Tourism, Change and Time: Time Concepts and Understanding Tourism Related Change PDF

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1 Paper accepted for the CAUTHE conference, Fremantle, February 2009. (Draft as of 1 November 2008) TOURISM, CHANGE AND TIME: TIME CONCEPTS AND UNDERSTANDING TOURISM RELATED CHANGE C. Michael Hall Department of Management University of Canterbury Private Bag 4800 Christchurch New Zealand 8140 michae...

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Paper accepted for the CAUTHE conference, Fremantle, February 2009. (Draft as of 1 November 2008) TOURISM, CHANGE AND TIME: TIME CONCEPTS AND UNDERSTANDING TOURISM RELATED CHANGE C. Michael Hall Department of Management University of Canterbury Private Bag 4800 Christchurch New Zealand 8140 [email protected] Abstract Change is an essential element of the study of tourism. In order to be able to understand change it is also necessary to understand time yet there is surprisingly little research on the implications of the various dimensions of time on tourism. The paper identifies some of the key concepts of time as they are applied in tourism and comments on some of their implications. It is divided into two main sections. The first discusses time as a physical dimension, a view of time as something that can be measured precisely. This has implications for technical definitions of tourism, the conduct of time-series analysis, and the understanding of tourism systems. The second section examines time as a social construct. Social time indicates time with content: tourism related phenomena in the process of change. Key time related concepts discussed here include timespace compression, time-space convergence, time-space distanciation and timegeography. Social time is also connected to the understanding of historical periods in which tourism is variously implicated. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of scale of analysis in understanding change and the connectivities between different scales, using the example of climate change. Key words: change, physical time, social time, time-budget, scale, panarchy Introduction Change is an essential element of the study of tourism. It is the stuff of which papers and articles are written, and which also provides the basis for tourism education. Yet in order to understand change there also needs to be a clear understanding of concepts of time and how they are applied in different

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circumstances and situations. Time is undoubtedly integral to tourism management and theory and is witnessed in a number of terms to be found in monographs and journals (Table 1). Different disciplinary fields have different understandings and emphases in considerations of time (Hall, 2005a). However, there is a relatively poorly articulated theory of time in tourism studies, although the area is increasingly receiving greater attention (e.g. Krakover, 2002; Hall, 2005a, 2005b; Weiermair, Pechlaner, and Bieger, 2006). The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the key concepts of time as they are applied in tourism and briefly comment on some of their implications for understanding tourism related change. It is divided into two main sections. The first discusses time as a physical dimension, a view of time as something that can be measured precisely. The second examines time as a social construct. Social time indicates time with content: tourism related phenomena in the process of change. INSERT TABLE 1 HERE Physical Time Physical time is integral to understanding technical definitions of tourism. Time, along with space, is used to determine what constitutes international and domestic tourism as well as differentiate between tourism and other forms of mobility such as migration (Bell and Ward 2000; Hall, 2005a; Bell and Brown, 2006). According to this approach a phenomena is defined, and hence to an extent determined, by the application of the application of a quantitative measure of time. Physical time provides an important framework in which events are often placed so as to infer cause-and-effect relationships via dynamic models that rely on time-series data and analysis. Such applications of physical time are important, for example, to the measurement of distance which is integral to transport and economic spatial studies of tourism behaviour, as well as to the evaluation of economic and other impacts. However, arguably it is the relationship between time and change in physical and environmental systems that the issue of time has had the most intellectual impact on tourism studies. The understanding of environmental systems has always been influenced by reflections on time. The development of modern earth sciences, such as geology, climatology, geomorphology and ecology lie rooted in a shift in understanding of time from a creationist to an evolutionary and geological perspective – from what may be termed shallow time to deep time (Or from about 6,000 years BP to 13.7 billion years BP). Our understanding of landscape change and climate change, for example, is dependent on such an important mental shift in temporal thinking allowing as it did the coupling of environmental change with historical

