summarising a journal article (1000 words)topic: Gotham, KF 2007, ‘Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization, and the rise of urban tourism’,…

summarising a journal article (1000 words) topic: Gotham, KF 2007, ‘Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization, and the rise of urban tourism’, Journal of consumer culture, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305-334

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Kevin Fox Gotham
urban tourism

Destination New Orleans : Commodification, rationalization, and the rise of

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ARTICLE

Destination New Orleans
Commodification, rationalization, and the rise of urban tourism
KEVIN FOX GOTHAM
Tulane University

Abstract
This article uses a case study of New Orleans to illustrate the nexus of
commodification and rationalization in the development of urban tourism during the
first half of the 20th century. Tourism is exemplary of the consumption of space and
involves the circulation of people to particular locations to consume local culture,
nature, history, or otherness. I examine the role of urban literary writers, visitor
guidebooks, and the New Orleans Association of Commerce in constructing a
‘destination image’. As a collection of symbols and motifs representing a locale, a
destination image is a visual cue that acts both as an attraction for potential tourists
and as a cultural framework for authenticating the tourists’ experience once they
arrive in the city. I argue that creating and (re)producing a destination image and
assorted urban symbols requires an institutional system or set of formal organizations.
Institutions and organizations create the rules, routines, and structures that shape how
tourism markets and destination images develop, how actors present and arrange
symbols to persuade people to invest in and travel to cities, and how actors develop
promotional strategies. Analysis of rationalization and commodification in the
production of a destination image offers a unique perspective for understanding
tourism as a major consumption practice constituted by a set of ‘distant’ processes and
‘local’ practices.

Key words
authenticity ● commodification ● New Orleans ● rationalization ● tourism

Journal of Consumer Culture

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

(London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)

Vol 7(3): 305–334 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540507085254]

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INTRODUCTION
Recent years have witnessed the growth of a burgeoning literature on the
rise of urban tourism, entertainment, and consumer culture. Scholars have
noted that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tourism shifted
from a set of leisure activities for members of the elite to a mass phenom-
enon with hotels, conventions, and other facilities making up the expand-
ing industry (Desmond, 1999; Gottdiener, 2000, 2001; Rojek and Urry,
1997; Urry, 2002). During this period, US cities began to create specific
organizations and promotional strategies to advertise themselves as attrac-
tive places for commercial investment and pleasure travel. In addition to
sponsoring international expositions, cities established chambers of
commerce, commercial and industrial associations, and placed advertising
in newspapers and magazines to attract visitors and enhance local distinc-
tiveness (Cocks, 2001; Ewen, 1976; Hannigan, 1998; Leach, 1993). The
scholarly diversity and richness of accounts on the rise of urban tourism
show that the subject has been a major topic of intellectual concern for
some time. Yet differences in theoretical orientation, methods, and analyti-
cal techniques have led to alterative ways of conceptualizing tourism, assess-
ing consequences, and delineating the effects of tourism on local culture.1

Few scholars have provided a theoretically sophisticated account of the
diverse ways early 20th-century elites used tourism to transform space and
engineer the post-Second World War growth of what George Ritzer
(2005) calls the ‘means of consumption’ of corporate entertainment, theme
parks, and retail chains. More rarely have scholars connected their empiri-
cal work on tourism with a broader analysis of consumer culture and the
rise of mass consumption. Indeed, the linkages between tourism, consump-
tion, and consumer culture remain undertheorized and poorly understood.
Scholarship lacks specificity in analyzing how and under what conditions
tourism developed as a rationalized industry devoted to the aestheticization
of local culture and the production of spaces of consumption, leisure, and
entertainment.

This article uses a case study of New Orleans to illustrate the interplay
of commodification and rationalization in the development of urban
tourism. During the 19th century, the emergence of jazz music, the
increased popularity of voodoo ceremonies and gaming, and the indelible
Mardi Gras celebration contributed to projecting an image of New Orleans
as a unique place with an individuality and authenticity of its own. Early,
the emerging railroad industry, guidebook companies, and urban literary
writers published a variety of tourist manuals, descriptive essays, and whim-
sical pieces describing New Orleans as a crucible of cultural diversity and

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creativity (Boyer, 1994; Jackson, 1969: 23–4, 63, 255–7, 273–82). As I show,
New Orleans’s image and reputation as a sui generis place was not some-
thing that developed by fortuity or happenstance. By the late 19th century,
the promotional material of local business leaders implied an evolving form
of civic boosterism centered on attracting tourists and remaking the city
into a landscape of consumption. In 1894, several hundred businessmen
formed the Young Men’s Business League for the purpose of bringing ‘to
the notice of the business world the material wealth of our city and its
advantages for business, manufactures and residences’.2 By the turn of the
century, more local businesses joined to create the New Orleans Progress-
ive Union, an organization to entertain distinguished visitors to New
Orleans. In 1913, the Union and the Young Men’s League merged with
several other associations to form the New Orleans Association of
Commerce.3 A year later, the Association joined the Chamber of
Commerce of the United States. The Association of Commerce was the
first organized group of business leaders in New Orleans to create a tourism
and convention bureau, promote the city on a widespread scale, and
encourage people to view the city as a collection of tourist attractions
(Stanonis, 2006). Early New Orleans literary writers – Grace King, Kate
Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, Robert Tallant, George Washington Cable,
William Coleman, Lyle Saxon, and others – facilitated the creation of a
collective memory of New Orleans culture with deep historical roots in
an amalgam of different people and groups. Yet it was the Association of
Commerce that supplied the organizational structures, marketing strategies,
and promotional efforts to disseminate this image on an international scale
and link New Orleans with a fledgling mass tourism industry.

My case study of New Orleans addresses two major limitations in
scholarship on the rise of urban tourism and consumer culture in early
20th century America. First, I maintain that early efforts to promote tourism
emerged during the 20th century not as a linear transition or smooth
progression from less developed patterns of urban promotion and booster-
ism. Rather the development of tourism was uneven and chaotic, punctu-
ated by periods of growth and prosperity as well as by severe crises and
instability. The precariousness of industrial expansion and commercial
transformation was marked by increasing anxiety and mobilization among
business groups. During the 1910s, new business associations began forging
networks with the emerging convention industry to transform tourism into
a highly organized and rationalized set of enterprises, enabling people to
consume specially prepared spaces. By the 1930s, a formal system of tourism
infrastructure – hotels, sightseeing tours, travel bureaus, tourist information

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centers, tourist publications, a convention and visitors bureau and public-
ity bureau located within the Association of Commerce, and so forth – had
replaced the more piecemeal and unconnected services offered to visitors
during the early 20th century. The development of tourism in New
Orleans was intimately linked with the rationalization of place promotion
activities and the commodification of indigenous products, cultures, and
social relations. As two defining processes of consumer culture, the spread
of commodification and rationalization presaged a new era whereby locally
conceived social forms could be transformed into abstract and iconic images
and symbols that could be used for the cross-promotion of diverse
commodities (guidebooks, hotels, railroads, airlines, etc.). In the signifying
act of the tourist advertisement, otherwise disconnected images could be
transferred from one social activity and reference set to another. In this
sense, the advertising of New Orleans as a tourist site became an import-
ant and strategic device in the production of urban space.

Second, recent historical scholarship on the rise of tourism in the
United States has focused on the role of consumer demand and individual
travel preferences in the development of tourism venues and promotional
activities during the late 19th and 20th centuries (Rothman, 2003; Shaffer,
2001). While these factors are important, they can obscure the powerful role
of political and economic elites, coalitions of businessmen, and other
organized interests in shaping and influencing tourists’ views of cities. As I
show, the members of the committees of the Association of Commerce
were urban imagineers – signifying agents – who helped fashion a ‘desti-
nation image’ and worked diligently to influence the (re)presentation of the
city to locals, businesses, and tourists. A destination image is a set of visual
symbols and descriptors that provide visitors and residents with a trans-
parent and recognizable local iconography for interpreting the cultural
attractions of a city or destination. As a socially constructed cultural script,
a destination image emerges from interactions among local actors, corpor-
ations, and other economic and cultural interests linked through organiza-
tions and network ties. I draw upon archival data, especially minutes of
meetings of the Association of Commerce, to reveal the key actors, organ-
ized interests, patterns of interaction, and important motivations underly-
ing the elaboration and development of New Orleans’s ‘destination image’
and the early building of tourism in the city.4 The minutes of meetings of
the bureaus, departments, and committees of the Association of Commerce
are infused with a political messianism. Members viewed themselves as the
civic guardians of New Orleans culture and they engaged in actions to
create organizations and promotional strategies to ‘construct’ New Orleans

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as a place of leisure, entertainment, and consumption. The creation and
stabilization of networks and organizational ties helped businessmen
produce collective representations of New Orleans, and disseminate these
representations to the world through the institutional channels of the
emerging convention and advertising industries. The Association of
Commerce was organized in a quasi-bureaucratic form with a flexible
division of labor, a several-layered authority system, and a strong commit-
ment to organizational continuity and goal achievement. This organiza-
tional structure rationalized the process of symbol production while
creating opportunities for the amplification of local culture on a global
scale.

COMMODIFICATION, RATIONALIZATION, AND URBAN TOURISM
Tourism stands at the nexus of the ‘distant’ processes of commodification
and rationalization, and ‘local’ forces of territorial embeddedness and place
particularity. Unlike other commodities that are bought and sold in markets,
the tourism commodity and related services are spatially fixed and
consumed at the place of production. At the same time, tourism is a set of
extra-local practices and activities that are subject to the fluid dynamics and
anarchic character of capital investment. It is this duality between localized
and non-transportable products and distant and mobile capital that makes
the study of tourism especially important for illuminating the rise of
modern consumption practices. On the one hand, scholars have long
conceptualized tourism as an extension of commodification that transforms
indigenous places and cultures into saleable products that are devoid of
authenticity (for example, see Boorstin, 1964; Britton, 1991; Debord, 1994;
Watson and Kopachevsky, 1994). In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) work,
tourism is a force of standardization that promotes the growth of extra-
territoriality whereby ‘intra-planetary connections . . . stamp uniformity
where connections would be, sameness over differences, uniformity over
exchange’ (Franklin, 2003: 212). Other scholars have viewed tourism as a
‘local’ practice that nurtures the growth of indigenous identities and trans-
mits expressive resources for localized cultural valorization (for example,
see Coleman and Crang, 2003; Eade, 1997). Rather than viewing terms
like the ‘distant’ and ‘local’ as binaries or independently given sets of
phenomena, it is helpful to see them as existing in a dialectical, reciprocal,
and interactive relationship. Such a perspective recognizes that distant
processes like commodification and rationalization are articulated in
everyday social behaviors and cultural practices in particular places at
specific times. In this dynamic relationship, every local context involves its

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own appropriation and reworking of extra-local processes and influences,
thus encouraging diversity and variety. Understanding tourism as an
amalgam of both distant and local influences helps to shift analytically from
the macro-level and accompanying abstract dimensions to the local, the
specific, and the micro-level of everyday experience. Such a perspective
adjudicates between a ‘top-down’ approach that stresses the role of distant
forces and macrostructures in driving tourism, and a ‘bottom-up’ approach
that focuses on the role of local influences and particularizing forces.

