Regimes of Value in Tourism

<p>Drawing from ethnographic work in five continents this book demonstrates how different regimes of value in tourism can coexist collide and compete across a varied geographic terrain. Much theory in tourism economics defines ‘value’ as a measure of monetary worth a concept governing commodity exchange and a gauge for tourist satisfaction. The research included in this volume shows that tourism not only feeds off existing conceptions of value as a monetary category but that it is also instrumental in reproducing and reinforcing those subjective morally heightened and highly intangible values that make tourism and the tourism economy a complex social cultural political and psychological phenomenon. The book pushes the debate about the tourism economy beyond a simplistic understanding of producer-consumer relations instead suggesting a refocus on the social spatial and temporal lags in tourism production and the ensuing differentiated regimes of values.</p><p>This book was published as a special issue of the <em>Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change</em>.</p>