Debunking old myths and challenging old models

I am often seen as an agitator or contrarian I think, both descriptors that I am happy with. Part of the fun with science is that we have to be open to the notion that what we know today may be total nonsense tomorrow. Today I was thinking of this a bit with some fun jest with colleagues here on one model that I often find limiting in my work (there are others). While all of these models served an important role in advancing our thinking at the time, many are now limiting us when they are applied to policies and management decisions. As researchers find out new information and share it with one another, we need to be open to explore other explanations for the things we see happening around us.

One of my favorite examples - the most often cited model for destination development is Butler's lifecycle model. In essence, Butler proposed that destinations move from a state of exploration to eventual consolidation - and at this point, depending on the actions taken by stakeholders - they could either stagnate and decline or rejuvenate. This model has been widely adopted in academia and is taught to most students in tourism management programs as a way of emphasizing the importance of management decisions.

An example of a well done investigation to expand this model is by Noreen Maree Breakey's Phd from the University of Queensland . Noreen delves into and compiles a number of observations on theories used to explore destination development. Poking holes in all of them, she filtered out the useful elements of them and proposed a new "Multi-Trajectory Model of Tourism Destination Change. Her new model "proposes that the growth pattern of a destination variable may at times be in a state of complete ‘equilibrium’, undergoing gradual positive or negative ‘evolutionary’ change, or within a ‘chaos’ induced ‘punctuation’ causing an immediate, and substantial increase or decrease in growth." She tested her model in different destinations along the Sunshine coast of Australia and found that there is no single pattern to destination development. This work, if picked up and used more broadly (along with other contraries work) has the potential to move us forward and ensure that our management practices are in alignment with research evidence gathered from the field.

My issue with this model and many others (such as the origin, transit and destination description of the tourism system) is the extent that they simplify what is in reality, a much more complex system. I still hear colleagues using Butler's model as the "state of the world" about tourism and have had senior level students question why they would ever want to be part of an industry that will eventually destroy itself!

In rural areas, these models can be limited in their application. Most of the research that has been used to develop macro models have been on well known, major destination or resort areas. Can we assume that a community of 500 in rural BC at the beginning of transitioning to tourism is going to undergo the same process? And what about all of those communities that have been trying to develop tourism for 20 years and are still a long way from being at the development stage. Are we to assume that they all need to embrace for the certainty that the hordes will soon be upon them? And what of those destinations where the people involved in tourism (because there is a lot of burn out and attrition in tourism champions and entrepreneurs) change regularly. Do we not see alternate trajectories emerge from inputs other than the sheer number of visitors that arrive? Oh, there are so many questions.

What is promising is that new young researchers are emerging all the time with different ways of seeing the world, different hunches about what they see and different ways of measuring and explaining phenomena around us. Let's keep our exploration hats on shall we - so we stay involved and don't stagnate and decline in our collective work on sustainable tourism development!

What models do you want to poke holes in?