References to commodification and rationalization abound in recent
studies of urban tourism, place marketing, and consumer culture. Commod-
ification refers to the dominance of commodity exchange-value over use-
value and implies the development of a consumer society where market
relations subsume and govern social life. In the context of urban tourism,
local customs, rituals, festivals, and ethnic arts become tourist attractions,
performed for tourist consumption, and produced for market-based instru-
mental activities (for overviews, see Gotham, 2002; Judd and Fainstein,
1999; Rath, 2007). Rationalization is a process whereby social actions and
interactions become based on considerations of efficiency and calculation
rather than on motivations derived from custom, tradition, or emotion. Max
Weber (1968 [1921]; 1995 [1905]) used the concept formal rationality to
explain the process by which the major institutions of the West became
dominated by means-ends calculation guided by universally applied rules,
laws, and regulations. Formal rationality is implemented most fully through
bureaucratic organizations. Following other scholars such as Ritzer (2004)
and Gottdiener (2000), I use the term rationalization to analyze the imple-
mentation of formal procedures to enhance the efficiency, calculation, and
predictability of producing tourism products, images, and spaces. Broadly,
the commodification of local cultural products and the production of
spaces of consumption could not take place without rationalized organiza-
tions and institutions. Rational organizations provide a regulatory frame-
work of rules, norms, and procedures in which the production and
consumption of local culture and tourism-building take place. Codified
procedures and rules also establish stable routines to localize and reproduce
flows of capital, culture, images, and people. Commodification and rational-
ization always appear on the same stage in each other’s company, and to
speak of one is to imply the existence of the other. Thus, commodifica-
tion and rationalization are not pre-given or independent categories but
are uneven and historically changing processes that never reach any ultimate
conclusion or completion.

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Commodification and rationalization are important for explaining the
formation of structured webs of cultural meaning and significance that
animate expressions and representations of urban identity in tourism
promotion. Over the 20th century, the cultural meanings and significations
that people in different places have assigned to local products, organizations,
and other creations have been shaped by wider structures and processes of
commodification and rationalization. The pioneering work of John Urry
(2002), Stuart Ewen (1976), and William Leach (1993) draws attention to
the rise of standardized factory production and mass advertising as central
components in the development of a broad-based consumer capitalism
with tourism as a form of rationalized leisure. In his oft-cited book, The
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) developed the concept of the
‘spectacle’ to refer to the ‘historical moment at which the commodity
completes its colonization of social life’ (p. 42) and images and symbols
become commodity-spectacles. As the processes of commodification and
rationalization spread through society, towns and cities increasingly re-
organize themselves as exotic places for the consumption of culture and
uniqueness, both for residents and tourists, a phenomenon described by
Mark Gottdiener (2001), Richard Williams (2004), and Anne-Marie
Broudehoux (2004). Every town and city, as David Harvey (1989: 13) notes,
‘has to appear as an innovative, exciting, creative, and safe place to live, play,
and consume. Spectacle and display [become] the symbols of [a] dynamic
community.’ These perspectives are important for drawing attention to how
tourism framings of local culture, history, and identities spring from an
interplay of signification and interpretation that are structured by a plethora
of intersecting rules, codes, formal organizations, and rationalized
procedures. While localized cultural invention and interpretation are based
on people’s negotiation of shared cultural meanings, these meanings are
neither spontaneously created nor structurally determined. Structures,
organizations, and processes constrain choices, enable decision-making, and
provide opportunities and symbolic resources to forge some kinds of
cultural meanings rather than others.

Many scholars acknowledge the rise and development of urban
tourism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they disagree
over its form, impact, and trajectory. Cocks (2001) attributes the growth of
urban tourism to increasing and more affordable transportation, rising
middle-class income, and the development of new urban hotels. Sears
(1989) maintains that the rise of American tourist attractions during the
19th century assumed the function of ‘sacred places’ for affirming a national
collective identity and a broad cultural sensibility. Reflecting Sears’s cultural

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approach, Shaffer (2001: 6) argues that tourism operated to forge a modern
American cultural identity: ‘both the production of the tourist landscape
and the consumption of the tourist experience [were] central to the
development of a nascent national cultural in the United States’. These
diverse accounts offer broad insight into the connections between tourism
and consumer culture, and the role of consumer demand in stimulating
travel. Yet, at the same time, this scholarship is less helpful in explaining the
uneven development of tourism, analyzing how and under what conditions
tourism emerged in major cities, and identifying how tourism became
intertwined with mass consumption. Just as racial and ethnic interactions
and relations, social conflicts, and the nature of work varied from place to
place, the emergence of urban tourism reflected local idiosyncrasies, local
histories, and indigenous practices in the making of urban culture and
place. More important, situational and contextual factors specific to each
city under study complicate cross-city generalizations about tourism and
consumption. As far as tourism is an expression of larger processes and
socio-economic relationships, the development of tourism in any particu-
lar city will express the particularities of the place in the making of its
urban space. In short, place matters in the study of tourism because an
analysis of why and how tourism develops will need to take into account
where (and when) it develops.

URBAN TOURISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DESTINATION IMAGE
Scholars have noted that a city’s ‘destination image’ comprises a distinct set
of iconic representations and cultural symbols that people associate with a
particular locale. The destination image is a visual cue that acts as both an
attraction for potential tourists and as a cultural framework for authenticat-
ing tourists’ experiences once they arrive in the city. Jane Desmond’s (1999)
examination of Hawaii’s destination image locates the construction of the
female hula dancer in the circulation of visual and verbal representations
that romanticized 19th-century representations of ‘natives’ to sell a pleasur-
able image and experience to tourists. Mimi Sheller’s (2003) study of
tourism consumption in the Caribbean and Michael Dawson’s (2004)
historical analysis of consumer culture and tourism in British Columbia
suggest that destination images are constructed not only from publicity
materials but also from other forms of representation, including fashion,
cuisine, urban literary descriptions, historical narratives, music, and news
stories. While most scholars agree that destination images are ‘constructed’,
there is much disagreement over how organizations and institutions shape
the production of a destination image, how past actions and choices

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constrain and/or enable the process of destination image creation, and
how powerful actors fabricate and deploy cultural themes to legitimize their
own interpretations of the destination image. Creating and (re)producing
a destination image and assorted urban symbols requires an institutional
system or set of formal organizations. Institutions and organizations create
the rules, routines, and structures that shape how tourism markets and
destination images develop, how actors present and arrange symbols to
persuade people to invest in and travel to cities, and how actors develop
promotional strategies.

The early construction of a New Orleans as a tourist destination is
connected to several major developments that link the process of destina-
tion image construction with the rise of mass tourism: the rise of literary
writers, guidebooks, and the mass media; and the actions of the New
Orleans Association of Commerce. In his book, The Culture of Time and
Space, 1880–1918, Stephen Kern (1983: 34) explains how, in the 19th
century, communication, transportation and the growth of journalism made
it possible for more people to read about distant places in the newspaper,
see them in magazines and movies, and travel more widely. As human
consciousness expanded across time and space, people could not help
noticing that in different places there were vastly different customs. While
attention to transportation and communication technologies is important
for understanding the increasing rapidity and velocity of flows of travel, it
is less helpful in explaining the conditions under which different cities
mobilized their cultural attributes to develop different destination images
to attract capital and consumers. As Cocks (2001) has noted, descriptions
of cities contained in tourist guides published by hotels, railroads, and other
travel interests were sites on which various social groups, institutions, and
ideologies struggled over the definition and construction of urban reality.
Understanding the construction of destination images means focusing
analytical attention on identifying the institutional relations linking macro-
processes and social actors in the development of modern tourism. Such
an approach calls for greater attention to the complex and nuanced ways
that destination images emerge from interactions among national and local
actors connected through organizations and network ties.

THE ROLE OF LITERARY WRITERS, GUIDEBOOK PUBLISHERS, AND THE
MASS MEDIA
One way rational organizational forms and commodity images of places
and cultures became enmeshed in the emerging consumer culture of urban
America was through the ideas and representations purveyed by urban

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literary writers and guidebook publishers. Throughout the 19th century,
architectural guidebooks, local storybooks, cookbooks, and a variety of
visitor guides published by Benjamin Moore Norman (1845), J. Curtis
Waldo (1879), and William H. Coleman (1885), among others, contained
descriptions of New Orleans; identified a variety of local myths; celebrated
the city’s cultural expressions, customs and traditions; and included songs,
recipes, and collective memories. New Orleans’s first guidebook, Norman’s
New Orleans and Environs, a 223-page book published by Benjamin Moore
Norman in 1845, offered itself as a ‘historical sketch of the Territory and
State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans, from the earliest period
to the present time: presenting a complete guide’. J. Curtis Waldo, a local
publisher and photo-engraver, issued his Illustrated Visitors’ Guide to New
Orleans in 1879, featuring tourist highlights along with prominent busi-
nesses (and businessmen), institutions, and organizations of the day. In the
ten years he was in New Orleans, from 1877 to 1888, Lafcadio Hearn
published hundreds of descriptions of New Orleans that appeared in the
New Orleans Daily Item and Times-Democrat, Harper’s Weekly, and Scribner’s
Magazine.5 The prolific writings of Hearn complemented a plethora of
stories about New Orleans written by George Washington Cable that were
published nationwide in the popular Century Magazine.