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dating methods. However, initial understandings of change even within a deep time perspective tended to see change as a linear process. This perhaps saw its most significant application in ecology with respect to the idea of succession. This was the idea that, “following disturbances, there was a progressive change leading to a new equilibrium state called the ‘climax’, in which the vegetation achieved its full potential, given the prevailing soil, climate and socio-economic conditions” (Thornes 2003: 133). The succession concept was extremely significant in environmental management for most of the last century, and directly influenced tourism with respect to the way that natural resources, and national parks and conservation areas in particular, were managed. However, it can also be argued that the linear succession model also provided an influential analogue for life-cycle models whether they be in terms of marketing, firm development or that of a destination (e.g., Cooper, 1992; Butler, 2005). Although Hall (2007) argues that the lack of a workable ergodic hypothesis has substantially hindered understanding tourism’s relationship to the environment. A system is ergodic if the long-term observation of a single motion leads to the same frequency of measured values as the observation of many motions with different starting points. In ecology an ergodic hypothesis is an expedient research strategy that links space and time so that different areas in space are taken to represent different stages in time (Bennett and Chorley 1978). For example, with respect to ecological succession whereby different locations within an area at one point in time are taken to represent the sequence of changes in species composition that would occur in that area over longer periods of time. Nevertheless, a linear notion of time has significant restrictions. ‘Linear science complemented the dreams of a nineteenth century society that was rule bound, reliable, predictable and unlikely to shock, a society that believed in eternal progress through the manipulation and exploitation of natural and human resources’ (Marshall and Zohar, 1997: 248). Conceptualising change as linear meant that thinking was dominated by an understanding that small forces would produce proportionately small responses. Doubling the force would double the response. Linear phenomenon were also regarded as being kept in check by negative feedbacks that tended to subdue strong departures from the norm in time, meaning that understanding of systems was dominated by a belief that they would react to changes in ways that would tend to minimise the effects of the initial disturbance (Thornes 2003). However, from the 1960s on the linear model of change came to be challenged and overthrown in the physical sciences by recognition on non-linear systems change, although linear thinking continues to linger in many texts in the social sciences to the present-day. Non-linear systems change recognises that big

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effects do not necessarily have big causes and that change can be rapid and unexpected and triggered by small events. Simple changes in inputs may appear insignificant but may be sufficient to lead systems across thresholds that unexpectedly and rapidly shift behaviour. Non-linear thinking has become extremely influential with respect to environmental management and concerns of sustainability, particularly the notion of resilience, that a natural system will respond to management perturbations by adopting a new equilibrium. In tourism this has arguably been most influential with respect to the notion of carrying capacity, a concept that seemed to offer potential for systems control but which is now more or less discredited although elements of it still remain with respect to indicator selection and the attachment to hard targets as part of sustainable tourism (e.g. Miller and Twining-Ward 2005). As Gunderson and Holling (2002: xxii) comment with respect to the prescriptions of environmental systems control: They seem to replace inherent uncertainty with the spurious certainty of ideology, precise numbers or action. The theories implicit in these examples ignore multiple stable states… The theories ignore the possibility that the slow erosion of key controlling processes can abruptly flip an ecosystem or economy into a different state that might be effectively irreversible. The work of Holling and others has increasingly focussed on developing a theory of adaptive change “to help us to understand the changes occurring globally” (Holling et al., 2002: 5). An adaptive system is one in which the system tends to move through four recurring phases, that are referred to as adaptive cycles. The four phases are rapid growth, conservation, release, and reorganization, followed again by rapid growth (Holling 2001) (Figures 1 and 2). The application of adaptive systems to tourism has only occurred since the late 1990s and then primarily in connection to sustainability and the conceptualization of tourism systems (e.g. see Hunter, 1997; Farrell and Twinning-Ward, 2004; Hall, 2008), although the related concepts of chaos and complexity are being increasingly used as a metaphor in tourism studies (e.g. McKercher, 1999; Russell and Faulkner, 2004; Hall, 2005a). However, tourism studies has not readily responded to the multiple scales at which change occurs, the interrelationships between scales and the different timescale of change at each scale – a situation referred to as panarchy, ‘the cross-scale, interdisciplinary and dynamic nature of the theory whose essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and the unpredictable’ (Holling et al., 2002: 5). INSERT FIGURES 1 AND 2 HERE

