some of my own co-authored papers in that!) as it is meeting particular requirements, whether grant or institutional, and there is often too much salami slicing of the data to generate papers. Although, admittedly, at times that may also reflect the increased costs of obtaining the data as well. And, although it rarely seems to be commented on, the situation is that when you look at the same data using different methods and theories and coming up with different results. iI just shows how fragile and fragmented our understandings of reality really are, yet, individually, those papers are making knowledge claims as to their contribution and those papers are getting cited by others (which is different from having been read!) and portrayed as something substantive. All in 7,000 to 10,000 words!
For me the really interesting stuff is often occurring on the margins between disciplines where you get the interplay of ideas. However, journals working in that area usually are not so well ranked, so that deters some colleagues from publishing in them or they are similarly concerned with publishing books and book chapters, even though they may also be much more appropriate outlets. But if I think of the really big issues in tourism, such as sustainability, resilience, the nature of consumption, and development, then we need to be able to get out of our silos, read and talk widely at the absolute minimum and, if we can, publish widely as well.
As for where we seek inspiration it will depend on the problem. But, as I said earlier, it is about crossing some borders in what you read and who you have coffee with to see if some new lines of thinking will open up. I also think it is important to go back and read some of the classics in a field as well. Definitely read things before they were easily categorised by Google Scholar! Unfortunately, I think too much tourism scholarship is fashion driven, as evidenced by various turns, and the actions of a range of journal editors and publishers to up their rankings, impacts and attractiveness for downloads. This means that some of the solid reinforcing work is not really followed or published, there is a lack of longitudinal studies, and there are too many dodgy methodological assumption with respect to cross-cultural studies, construct identification and development, and analysis. A lot of work is formulaic and there is also a lack of deeper reading on many topics I think too which leads to a lot of reinvention and sometime relabelling of the wheel. Sorry to be so sanguine but I just struggle with a lot of what is published and, more worryingly, is acceptable for journals. And that is probably one of the more difficult issues because I often think that some papers are written in certain ways because that is what will make it more likely to be published rather than them representing a genuine engagement with intellectual and theoretical issues. So maybe it is a straightjacket of our own making – of which I am also complicit at times. However, I think that even though you sometimes have to do certain things to get a paper published, you still need to try and do another paper that says some things differently, or allows you to bring up thoughts in a different way, and communicate what you really want to say. At least try.
Finally, from your own personal experiences, is there a memory or vignette you can share that might interest or inspire young people interested in the tourism and hospitality industries?
I grew up in the industry, maybe without realising it. My grandfather’s printing firm printed the posters for Dreamland and the Winter Garden in Margate. My mother had a B&B and my stepfather drove taxis. I worked in hospitality and did catering when at university. If I wasn’t an academic I would maybe be an environmental activist or a cook – maybe both, given the need to develop more sustainable food systems, and there are some cook books I want to write. Good service experiences are exciting, no matter what side of the counter you are on as it is nice knowing you have made some sort of difference.
I think for me my most significant memories are serendipitous. Just chance although we can manage it sometimes for our customers. I was in South Africa and there was a cultural performance being put on. I usually hate cultural performances and see them as inauthentic and having all the worst aspects of touristification and I avoid them like the plague. I dislike them almost as much as conference dinners! But I went. It was a Zulu high school group using traditional modes of singing and dancing to get contemporary messages across about AIDS, poverty, violence, a whole range of issues in their lives. It was truly amazing. The cultural performance to the tourists at the lodge (owned by the local tribe) gave these guys a sense of pride, income, and invested money into the community and their school. Their performance was brilliant and they could also understand that the group of us there were genuinely interested in what they were doing. It was one of those moments that you realise that tourism can contribute and make a difference.