The spread of newspapers, guidebooks, magazines, and other media
helped popularize and disseminate an image of New Orleans as a city of
romance, uplifting culture, and architectural splendor. Specifically, the ingre-
dients of New Orleans in destination image included French and Spanish
architecture, Creole culture, the Vieux Carre (French Quarter), Mardi Gras,
Les Coulisses (French Opera), beautiful oak trees, Spanish moss, voodoo,
cities of the dead (above-ground cemeteries), and scenes of romance and
mystery. Later writers such as Grace Elizabeth King (1895, 1932), Robert
Tallant (1948), and Lyle Saxon (1928) would elaborate on these resonant
themes and amplify them to build a veritable cornucopia of culture
materials to lure tourists to the city.

The invention of photography helped support the expansion of a vast
literature on American cities, through booster literature, travel sketches,
guidebooks, tourism itineraries, and other illustrated brochures of cities and
urban life (Cocks, 2001; Shaffer, 2001). Photography enabled travelers to
transcribe reality visually, thus providing a motivation for people to visit
exotic places and capture images and experiences on film.6 Early visitor
guides were organizers and transmitters of cultural information that
reflected as well as created public opinion about cities. Railroad, hotel, and
other emerging travel industries, in turn, adapted and reshaped images of

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cities to stimulate desire to travel and thereby create a market for their
products and services. In a section titled ‘Why We Travel’, a Rand McNally
guidebook published for the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans declared
that people travel to ‘find constant pleasure and profitable interests over
every mile’. Juxtaposing ‘pleasure and profit’ connected with a narrative
strategy of extracting, reducing, and recombining iconic representations of
New Orleans to construct and project an image of the city as place of
amusement. To ‘fix salient points in the mind’, the guidebook instructed
visitors to take a notebook and ‘write out condensed memoranda of what
you learn. It will assist you in memorizing and photographing on the mind
what you acquire.’ The Rand McNally guidebook drew a sharp distinction
between ‘a time of labor’ and a ‘time for recreation’, noting that visitors
who travel to New Orleans ‘will come back refreshed and enlightened from
what they have seen and learned’.7 In the 19th century, the advertising work
of railroad companies and guidebook publishers complemented and
embellished the place-making work of George Washington Cable, Lafcadio
Hearn,William H. Coleman, and other New Orleans writers to frame social
conditions, assign meaning to New Orleans, and thereby organize tourist
experience. The partial and selective descriptions of the city deployed by
these and other literary writers coupled with the appearance of undeviat-
ing candor and credibility helped supply an interpretive schema that could
act as an attraction for potential tourists.

By the 20th century, the image-building of urban writers, journalists,
and guidebook publishers reflected and supported an emerging system of
urban promotion led by magazines, music, silent films, motion pictures,
radio, and later, television. Recording and radio made it possible to project
music over time and space and introduce people around the world to New
Orleans jazz (Raeburn, 2002). The transmission of cultural images and
symbols about the city received an added boost with the development of
silent films. In 1912, George Klein, Samuel Long, and Frank Morton
founded the Kalem Company, and began to produce silent films using New
Orleans as a setting. During its first year, the company produced The Belle
of New Orleans, Girl Strikers, The Pilgrimage, Mardi Gras Mix-up, Bucktown
Romance, and The Darling of the C.S.A. (Rosendahl, 1984). Later, the advent
of television and motion pictures encouraged the theatrical stereotyping of
New Orleans, creating a symbolic reality colored by the selective interpret-
ations of producers and writers. Cinema, motion pictures, and television
superimposed a ‘visual city’ on the ‘built city’, creating a narrative map of
familiarity and coherence in place of complexity and variety. Movies like
Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando, Louisiana Purchase with Bob

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Hope, King Creole with Elvis Presley, and many others, presented slices of
authenticity to reinforce and accentuate certain stereotypes while creating
for each viewer a private impression of New Orleans. Overall, the
(re)presentation of urban life and culture in visitors’ guides and mass media
transmitted ideas about New Orleans to a broad audience, thus captivating
attention and nurturing people’s understandings of the city and its people.
The discourse and imagery contained in visitors’ guides, literary depictions,
movies, and television made it possible for more people to visually consume
representations of New Orleans and to imagine what it would be like to
travel to the city.

The above points draw attention to the centrality of literary writers,
guidebook publishers, and the mass media as institutions that appropriate
and transform otherwise mundane and ordinary images, symbols, and
experiences into spectacle and fantasy. For Guy Debord (1994), an essen-
tial part of contemporary society is the vast commercial effort to ‘spectac-
ularize’ the world through the production of commodity-images as ruled
by the logic and dictates of commodified media culture. For Ritzer (2005),
consumer society is dominated by the process of ‘re-enchantment’ by
which various entertainment firms, theme parks, and other enterprises use
spectacles and simulations to seduce people into consuming more
commodities. These points reflect a long-standing sociological concern in
explaining cultural phenomena and meaning-creation in terms of actors,
organizations, structures, and processes. In every society, as Bourdieu (1984
[1979]) noted, cultural objects are located within complex systems and
organizations that are created and reproduced through social interaction
among people. This argument also dovetails with Baudrillard (1998 [1973]:
79–80), who argues that processes of cultural production provide a code
that people use to construct and reconstruct cultural identities and
meanings through the exchange of commodities: ‘The circulation,
purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today
constitute our language, our code, that code which the entire society
communicates and converses.’ In the case of New Orleans, a variety of
corporations and organizations appropriated different components of urban
culture using rational techniques of image production. Processes of
commodification and rationalization assisted in abstracting New Orleans
‘culture’ from local contexts of interaction and meaning-making. Once
converted into an abstract and auto-referential image, culture was put
into the service of the commodification process and repackaged and sold
in a variety of market-based forms (tourist guides, books, magazines,
movies, and exotic stories). By the 1920s and 1930s, visual and verbal

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representations of New Orleans had been commodified in pictures, post-
cards, and advertisements to supply potential visitors with an inexhaustible
repertoire of pleasurable experiences, a development that both reflected and
legitimized the development of a rationalized tourism industry.

THE ROLE OF THE NEW ORLEANS ASSOCIATION OF COMMERCE
The mobilization of businessmen and the creation of the New Orleans
Association of Commerce in 1913 represent a major turning point in the
development and elaboration of New Orleans’s destination image. We can
view the Association as a major agent linking the processes of commodi-
fication and rationalization with the local actions of economic elites in the
institutionalization of a destination image, and the establishment of a local
tourism industry. During the first two decades of the 20th century, the
Association created over a dozen internal bureaus, committees, and depart-
ments to support inward investment, lobby city and state governments in
support of business-friendly legislation, collect data on demographic and
population trends, and represent the commercial interests of members.8

The establishment of a Convention and Visitors’ Bureau (CVB) and a
Publicity Bureau in the years after 1915 laid the institutional foundation
for disseminating New Orleans’s destination image through organized
promotional activities and network connections with national and inter-
national tourism organizations. Hierarchical organization and routinized
network ties helped stabilize and structure relationships to harness
commodity flows and create new circuits of representation, including
news stories, photographs, songs, nostalgic descriptions, literary narratives,
cuisine, and so forth. More important, networked relationships provided
for the creation and transmission of cultural knowledge about New
Orleans, and the mobilization of capital and resources for early tourism-
building. The CVB established the Greater New Orleans Hotel and
Lodging Association in 1924 and the New Orleans Restaurant Men’s
Association in 1931, two major developments that facilitated the building
of an alliance to represent the interests of restaurants and hotels and
provide for regularized interaction and cooperation within the emerging
tourism industry.9 In 1930, the CVB was accepted for membership in the
International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus (IACVB)
and thus, according to the Association of Commerce, ‘attained national
recognition as the official Convention and Tourist Bureau of the City of
New Orleans’.10

From the turn of the century through the Second World War, the CVB
and the Publicity Bureau played strategic roles in systematizing the process

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of attracting, planning, and organizing conventions in an effort to undercut
other cities in the competitive race to gain tourism investment. From the
early 20th century onward, city after city established convention bureaus
including Detroit (1895), Honolulu (1902), Atlantic City (1908), Denver
(1909), Atlanta (1913), Minneapolis (1927), Washington, DC (1931),
Cleveland (1934), New York City (1935), Philadelphia (1942), and Chicago
(1943) (Flynn and Flynn, 1996). In these and other cities, CVBs designed
their promotions and advertising to enhance predictability and reduce
uncertainty in the decision-making calculus. Early on, the Association of
Commerce recognized that attracting conventions ‘is about the most
effective form of advertising we could possibly have’ and is ‘tantamount to
selling New Orleans on a wholesale scale’.11 Members argued that the
systematization of promotional efforts was a logical and rational means of
doing business to benefit the entire city. Though all members were of a
similar class background to businessmen and entrepreneurs, different coali-
tions of interest cut across class boundaries within the organization. Almost
from the beginning, Association members disagreed on whether the CVB
should be led by hotel owners with specific interests in attracting mainly
conventioneers, or whether the bureau should contain a broad representa-
tion of business owners such as retail merchants and others interested in
bringing diverse kinds of visitors to New Orleans. The routinization of
action within a CVB and Publicity Bureau helped actors cultivate a cogni-
tive framework within which to interact and construct meanings about
New Orleans, engage in strategic and long-range tourism planning,
troubleshoot present problems in light of past actions, and forecast future
developments.