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The application of the adaptive cycle model to tourism is still in its early stages and its capacity to explain change over time for both social and physical elements of tourism systems. Nevertheless, the model is regarded as having significant appeal (Farrell and Twinning-Ward, 2004). Present weakness appears to lie primarily in the explanation of collapse which appears to depend more on external variables and the internal dynamics of the system. Periodic shifts from one stable state to another are ‘mediated by changes in the slow variables (the horizontal axis variables in the catastrophe theory) that suddenly trigger fast variable response, or escape’ (Holling et al., 2002: 35). Nevertheless, even despite weaknesses in the model it is likely that it will increasingly influence consideration of change in the tourism context, even if used just as a metaphor or heuristic device. Such a situation will be significant, Thornes (2003) observation with respect to adaptive cycles that, ‘If it overturns the idea that systems are generally in a stable equilibrium state and hence resilient in the engineering sense, this will represent a significant step forward’ applies as much to tourism as it does to geomorphology. Social Time The second broad perspective of time is that of time as social change (both internal and external to an individual), where the emphasis is on the content of time. There is a wide range of concepts associated with social time that are utilised in tourism (see table 2). Notwithstanding, recent debates on TRINET, time and space are inextricably linked for the study of tourism. The definition of what constitutes tourism for example is dependent on the identification of human movement in both dimensions. However, time-space relationships are also integral to understanding tourism processes at various human scales. With respect to globalisation Kelly and Olds (1999: 2), notes that “a key element in contemporary processes of globalisation is not the impact of ‘global’ processes upon another clearly defined scale, but instead the relativisation of scale”. Such relativities occur in relation to time-space convergence (Janelle 1968, 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975) through both ‘space-time distantiation’ and ‘space-time compression’. The former refers to the stretching of social and economic relations over time and space, e.g. through the utilisation of communications technology such as the internet and by advances in transport technology, so that they can be controlled or coordinated over longer periods of time, greater distances, larger areas, and on more scales of activity. The latter involves the intensification of ‘discrete’ events in real time and/or increased velocity of material and non-material flows over a given distance, again this is related to technological change, including communication, transport, and social technologies (Harvey, 19990; Jessop 1999).

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Reductions in the cost and time of movement over space has long been a focus of innovations in transport technology and a feature of the increasing connectivity between different parts of the globe and growth in mobility. For example, in mapping time-space Forer (1978) referred to 'plastic space' noting the manner in which time-space compression had shrunk the United States in relative travel time with each advance in transport technology. In the case of Germany Lanzendorf (2000) reported that the average kilometres travelled per person per year for leisure and vacation increased from 600km in 1976 to just under 1,000 km in 1996. For work related travel it increased 300 km to 500 km in the same period. However, the consequences of changes to travel times and the extent of travel is more than a change in physical relations, instead it reveals a fundamental change in social relations, identities and lifeworlds as time-space convergence implies greater social interaction with others whether it be through face-to-face or virtual contact (Hall, 2005a). The new interaction that results from increased mobilities brings the life paths of others with small space-time prisms in contact with those that are significantly larger therefore creating a new dialectic of social relations and ways of looking at the other that is tied up with the notion of the impact of various worldviews or gazes on how the world is perceived and understood (Urry, 1990). Janelle (1973) uses the notion of extensibility to describe the extent to which the social relations of many individuals in the developed world has increasingly become extended over time and space, often even without people even realising it (by what they watch on television). In such a situation personal boundaries in spacetime change and, in effect, we bring globalisation home with corresponding changes to relative accessibility (Janelle and Hodge, 2000). Such new sets of mobile relations has significant affects on social relations, senses of belonging, consumption and identity in which tourism is deeply implicated (e.g. see Shaw and Thomas, 2006; Jones, 2008; Gössling et al., 2009). Therefore, the degree of potential interaction and the implications of one gaze for another depends upon the 'positioning' of individuals in the time-space contexts of activity. One of the prime ways in which interaction and positioning of individuals has come to be understood is via time-geography, a method that has recently been re-discovered by those that have taken the ‘mobile turn’ in sociology and cultural studies and which builds on increased awareness of temporality in sociology (e.g. Maines 1987, 1989). Time-geography is concerned with the constraints that shape the routines of day-to-day life and shares with structuration theory an emphasis upon the significance of the practical character of daily activities, in circumstances of co-presence, for the constitution of social conduct, while also stressing the routine character of daily life “connected with features of the human body, its means of mobility and communication, and its path through the ‘life cycle’” (Giddens 1984: 111). Although originally used to

