“Longing home”

 

- Roger Sheldrake[1] and I

 

Svein Larsen, University of Bergen, Department of Psychosocial Science, Christiesgate 12, N-5015 Bergen, and Stavanger University, Department Norwegian School of Hotel Management, N-4036 Stavanger,

 

Abstract

This paper concerns a tourist longing home. The tourist is travelling, as it is, in the country of Tourism research.

            While inputs are sometimes surprising during the trip, the author (I) wonders whether they are for real or whether they merely represent constructions of some kind or another.

            Souvenirs from the trip leave one important question: is tourism research a sort of fiction, does it exist, is it for real? The premise for this question is that tourism research seldom proves able to return original material (theories and empirical findings) to the generic disciplines within the social sciences (economy, sociology or psychology). Worse yet; tourism research sometimes ignores its sources terminological precision, methodological refinement and the application of established scientific principles. One example of this is the frequent essensialism observed in tourism research. That Roger Sheldrake is a fiction, comes as no surprise. It is more surprising that his field-work searching for the “true meaning” of concepts and events (such as the concept of “swimming pool” [or even the concept of “paradigm”]) accurately illustrates a major problem in tourism research; While tourists go swimming (for example), we, the tourism researchers sometimes discover the “true meaning” of such behaviours. However, only rarely do we propose any accepted normal science methods to falsify their proposals. Even more seldom we actually conduct research to prove our conceptions wrong (or right). We, the tourism researchers, are therefore to a certain degree pre-scientific, and to a large degree we fail our obligations in the broader science-scape of social theory.

I suggest that we could and should adhere more strictly to scientific ideals (i.e. the construction of surveys and experiments) that would make it possible to reject (or confirm) some of our proposals. I further suggest that we accept that methods are not only “qualitative” or “quantitative” but also good or bad.