Members of the Association of Commerce recognized the fierce
competition of attracting visitors and struggled to build networks and
organizations to entice conventions to the city. Yet the volatile currents of
social unrest and economic instability unleashed by the First World War,
the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Second World War hampered
elite efforts to attract visitors and build tourism institutions. New Orleans’s
famed Mardi Gras krewes (organizations that plan and stage parades)
cancelled their parades during the First World War, the first ever mass
cancellation of the Mardi Gras season. It was not until the 1920s that the
four major krewes – Comus, Momus, Rex, and Proteus – returned to the
streets to host their parades. During the Great Depression, the Carnival
schedule shrunk to only three parades as lack of money forced Momus
to cancel its parades from 1933 through 1936. In 1932, the Annual Report
from the CVB lamented that ‘the stringency of the economic situation’

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has ‘had a most militating effect upon our efforts . . . to secure a steady
flow of desirable and profitable conventions for New Orleans’.12 The
‘world strife’ of the Second World War resulted in a ‘turbulent and trou-
blous year of 1940’, according to the CVB.13 The number of visitors to
Louisiana plummeted during the crisis of the Second World War, from
391,372 in 1940, to 82,606 in 1945, and only 12,000 in 1946.14 The
downturn in the number of visitors, conventions and attendance during
the Second World War also reflects federal restrictions imposed by the
Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) that banned conventions except
those that helped the war effort. The federal government also required the
conversion of tourist camps into military camps.15 By 1944, the ODT
required meetings of more than 50 participants to apply for authoriza-
tion. Around the nation, up to one-third of all convention and visitors’
bureaus discontinued their activities, and another third reduced their offer-
ings (Flynn and Flynn, 1996). Even after the Second World War, the CVB
primarily sought small conventions for the city due to a limited amount
of convention space and a lack of hotel rooms to accommodate large
conventions.

In general, the political instability of world wars and the Great
Depression portended a new era of seemingly chronic instability and
volatile transformation for New Orleans and other cities. As the Great
Depression spread, it created persistent mass unemployment, devastated
whole communities, and generated an upsurge of protest. As in other cities,
the unemployment rate in New Orleans peaked at 25 percent and only
gradually declined after the early 1930s. Compounding this problem was
the fragile New Orleans economy that was dominated by the port industry
and the oil industry, two industries extremely vulnerable to periodic down-
turns in the national and global economy. Despite being a center of trade
and commerce, New Orleans never developed a high-wage manufacturing
sector or textile industry. Most of the city’s industrial activity was limited
to cotton production and trade, sugar refineries, tobacco factories, coffee,
and businesses catering to the local market.16 Anxieties about the uncertain
place of New Orleans in the changing US economy and society fueled
debate and contestation over the future of the city while creating oppor-
tunities for elites to reinvent the city and to (re)present urban culture as a
theatrical spectacle. For New Orleans during the first half of the 20th
century, local elites working through the Association of Commerce
attempted to control the discourse of urban place-making and promotion,
legitimate tourism expansion, and define urban culture in the language of
the commodity-spectacle.

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An approximation of the size, complexity, and specialization of the
New Orleans’s tourism sector can be gauged from Table 1, which lists the
number of hotels and motels; tourist camps, homes, and courts; amusement
places; sightseeing tours; travel bureaus and tourist information centers; and
museums from the early 20th century to 1950. These figures come from
listings in New Orleans phone books for the given years. The table provides
a general indicator of growth in the number, differentiation, and special-
ization of tourism facilities. Before the 1920s, tourism promotion was
relatively ad hoc and uncoordinated. The few hotels in the city and the lack
of amusement places, sightseeing tours, and other tourism facilities suggest
that tourism was not a rationalized and distinctive set of activities. Although
different interests and actors advertised New Orleans as a tourist destina-
tion, this was not carried out on any systematic and routinized basis.
Moreover, lack of capital financing and low levels of tourism flows dis-
couraged large-scale tourism investment and commercial development in
the city. In addition, we can see from the table the precariousness and
unevenness of tourism development as the number of amusement places
plummeted after the beginning of the Great Depression, and the number
of sightseeing tours and travel bureaus dropped after the US entered the
Second World War. Almost all categories registered major increases in the
five years after the end of the war in 1945.

CITY OF PROGRESS, ROMANCE, AND UNIQUENESS
The mobilization for the First and Second World Wars, and the prolonged
economic instability caused by the Great Depression, threatened the
fortunes of economic elites and created a sense of political crisis among
leaders with interests in promoting tourism and attracting conventions.
Confronted with socio-economic uncertainty and unpredictability,
members of the Association of Commerce mobilized to establish and insti-
tutionalize a series of interconnected networks with railroad companies,
hotels, national book publishers, newspapers, and magazines to expand the
repertoire of urban place promotion and control the process of tourism-
building. As information disseminators, the CVB and the Publicity Bureau
produced and supplied photographs, tourist guides, booklets, special articles,
and other general publicity to travel editors, columnists, automobile clubs,
magazines, and tourist information centers around the world. During the
1920s, the Association began publishing and disseminating a weekly digest,
titled New Orleans is Growing, of news items showing the progress and
development of the city to hundreds of ‘interested publishers, editors,
correspondents, advertising agents, and individuals known to be interested

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321

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in New Orleans’. Importantly, the CVB established procedures to assist
‘visiting newspapermen, radiomen, writers and photographers while
visiting New Orleans, in most cases escorting them around the city, working
with them, so that they may see New Orleans through “our” eyes’.17

Through its various formal connections and cooperative agreements
with firms and tourism boosters, the Association embraced a holistic
approach of doing ‘everything possible to get favorable publicity for New
Orleans from the business, industrial, and tourist viewpoints in travel
magazines, convention organs, trade and business publications, financial and
business pages of newspapers’.18 What is important is that promotional
networks were not only structures of communication but were conduits of
resources and information exchange that served as a basis of collective
action. Through the creation of different network forms, the Association
was guided by a logic of commodification and rationalization of image
production. To enhance the building of a tourism infrastructure and attract
capital investment, the Association and its bureaus designed routines to
clarify goals, reduce the uncertainty of place promotion, and identify
opportunities to stimulate consumer demand to visit the city.

The growth and extension of networks between the bureaus of the
Association of Commerce and other corporations and tourism interests
helped encourage the formation of synergistic promotional opportunities
and corporate tie-ins to expand and legitimate the commodity form. One
of the first international publicity efforts involved making contact with the
commercial firm of Thomas Cook and Sons, a company that pioneered
the packaged tour and day excursions (Cocks, 2001: 110–16; Urry, 2002:
23–4, 46, 86, 138, 148). According to a July 1921 report, the Bureau ‘distrib-
uted about 3000 pieces of literature advertising New Orleans . . . not only
in all parts of the United States but also in several foreign lands through
the tourist services of Thomas Cook and Sons, and commercial
exchanges’.19 Organizational ties with the Cook company combined with
other international promotional efforts fueled the production of tourist
images of New Orleans and provided a rationale for identifying and
creating additional media outlets to advertise the city. In June 1924, the
Publicity Bureau reported that it sent 4000 pieces of printed matter to
London for distribution at the New Orleans Advertising Club’s conven-
tion.20 In 1927, the CVB was proclaiming itself ‘as the clearing house for
matters having to do with advertising to the nation and world at large, the
progress, possibilities, and attractions of the city’.21 The February 1932
Report noted that the CVB ‘effected an arrangement with the American
Express Company as a medium through which literature on New Orleans

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would be distributed to agencies of the company in foreign countries’.22

A year later, at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’World Exposition in Chicago,
the Association of Commerce opened an office at 334 S. Michigan Avenue
‘to develop increased tourist interest’ in New Orleans.23 According to the
Annual Report of the CVB, the office ‘was the only representative New
Orleans and Louisiana had in Chicago during the Exposition’ and ‘attracted
thousands of people from every section of the country and abroad, and as
a result, we are in position to know that a considerable volume of visitor
business was and will be directed to New Orleans’.24

As the above points suggest, structured patterns of interaction and
information exchange between the bureaus of the Association and other
organizations allowed for the systematization of cross-promotional activi-
ties and the institutionalization of the destination image. This rationaliza-
tion process also involved the representation and production of culture as
an object of visual consumption. In 1924, the Publicity Bureau adopted
and broadcast weekly slogans ‘emphasizing various phases of New Orleans
business . . . for use on letters, published newspapers, and . . . generally for
publicity purposes’. These slogans included, for example, ‘New Orleans –
The South’s Greatest City’ (14 January), ‘New Orleans – America’s Most
Interesting City’ (4 February), ‘New Orleans – City of Progress’ (4 May),
‘New Orleans – City of Romance’ (18 May), among several dozen other
slogans.25 What is important is that these and other slogans were carefully
crafted and adopted by the Association of Commerce to ‘construct’ New
Orleans, and to imprint different images of the city on the world’s
consciousness. Members of the Association attempted to make New
Orleans attractive and accessible to the imagination by simplifying and
reducing the city to a set of spectacular images and slogans. The Associ-
ation recognized that the use of slogans, combined with other visual images
of the city, could be effective tools in putting the city on the tourist’s mental
map. Sloganeering dovetailed with the tendencies of urban boosters to
demystify New Orleans by signposting sights and sites as worthy of
meaning and significance. Broadly, the members and staff of the Association
not only positioned themselves as image-makers but also as storytellers who
translated New Orleans into a place of unique authenticity, economic
progress, and romance. In the 1930s and later, the Publicity Bureau prepared
at least 40 ‘canned’ stories about New Orleans that it sent to magazine
editors and newspapers for their use. Declaring New Orleans as ‘one of the
three outstanding “story” cities in this country’, the Association produced
stories such as ‘Historic New Orleans’, ‘Port of New Orleans’, ‘Modern
New Orleans’, and other topics covering cemeteries, antiques, recreation,

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courtyards, monuments, old homes, streets, museums, and other stories. The
Publicity Bureau even turned otherwise mundane topics such as ‘Spanish
moss’, the city’s ‘drainage system’, ‘water supply’, ‘bridges’, and ‘spillways’
into extraordinary and spectacular ‘stories’ of interest.26

The mass production of entertaining stories and images of New
Orleans not only exemplifies the rationalization of place promotion but
illustrates the establishment and institutionalization of information
exchange networks within the city government to entice people to travel
to consume local culture and heritage. In the 1940s, the New Orleans
Public Service, an advertising agency supported by the city government and
the State of Louisiana, published leaflets and travel sketches about New
Orleans to persuade people to travel to the city.27 The agency also
purchased advertising space in many high-profile newspapers and maga-
zines such as The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine,
Newsweek Magazine, and others to promote the unique attractions of New
Orleans.28 Together, the New Orleans Association of Commerce and the
city government became major drivers of tourism development and power
agents of information transmission. The annual amount of printed matter
distributed by the Association of Commerce increased from 20,000 items
in 1921, to 200,000 in 1927, and 434,000 in 1937.29 This vast increase
reflects technological innovations in print and visual media, the cultivation
of new contacts with advertisers and journalists, and the rationalization of
producing and disseminating material about New Orleans. As an industry
coordinator, the New Orleans Association of Commerce united diverse
businesses – hotels and motels, restaurants, airlines, travel agencies, and so
on – into a loosely organized network where actors could interact, identify
goals, and engage in strategic tourism planning. Working with different
tourism interests, the Association of Commerce carefully crafted and
deployed a variety of slogans, themes, and motifs to ‘construct’ New
Orleans, to imprint different images of the city on the world’s conscious-
ness, and to ‘sell’ New Orleans to the world.