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study ‘routine’ daily behaviour, space-time convergence has meant that tourism has become part of the routine, at least in the developed world, and the tracking of space-time paths has become an increasingly significant approach to studying tourist behaviour (e.g. see Shoval & Isaacson 2007a, 2007b). A significant concept that is closely connected to understanding space-time behaviour is that of ‘time-budget’. The concept of time budget – the amount of time that can be allocated to a specific activity – is as significant for understanding tourism and travel behaviour as is that of the economic budget, although most analysis tends to pay far more attention to the latter than the former. Research suggests that daily travel-time budgets have not changed substantially over time, but instead what has become significant is the ability to travel further at a lower per unit cost within a given time budget (Schafer, 2000). This observation also points to the interconnectedness of economic and time budgets in that those that can afford too will tend to utilise their purchasing power so as to spend less of their tourism time engaged in travelling and correspondingly more at the destination (Hall 2005a). The faster the mode of transport the higher the cost. The accessibility of destinations is a product of the time it takes to get there. Unfortunately, tourism scholars tend to spend much more of their time studying the wealthier elements in society in terms of both time and money, those who are the more mobile, rather than those with time constraints because of cultural, economic or other constraints. Flavell (2001: 389) reminds us that to assess “the extent or nature of movement, … you have in fact to spend a lot of the time studying things that stand still: the borders, institutions and territories of nation states; the sedimented ‘home’ cultures of people [who] do not move”. The opportunity to take time to travel has always depended on the right to be absent from home and work, with such rights having historically been reserved for very few groups (usually male) in the population (Frändberg, 1998). As Giddens (1984: xxv) observed, ‘time-space “fixity” also means social fixity’. Although consumer research has not generally connected space to time with respect to the mobility of consumers there is a growing recognition of the importance of how people perceive, understand and use time with respect to consumption (e.g. Hirschman 1987; Bergadaa 1990; Carmone 1991; Hornik & Zakay 1996; Davies & Omer 1996; Cotte et al. 2004; Holbrook and Schindler 2004) – what has been referred to as their timestyle (Anderson & Golden 1989; Denton 1994; Cotte & Ratneshwar 2001, 2003). For example, Cotte and Ratneshwar (2001) suggested that individuals can be located on three different continuums based on their need for social interaction during free time (an alone versus social dimension); their temporal orientation or time perspective (a past versus future dimension); and, their approach to time management (a single task versus multi-task dimension). While a further research need is the extent to

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which there may be cross-cultural differences with respect to use and perception of time while engaged in tourism behaviour (Brislin & Kim 2003). Another way in which social time has been utilised is with respect to describing broader stages or periods of historical development (e,g, Braudel, 1980; Wallerstein, 1988, 1991). Such approaches are not only implicit in describing histories of tourism but are also for describing the time divide between patterns of economic and social relations, e.g. preindustrial and industrial society or und...