In addition, relationships between the Association of Commerce and
the rising mass tourism industry accumulated into a network containing a
repository of information about New Orleans to enhance the commercial
value of the city and region. The combination of rational organization and
sophisticated promotional strategies enabled actors to cultivate an image of
New Orleans as an enchanted place worth visiting and doing business in
and to project this image on a global scale. Moreover, the high level of
rationality exhibited by the Association of Commerce suggests that the
CVB and the Publicity Bureau were not responding to consumer demand

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per se, but were, to a large extent, proactive in stimulating and enhancing
consumer desires. Reflecting broad changes in urban culture and consump-
tion during the early 20th century, the Association was not content to react
to the uncertainties of consumer demand. Indeed, the minutes of meetings
of the Association of Commerce are clear that members acted strategically
and methodically to formulate promotional strategies to entice, mold, and
channel consumer choices to travel to New Orleans and ‘experience’ the
city. John Urry’s (1995: 132; 2002) concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ suggests
that tourism is about the consumption of exotic ‘experiences’ where ‘places
are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially
through day-dreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different
scale or involving a different sense from those customarily encountered’.
The Association’s promotional strategies to create consumable ‘experiences’
reflected and reinforced a market-driven conception of urban culture as
ruled by dictates of mass advertising and bureaucratic rationality. ‘Every
convention at which we put on a campaign results in creating a desire on
the part of a large number of people, who possess the means, to visit New
Orleans, according to the CVB.’30 Similarly, a 1937 Annual Report stated:

Contrary to the opinion prevailing in the minds of many of our
citizens and businessmen, conventions simply do not gravitate
naturally to New Orleans because our city is popular and
desirable. We are one favorite convention center of the nation
among some forty or more others in this country, competing
with other foreign capitals. . . . The campaign demands to secure
conventions are insistent that the Bureau and its executive staff
be constantly alert and active in behalf of maintaining the
position and desires of New Orleans before the influential spirits
of convention organizations which are prospects for the City.
You all know the story of convention development. Some
groups must be followed for years before they are ripened to the
point of becoming New Orleans conscious. All must be sought
from one to three years before they are secured. A lapse of an
interval often breaks the chain and throws years of effort and
expense to the winds.31

The reference to multi-year efforts to make conventions and consumers
‘New Orleans conscious’ is repeated throughout the 1930s and 1940s in
the monthly and annual reports of the CVB. The staff and members of the
CVB attempted to structure the desires of potential conventioneers and
tourists by providing a range of slogans, images, and other representations

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and promoting these intensively. What is important is that neither aggre-
gate consumer desires nor visitor demand were given, pre-existing factors
that explain the development of tourism in New Orleans. Members of the
Association of Commerce actively worked to shape, influence, and control
preferences and travel motivations through their advertising and publicity
efforts. Stuart Ewen (1976: 25–6) has suggested that during the early
decades of the 20th century, the pressure of industrial competition
compelled business elites to organize their businesses ‘not merely around
the production of goods, but around the creation of a buying public’. The
above points suggest that the rationalization and expansion of tourism as a
mass phenomenon was intimately connected with the creation of this
‘buying public’. Anticipating later developments in mass advertising and
niche marketing, the positive images projected by the tourism companies
interpreted New Orleans’s history and culture, and imparted to the tourist
what to do, where to go, and how to feel. In this way, mass advertising and
rationalized production of tourism images of New Orleans and other cities
helped fuel the commodification of local culture while bureaucratic
procedures were essential to priming consumer desires to travel to distant
cities to consume exotic cultures.

CONCLUSION
In this article I have identified the key actors and organized interests
involved in formulating promotional strategies, networks, and formal
organizations to cultivate a destination image and to build a nascent tourism
infrastructure in New Orleans. For decades, scholars have viewed tourism
as a set of discrete economic activities or a spatially bounded locality that
is subject to external forces producing impacts. In contrast, I have concep-
tualized tourism as a set of practices and institutions involved in the
rationalization of place promotion and the reframing of local culture as
consumption-based entertainment experiences. The rise of mass tourism
during the early 20th century reflected and reinforced an emerging view
of cities as places of amusement, fascination, and exoticism. New forms of
urban representation including photography, visitors’ guides, and literary
descriptions of New Orleans nurtured an embryonic destination image
while hotels, railroads, and other travel interests operated as communication
networks to disseminate local images, symbols, and motifs to a national and
international audience. By the early 20th century, the rising mass media of
radio, silent film, and magazines had become significant social forces in
forming and delimiting public assumptions, attitudes, and views of New
Orleans. In the 1920s and later, the Association of Commerce helped

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inaugurate a new era of specialized place promotion and tourism develop-
ment that aimed to reorganize New Orleans into a ‘landscape of consump-
tion’ (Ritzer, 2005), a process that would be further rationalized in the
decades after the Second World War. Indeed, the ability to create and deploy
selective and partial images of New Orleans through tourism and adver-
tising media became a new form of urban representation and reality
construction. The Association of Commerce employed rational organiz-
ation to localize distant capital flows, commodify images of New Orleans,
and transmit local information to far-away places through network ties with
corporations. Rational organizations not only streamlined the process of
image production but opened up new avenues and opportunities for
consuming cultures and places.

My study of place promotion in New Orleans provides insight into
the important role played by tourism in helping to support the rise of mass
consumption and the development of a broad-based consumer culture in
the United States. Local economic elites borrowed from a rich cornucopia
of cultural materials to produce and disseminate a destination image that
would facilitate the modern creation of what Don Slater (1997) calls a
‘consuming self ’ and what Steven Miles and Malcolm Miles (2004) call
‘consuming cities’. As a means of consuming culture and space, tourism
practices and discourses helped construct both the consuming subject and
the idea that cities should be seen as places of visual consumption (e.g.,
sites of ‘history’, ‘culture’, and ‘otherness’). As discussed, the New Orleans
Association of Commerce appropriated, organized, and disseminated
symbols, images, and motifs of New Orleans that had been popularized
during the 19th century by urban literary writers, journalists, and guide-
book publishers. Images of New Orleans as a place of unique architecture,
the Vieux Carre, creole culture, Mardi Gras, Les Coulisses, voodoo, cities
of the dead, and romance and mystery were the cultural raw material that
fed the commodification process and became the major elements of the
destination image. Against the backdrop of intensified urban competition
for conventions and visitors, the members of the Association of Commerce
labored to create and routinize a set of tourism practices to pin-point the
destination image, focus global attention on New Orleans, and channel and
direct consumer desires to visit the city to consume the markers of local
culture. In this sense, the Association of Commerce became a major
organization of aesthetic production that provided both symbolic and
material resources to engineer the development of a rationalized tourism
infrastructure. The rationalization of symbol production and the culti-
vation of sophisticated promotional strategies transmitted imagery and

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interpretive schemes, thereby connecting the city and region with a rising
consumer culture.

My analysis suggests that the early development of tourism had an
elective affinity with the transformation of urban culture into an abstract
image or commodity-spectacle. As I have pointed out, the Association of
Commerce helped legitimate an emerging conception of urban culture
as an object of visual consumption, a conception that reflected broader
transformations in the political economy of consumer capitalism. One
characteristic of early place-promotion activities was the growing
emphasis placed on commodity display, entertainment, and amusement as
central components of urban life. In Land of Desire, William Leach (1993:
xiii) described the rise of consumer capitalism during the late 19th
century and early 20th century as a ‘future-oriented culture of desire that
confused the good life with goods’. By the end of the 19th century,
according to Leach, the ‘cardinal features’ of the rising consumer culture
were ‘acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness;
the cult of the new; the democratization of desire, and money value as
the predominant measure of all value in society’ (p. xiii). Like other
business organizations and chambers of commerce in other cities, New
Orleans’s social elites and their organizations played key roles in generat-
ing and supporting the development of mass consumption by presenting
culture, traditions, and customs as objects of consumption. The images of
New Orleans presented through the signifying work of the Association
of Commerce were hypostatized descriptions that reflected profiteering
motives, including a desire to celebrate travel and expand the commodity
form. Over the course of the 20th century, the local elites would estab-
lish sophisticated networks and synergies with transnational hotel firms
and entertainment chains to further rationalize the production of urban
imagery and transform the metropolitan area into a major site of tourist
consumption.

Notes
1. In their edited volume, C. Michael Hall, Allan M. Williams, and Alan A. Lew

assert that the field of tourism has been ‘substantially criticized in terms of its
theoretical base’ (Hall et al., 2004: 14). Kevin Meethan (2001: 2) maintains that
‘for all the evident expansion of journals, books and conferences specifically
devoted to tourism, at a general analytical level it remains under-theorized’.
Likewise, in criticizing the tendency within tourism studies to ‘internalize
industry led priorities and perspectives’, Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang (2001:
5) argue that conventional tourism scholarship does ‘not include the tools
necessary to analyze and theorize the complex cultural and social processes that

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have unfolded’ over the decades. For an overview of theoretical debates in urban
tourism, see Fainstein et al. (2003).

2. Young Men’s Business League of New Orleans (n.d.) New Orleans of 1894: Its
Advantages, Its Conditions, and Its Prospects. Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Jones
Hall, Louisiana Collection. Vertical file:’Descriptions, New Orleans, 1880 – 1899.’
New Orleans, LA.

3. In 1950, the Association of Commerce changed its name to the Chamber of
Commerce of the New Orleans Area.‘Chamber History’ (n.d.) box 652, folder
#5, MS 66. Chamber of Commerce of the New Orleans Area. University of
New Orleans.

4. The main primary sources in this article are the reports, analyses, and minutes of
meetings of the Chamber of Commerce of the New Orleans Area. In addition to
examining published material and reports of the many committees, bureaus, and
departments of the Chamber, I accessed minutes of every meeting of the
Convention and Visitors’ Bureau and the Publicity Bureau from the 1910s
through 1979 (the last year on record). The collection is located at the University
of New Orleans and the manuscript number is 66.

5. For an overview of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings, see Starr (2001).
6. On the significance of photography for tourism, see Urry (2002: 128–9). As

Brown (2005) has noted, the rise and popularization of photography was a major
technological force that modern corporations appropriated to consolidate
corporate power and rationalize commercial culture. For Brown, photography was
‘structured by the economic, while at the same time working to naturalize
capitalism at the level of ideology’ (p. 16). These points dovetail with the work of
Nye (1985) and Marchand (1997), who draw attention to the ideological role that
photographic images and advertisements played in the development of consumer
markets and workplace rationalization schemes. Even more important,
photography allowed people to visually represent urban reality at one fixed point
in time and space. This new mode of representation, in turn, valorized the notion
of cities as having distinctive ‘personalities’ that could be interpreted through film
and visual imagery (Cocks, 2001).

7. Rand, McNally and Company (1885) The World’s Industrial and Cotton
Centennial Exposition at New Orleans, pp. 8–9, 14–15. Chicago: Rand, McNally.
Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, Jones Hall. Louisiana
Collection.

8. In 1917, for example, the Association contained a Board of Directors (14
members), a Members Council (22 members), and the following bureaus, each
with a chairman, vice chairman, and several committees: Civic Bureau; Industrial
Bureau; Wholesale Merchants and Manufacturers Bureau; Foreign Trade Bureau;
Legislation and Taxation Bureau; Traffic and Transportation Bureau; Retail
Merchants Bureau; Good Roads Bureau; Publicity, Convention and Tourist
Bureau; Agricultural, Reclamation and Immigration Bureau; and a Young Men’s
Department.

9. By the 1930s, the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association was made
up of directors of the La Salle Hotel, Hotel De Soto, Hotel New Orleans,
Monteleone Hotel, Pontchartrain Hotel, St Charles Hotel, Roosevelt Hotel, and
the Jung Hotel (Summary of Semi-Annual Accomplishments of the Convention and

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Visitors’ Bureau for the Period Jan. 1 – June 30, 1931, Vol. 37, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC.
UNO).

10. The development of the convention industry in the US received a major boost
with the creation of the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 1910 and
the International Association of Convention Bureaus (IACB) in 1914. The
IACB held its first formal meeting in 1920 and adopted a code of ethics to
promote professional practices three years later in 1923 (Ford and Peeper,
2007).

11. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 6 November 1932, Vol. 39, p. 2
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

12. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 6 November 1932, Vol. 39, p. 1
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

13. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 25 November 1940, Vol. 55
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

14. Letter from Bethoe Gessner, Advertising Manager, Capitol Guide, to Mayor de
Lesseps Morrison, 21 August 1946, box 3, folder 1 (MS 270. De Lesseps Morrison
Collection, Tulane University).

15. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 November 1945, Vol. 65
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

16. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 November 1945, Vol. 65
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

17. The production of touristic images and discourses about New Orleans was
bolstered through the creation of cooperative agreements with railroads, hotels,
sightseeing tours, cab companies, and travel bureaus in preparing tourist guides
and organizing tours. See What’s Being Done to Help the Growth of New Orleans:
Civic, Industrial, Commercial as a Port. 1927 (A Report of the 1927 Activities of
the Bureaus and Committees and of the New Orleans Association of
Commerce), Vol. 29, pp. 57, 60 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

18. Minutes of the Meeting of the Publicity Committee, 5 February 1946, Vol. 67
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

19. Report for the Month of July, Convention and Tourist Bureau, 30 July 1921, Vol. 23
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

20. Report for June 1924 of the General Manager to the Board of Directors, New Orleans
Association of Commerce, Vol. 26, p. 2 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

21. What’s Being Done to Help the Growth of New Orleans: Civic, Industrial, Commercial as
a Port. 1927 (A Report of the 1927 Activities of the Bureaus and Committees
and of the New Orleans Association of Commerce), Vol. 29, p. 6 (MS 66.
NOCC. UNO).

22. Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, February 1932, Vol. 39, p. 2 (MS 66.
NOCC. UNO).

23. August Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 1 September 1933, Vol. 41, p. 1
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

24. Annual Report, Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 24 November 1933, Vol. 41, p. 3
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

25. Annual Report, Publicity Department, for 1924. Submitted by Wilson S. Callender,
Secretary, Publicity Department of the New Orleans Association of Commerce,
Vol. 26 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

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26. ‘Revised List’ of stories from P.J. Rinderle, ed., Bureau of New Orleans News,
1938, Vol. 50 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

27. Letter from Bethoe Gessner, Advertising Manager, Capitol Guide, to Mayor de
Lesseps Morrison, 21 August 1946; box 3, folder 1. Letter from De Lesseps
Morrison, Mayor, to Mr Walter M. Holmes, Jr, Passenger Agent, Southern Pacific
Line, 24 February 1947; box 3, folder 4. Letter from Rod Raimondy, Chairman,
Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, to Mayor de Lesseps Morrison, 21 November
1946; box 8, folder 25 (MS 270: De Lesseps Morrison Collection. Special
Collections, Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans,
LA).

28. Full-page advertisement: ‘News from New Orleans’, proclaiming New Orleans
the ‘International City’. Advertisement appears in New York Times (21 March
1948), New York Herald-Tribune (28 March 1948), Chicago Tribune (4 April 1948),
Time Magazine (15 March 1948), and Newsweek (29 March 1948). Advertisement
sponsored by the Greater New Orleans, inc. box 3, folder 5 (MS 270: De Lesseps
Morrison Collection. Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library,
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA).

29. Convention and Tourist Bureau, 15 October 1921, Vol. 23; What’s Being Done to Help
the Growth of New Orleans: Civic, Industrial, Commercial as a Port. 1927 (A Report
of the 1927 Activities of the Bureaus and Committees and of the New Orleans
Association of Commerce), Vol. 29, p. 6; Annual Report of the Publicity Department,
30 November 1936, Vol. 47 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

30. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 24 November 1933, Vol. 41,
p. 4 (MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

31. Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 30 November 1937, Vol. 49;
Annual Report of the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, 20 November 1938, Vol. 51
(MS 66. NOCC. UNO).

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Study guide – Part

2

Weeks 5-7

TOUR 1001

Understanding travel and tourism

Graham Brown, Shirley Chappel, Jenny Davies

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TOPIC 4 SUMMARISING A JOURNAL ARTICLE – ASSIGNMENT 2

TOPIC 5 INTRODUCTION TO ASSIGNMENT

3

Note: This Study Guide is available on the World Wide Web.

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2

TOPIC 4: SUMMARISING A JOURNAL ARTICLE

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this topic you should be able to:

 explain the structure of a journal article

 explain the meaning of ‘refereed journal’

 explain the meaning of double-blind peer review

 explain the term ‘literature review’

 explain the term ‘theoretical framework’

 explain the research methods used in the article you choose to summarise

 explain the meaning of ‘teaching-research nexus’

 demonstrate your ability to access journal articles

.

REQUIRED READING

You must choose one of the following articles:

New Orleans, USA

Gotham, KF 2007, ‘Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization, and the rise of

urban tourism’, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 305-334

Or

Venice, Italy

Quinn, B 2007, ‘Performing tourism: Venetian residents in focus’, Annals of Tourism Research,

vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 458-476.

Due date for assignment: Friday, 3 May, 2013.

ACCESSING THE JOURNAL ARTICLES

You are not provided with direct links to these articles because in the real world of

research you will not always have direct links. The University is preparing you for lifelong

learning.

3

Destination: New Orleans, USA

Step 1: Go through your student portal and click on the Library icon.

Step 2: Type Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization and the rise of urban

tourism in the space provided under Search the Library Catalogue and then click on

SEARCH.

Step 3: Click in the box to the left of Journal Article on the left hand side of the screen and

click on Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization and the rise of

urban tourism in the middle of

the screen.

Step 4: Click on Access this article via SAGE Sociology Full-Text Collection in the middle of

the screen.

Step 5: Click on All Issues near the bottom of the screen.

Step 6: Click on 2007.

Step 7: Click on November 2007.

Step 8: Find Kevin Fox Gotham and click on Full-Text PDF below the name of the author.

Step 9: Click on Print icon.

Step 10 Click on Print.

Destination: Venice, Italy

Step 1: Go through your student portal and click on the Library icon.

Step 2: Type Performing tourism: Venetian residents in focus in the space provided under

Search the Library Catalogue and then click on SEARCH.

Step 3: Click in the box to the left of Journal Article on the left hand side of the screen and on

Performing tourism: Venetian residents in focus in focus in the middle of the screen.

Step 4: Click on Access this

article.

Step 5: Click on volume 34 on the left hand side of the screen.

Step 6: Click on issue 2 on the left hand side of the screen.

Step 7: Click on Performing tourism: Venetian residents in focus in the middle of the screen.

It is number 11.

Step 8: Click on PDF near the top of the screen.

Step 9: Click on print icon.

Step 10: Click on Print.

4

THE STRUCTURE OF A JOURNAL ARTICLE

Introduction

 For Assignment 2 you are required to summarise an article that relates to a particular

destination. Please see the Required Reading above. The destinations and the articles are

also listed in your Course Outline.

The teaching-research nexus

 See Topic 1 under the heading Academic Literacies.

 The Learning and Teaching unit of the University of South Australia refers to the ‘teaching-

research nexus’, that is, the connection between research and what students are taught and

learn. Although students are referred to a textbook, the main resources for this course are

refereed journal articles and scholarly books. Students learn how researchers gain

information for the books and articles they write. In Assignment 2 students are required to

comment on the research methods of authors.

Journal articles

 Journal articles are a very important source of ideas and information in studies at a

university.

 They are the result of research scholars have done about particular topics.

 If the articles are in refereed journals, this means that their contents have been checked for

accuracy by scholars unknown to the writer or writers of the articles. The scholars who do

the checking do not know the identity of the writer or writers of the articles. This is referred to

as a double-blind peer

review.

The Abstract

 Most articles have an abstract at the beginning. Abstracts usually give you an idea of the

main points of the article. Therefore, they should provide you with some guidance about

what to include as the main ideas in your summary. Sometimes, however, they may contain

concepts you do not understand. Do not worry about this. By the time you have finished

reading the article you should have a much better idea of the meaning of the abstract.

 Sometimes abstracts give some general background information about the topic.

 Sometimes the title ABSTRACT is provided. Sometimes there is no title.

 The abstract section may be typed in bold or in italics if the title ABSTRACT is not used.

 Do not summarise the abstract. In the article the main points of the abstract will be

discussed in much greater detail. These are the points you must summarise.

 Students sometimes ask whether they are required to do any additional reading for

Assignment 2. You may wish to do additional reading to clarify what you are reading about in

the article. Your summary, however, is a summary of the article. It must not include any

information that is not in the article.

 The articles about New Orleans and Venice have abstracts..

5

The Main Theme and the Title

 The article has a main theme. You must summarise what the article tells the reader about

that theme. The title of the article gives you an idea of the main theme although you may find

the title hard to understand until you have read the article.

 After reading the article, you should be able to explain what the title of the article means.

 The Introduction to the Venice article tells the reader what the main theme of the article is.

 The Introduction to the New Orleans article tells the reader about the main theme of the

article.

Reviewing the Literature

 Articles provide information about what scholars have already written about a topic. This is a

literature review. This information may not mean much to you if you do not read the

references used in this literature review.

 Very often you may find the literature review quite difficult. Do not worry about it. If you keep

reading the article, by the end of it you are likely to have at least some idea of the main points

in the literature review. You will need to read the article several times when you are

preparing your

assignment.

 You must include the main ideas of the literature review in your

summary.

 The list of references also tells you what literature has been used to write the article.

 When scholars conduct a good literature review, they should be able to judge where there is

a gap in knowledge about a particular topic. In their research, they may choose to fill this gap

and thus add to knowledge about the topic.

 In one of the weekly Shirley’s Corners you will be taught how to summarise the literature

review.

Research Methods

 Articles usually describe the research methods used to gain information for the article. You

are expected to summarise these research methods when you write your summary.

 In the Venice article the research methods are in the section called Study Methods.

 In the New Orleans article the research methods are in the Introduction.

Theoretical Framework

 Articles usually are based on some tourism theory. Sometimes a theory from another subject

area is applied to the topic about which the author or authors of the article are writing.

 In the Venice article the theoretical component is about tourism as a performance, mobility,

resident-tourist encounters and spaces.

 In the New Orleans article the theoretical component is about commodification,

rationalization, urban tourism and destination image.

 You will receive help with writing about the theoretical framework in one of the weekly

Shirley’s Corners.

6

Conclusion

 A well-written conclusion to an article can also be a good place to look for the main points

made in an article.

 Sometimes conclusions also indicate what additional research could be done about a topic.

RULES FOR SUMMARISING

1. When you read the journal article you have selected for Assignment 2, write down and

explain the main ideas of the article in your own words. Examples will help your explanation

but you should not include unnecessary detail.

2. As you read the article, do not stop to look in a dictionary for the meanings of words you do

not understand. Underline or highlight these words and find their meanings in a dictionary

after you have finished reading the article. If you stop to look up words while you are reading

the article you will lose your train of thought and you will find yourself re-reading what you

have already read.

3. When you start to write your summary, write an introductory sentence that includes the

following:

a. The title of the article in single quotation marks. The New Orleans article is called

‘Destination New Orleans: commodification, rationalization, and the rise of urban

tourism’.

The title of the article about Venice is called ‘Performing tourism: Venetian residents in

focus’.

b. The surname or family name of the author or authors of the article in the order in which

they are found in the article. The New Orleans article was written by Gotham. The

article about Venice was written by Quinn.

c. The name of the journal from which the article comes. The name of the journal is in

italics.

The New Orleans article is from a journal called Journal of Consumer Culture. The

article about Venice is from a journal called Annals of Tourism Research. Please note

the spelling of the word Annals.You will lose marks if you spell the word incorrectly.

d. The details of the journal from which the article comes including the year of publication,

the volume number, the issue number, the number of the page on which the article

begins and the number of the page on which the article finishes. The details for the New

Orleans article are as follows: vol. 7, no.3, pp.305-334. Its year of publication is 2007.

The details for the article about Venice are as follows: vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 458-476. Its

year of publication is 2007.

e. The main idea of the article.

4. In the main part of the summary, write a paragraph about each of the main ideas. In the

summary below, the writer has grouped within one paragraph main ideas that have

similarities or connections.

5. Use quotations sparingly. If you use quotations they must be very short (two or three words).

Write most of the summary in your own words. Do not copy from the article. If you do use a

quotation, provide the page number. Do not use quotations to cover the fact that you do not

understand what you are reading. If you have difficulty in understanding what you are

7

reading, consult the tutor by email or by a question on the Discussion Board. See how short

quotations are used in the example below.

6. The example below is a summary of one of the articles set for Assignment 1. The summary

does not refer to research methods, a literature review and theoretical frameworks. These

aspects of journal articles will be dealt with in a Shirley’s Corner and will be directly relevant

to the articles you are required to summarise.

AN EXAMPLE OF A SUMMARY

In an article titled ‘Who is a tourist? A conceptual clarification’ in vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 527-555 of

The Sociological Review in 1974, Cohen provides a conceptual definition of ‘tourist’ that

distinguishes a tourist from other kinds of travellers. Tourists make a journey and visit places

outside their normal environment for limited periods of time. Six characteristics differentiate

tourists from other kinds of travellers. Partial tourists, whose travels are similar in some ways to

tourism, do not satisfy all the requirements. To define ‘tourist’, Cohen uses already existing

definitions and adds some ideas of his own. He uses the word ‘fuzzy’ to indicate that it is not

always easy to differentiate a tourist from other kinds of travellers.

A tourist is a person who chooses to travel, unlike refugees, exiles and prisoners-of-war who are

forced by their circumstances to travel. Some travellers are not physically forced to travel but do

so because of the social requirements of the group to which they belong.

Unlike nomads who travel as a way of life, tourists are temporary travellers. Whereas nomads

have no fixed abode, tourists have permanent homes to which they return after a limited period

away from home. It is difficult to determine, however, the shortest period of time a person must

be away from home to be classified as a tourist. Similarly, it is also difficult to determine the

longest period of time tourists must be away from home before their classification changes to

permanent resident.

The tourist returns eventually to the place at which the journey began, thus being differentiated

from a migrant who makes a one-way journey to a new permanent destination. Although tourists

may stay away from home for a long time, they are still tourists if they intend to return home.

Unlike beach-house owners who have their holidays in the beach-house every year, tourists are

non-recurrent travellers who do not travel to the same place regularly on holidays. Regular

holidays at the same place lose their novelty although it is difficult to determine how frequently a

person must visit a place before this happens.

A tourist’s trip is ‘relatively long’ (p. 532); its length distinguishes it from a short trip. Length,

however, is not only decided by physical distance but can also depend on previous experience

and on the travel practices of the group to which the person belongs. People who are not

accustomed to travel may need to travel only a short distance to experience novelty which is

essential to tourism. The tourist does not have a specific purpose such as business, religion or

education. Instead, he or she has a general purpose, namely, the ‘expectation of pleasure’ (p.

533) from experiencing ‘novelty and change’ (p. 533). There is a slight difference between

‘novelty’ and ‘change’ (pp. 532-533). ‘Novelty’ is something new; ‘change’, however, does not

necessarily involve something new. Tourists who seek novelty are sightseers. Vacationers seek

change in the form of facilities and amenities such as good accommodation.

.

8

TYPES OF RESEARCH METHODS

You are required to summarise the research methods used in the article you have chosen. To

help you with this, here are some explanations of important research methods.

 Case study: Some articles will be described as a case study. In a case study, the

researchers concentrate on studying a group of people or a particular kind of tourism at a

particular place. Sometimes the researcher who develops a case study may rely upon

government documents and business records to collect the information.

 Content analysis: In this kind of research, the researchers study written text or pictures and

try to discover the symbolic meanings in these texts or pictures. In one of his lectures

Professor Brown showed you a poster of a family at the beach in the 1950s. The image of a

family at the beach symbolised the importance of the family in the 1950s.

 Data: This is the information collected by the researchers.

 Discourse analysis: In this kind of analysis, the researchers study the written and spoken

word to find out what has motivated the words that have been written and spoken.

 Desk research: In this kind of research, the researcher does not collect the data. Instead,

the researcher uses the data collected by other researchers. In this way, the researcher

gains background information about a topic. The data are referred to as secondary data.

Primary data are collected by the researcher. Please note that ‘data’ is a plural word and is

therefore followed by a plural verb. For example, you write ‘data are’, not ‘data is’.

 Direct observation: The researchers directly observe aspects of the topic of their research,

for example, the way tourists behave at the beach.

 Empirical: This is the word used to show that the researchers have used their senses (e.g.

sight and hearing) to gather their information about a topic.

 Ethnography, field research and participant observation: In some articles the writers use

ethnography and field research. Ethnography is also referred to as ‘participant-observation

research’ (Neuman 2000, pp. 344-345). The word is made up of the words ‘ethno’ which

means ‘people’ and ‘graphy’ which means ‘describing something’ (p. 347). It means

‘describing a culture and understanding another way of life’ from the point of view of the

people being studied (p. 347). Neuman defines participant observation as a research style

in which ‘a researcher directly observes and participates in small-scale social settings in the

present time’ (p. 345). The field researcher ‘directly talks with and observes the people being

studied’ (p. 345). In field research, the researcher asks questions, listens, shows interest,

and records answers (Neuman 2000, p. 370). In the field interview, ‘[o]pen-ended questions

are common, and probes are frequent’ (p. 371). Open-ended questions allow the person

being questioned to tell his or her story. The interviewer uses the interviewee’s answers as a

starting-point for gaining further information.

 Exploratory research: This involves research ‘into an area that has not been studied and in

which the researcher wants to develop initial ideas and a more focused research question’

(Neuman 2000, p. 510).

 Hypothesis: The researchers provide an explanation of a situation and then, through their

research, try to prove whether their explanation is correct or incorrect.

 Interviews: Interviews are like a conversation between the person doing the research (the

interviewer) and the person who is being interviewed (the interviewee) whose ideas provide

the interviewer with the data the interviewer is seeking. In an unstructured or in-depth

9

interview, the interviewee does most of the talking. The interviewer may ask a question now

and then for clarification. In a semi-structured interview, the interviewer does have a list of

topics to be discussed to focus the interviewee on the topic. In group interviews, several

people are interviewed at the same time.

 Longitudinal studies require the study of a research topic over a long period of time, for

example, the development of a child’s social skills over a long period of time.

 Purposive judgement samples: ‘Sample’ refers to the group of people chosen by the

researchers as the subjects of their research. In purposive or judgemental sampling the

researchers choose subjects they think would be best suited to the research study they are

conducting.

 The term ‘qualitative data’ means information in the form of words’ (Neuman 2000, p.

516).

 The term ‘quantitative data’ means ‘information in the form of numbers’ (Neuman 2000, p.

516).

 Survey: When a survey is conducted by researchers, they require many people to answer

the same questions. The researchers keep a record of the answers and analyse the

answers. The questions asked are known as a questionnaire. Before asking the questions,

the researchers have worked out what questions they are going to ask. This is a structured

questionnaire. Some of the questions will require one answer and are used to get factual

information. These questions are close-ended. Other questions are open-ended. These

allow the people being questioned to give a longer answer in which they can express their

points of view.

THE ORDER IN WHICH YOU DO THE VARIOUS PARTS OF THE SUMMARY

 There is no set order for the summary but you should make your summary flow so that the

person reading it will be able to make sense of it. Of course, the introductory sentence must

come first.

MINI-CHECKLIST FOR ASSIGNMENT 2

 Format of the summary

o The introductory sentence in the summary follows the guidelines explained in the Study

Guide Part 2, Rules for Summarising.

o The summary is written in the student’s own words with only very

brief quotations.

o Quotations are used sparingly in the summary.

o Quotations used are no more than three words in length.

o Quotations used are followed by the page number in brackets.

o The summary contains no in-text referencing, except for the page numbers for the very

brief quotations.

o The summary does not have a list of references.

o The summary is no longer than two A4 pages, that is, two sides of one piece of paper.

o Font 12, Times New Roman and single-line spacing are used in the summary.

o The summary has a title page containing the following information:

10

 The student’s name – (Chinese and Korean students must use their full Chinese or

Korean name.)

 The student’s ID number

 Assignment 2

 The name of the destination chosen – New Orleans or Venice

 Submission date

o The summary does not use headings.

o The summary does not use dot-points.

o The summary does not use contractions such as don’t.

o The summary has a conclusion that does not repeat information already contained in the

summary.

 Content of the summary

o The summary concisely and correctly explains the main points of the article.

o The summary identifies and concisely summarises the main ideas of the literature review.

o The summary identifies and concisely summarises the research methods used in the

preparation of the article.

o The summary identifies and concisely summarises theory used in the preparation of the

article.

MAJOR COMPONENTS OF THE RUBRIC FOR ASSIGNMENT 2

 Learning outcome 1 – understanding of article content – 75% of marks for this

assignment

 Learning outcome 2 – adherence to summarising guidelines outlined in study guide part

2, rules for summarising.

 Up to 5% of the marks will be deducted from the final mark for incorrect spelling and/or

grammar and for failure to follow the guidelines for the title page.

 Late assignments will receive a 10% penalty per day late.

REFERENCE

Neuman, WL 2000, Social research methods: qualitative and quantitative approaches, 4
th
edn,

Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, Massachusetts.

11

TOPIC 5: INTRODUCTION TO ASSIGNMENT 3

SEE THE COURSE OUTLINE FOR THE ASSIGNMENT DETAILS FOR ASSIGNMENT 3.

OBJECTIVES
At the end of this topic you should be able to:

 analyse a tourist

destination

 locate your chosen destination on a political map

 identify the major features of the natural environment that would be interesting to tourists

 describe the society at the destination you have

chosen

 explain how tourists would become aware of the cultural features of the society at the

destination

 explain how the heritage resources at the destination you have chosen illustrate the history of

the destination

 explain how the tourist destination became a tourist destination

 explain why tourists are motivated to visit the destination you have chosen

 identify the ‘push’ factors that enable tourists to visit the destination you have chosen

 explain the ‘pull’ factors that attract tourists to the destination you have chosen

 discuss the kinds of souvenirs tourists are able to buy at the destination you have chosen

 identify the impacts tourism has had on the people who live at the destination you have

chosen

 identify the kinds of accommodation available to tourists at the destination you have chosen

 explain how people access the destination you have chosen

 describe the kinds of transport available to tourists at the destination you have chosen

 identify the gastronomic experiences available to tourists at the destination you have chosen

 explain the purpose of the promotion of a destination

 identify the ways in which websites interpret the destination you have chosen

 produce the components of an original brochure to promote and interpret the destination you

have chosen.

When you have finished Assignment 2, you must start collecting your information

for the following parts of Assignment 3. You may find some of the information in

the article you have summarised.

12

Features of the natural environment

 Features of the natural environment include climate, seas, rivers, lakes, waterfalls,

mountains, coastlines, deserts, grasslands, reefs, natural events such as volcanic eruptions,

jungles, flowers, autumn leaves, rainforests, wildlife, sea life, birds and animals that are

national icons. (See your textbook: Weaver & Lawton 2010, pp. 115-123.)

Society at the destination

 The society at the destination includes the following topics: the racial and cultural diversity of

the people, the languages spoken, the ways in which the languages are written (the script),

the religions of the people, and the ways in which the people earn their living and the

destination gains its wealth.

 When you collect this information you should try to imagine how, as a tourist, you would be

aware of the characteristics of the society if you went to that destination. What would you

see? What would you hear? What would you smell?

History and heritage

 The history of the destination refers to the story of the destination told in chronological order.

 You are expected to write about what tourists would see at the destination from which they

could learn about the history of the destination. This means that you are required to write

about the heritage resources of the destination. Heritage refers to the remains of the past

that are passed on from one generation to the next. Heritage tourism can involve the

following activities:

o visiting historical monuments

o visiting museums and art galleries

o visiting historic houses and historic villages

o visiting theme parks that are based on the history of the destination

o attendance at re-enactments of historical events.

Tourist attractions

 Attractions can be:

 natural attractions such as beaches and dolphins

 cultural attractions such as festivals, sporting events and famous buildings

 specialised recreational attractions, made especially for tourism and recreation, such as

Disneyland or a golf course.

 See your textbook: Weaver & Lawton 2010, pp. 115-123, 123-128, 128- 130, 130-132.

The tourism industry

 At a destination, the tourism industry provides for the needs of tourists, for example,

providing accommodation, food and beverage and transport. Your search for information

should therefore include the following kinds of topics:

o What kinds of accommodation are available for tourists?

o What kinds of accommodation would enable tourists to experience the local culture?

o What kinds of transport are used to take tourists to and from the destination?

13

o What kinds of transport do tourists use when they are at the destination?

o Are there special kinds of transport that are used as a tourist attraction?

o What kinds of food and beverage outlets are available for tourists at the destination?

o What special kinds of food and drink are available at the destination?

o What kinds of souvenirs would tourists collect at the destination?

o How is the destination you have chosen advertised on websites?

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

 At this stage of Study Period 2 you should look for general information about these topics.

Later, you will be directed to scholarly information in journal articles and books.

 Each week in Shirley’s Corner I shall make suggestions about sources of information for

each of the destinations.

 As the Study Period progresses, you will be taught the theory that applies to the assignment.

The theory section includes motivation, ‘push’ factors, ‘pull’ factors, impacts, promotion and

interpretation.

 Try to spend at least 20 minutes each week collecting the information for your major

assignment.

SOME SUGGESTIONS

 To help you choose your destination, type into your computer the following:

o New Orleans tourism

o Venice tourism

 This will make available to you a number of websites from which you can get information

about tourism in each of these destinations. The information in the websites should then help

you to choose the destination on which to base your major assignment.

REFERENCE

Weaver, D, Lawton L 2010, Tourism management, John Wiley & Sons, Milton, Queensland.

1

Assessment feedback

TOUR 1001 Understanding Travel and Tourism Assignment 2 – Summary of article

Length – 2xA4 pages using font 12 Times New Roman (Single line spacing). Due date – Assignment 2, Friday 3
rd

May by 11p.m.

Up to 5% of the marks will be deducted from final mark for incorrect spelling and/or grammar and for failure to follow guidelines for title page. Late

assignments will receive a 10% penalty per day late.
Fail 2 Fail 1 Pass 2 Pass 1 Credit Distinction High Distinction

Understanding of

article content. (75%)

Minimal understanding

of

content of the set

article, indicated in

incorrect statements

and excessive

quotation.

Major aspects of the

article completely

omitted.

Some

understanding of

content of the set

article.

No explanation of

theoretical

framework and

methodology used

in the article.

Failure to

discriminate

between

important and

peripheral aspects.

Too much

quotation.

Most major

aspects

distinguished

from peripheral

aspects.

Excessive use of

quotation, thus

avoiding

explanation.

Major aspects of

the article

identified and

explained.

Some unnecessary

use of quotation,

thus avoiding

explanation.
Major aspects of

the content of the

article identified.

Unnecessary

quotation avoided.

Clear demonstration of

understanding of

content and purpose of

the article, shown in the

links made between

examples and

theoretical framework.

Unnecessary quotation

avoided.

Thorough understanding

of key aspects of the

article, its content and

purpose, shown in the

links made between
examples and

theoretical framework.

Individuality shown in

organisation of the

content of the summary

while remaining true to

the intent of the

content.

Adherence to

summarising

guidelines outlined in

relevant Information

sheet. (25%)

Complete failure to

adhere to guidelines for

summarising an article.

Some adherence

to

guidelines.

Errors in

formatting article

reference details.

Failure to provide

page numbers for

Some

adherence to

guidelines.

Formatting of

reference

details error

free.

Page numbers

Complete

adherence to

referencing

guidelines.

Ideas grouped

successfully in

most cases.

Improvement

Complete
adherence to
referencing
guidelines.
Ideas grouped

successfully in well-

constructed

paragraphs.

Complete adherence to

referencing guidelines.

Ideas appropriately

grouped in well-

constructed

paragraphs.

Concise words and other

written expressions well

Complete adherence to

referencing guidelines.

Concise written

expression. Ideas

appropriately grouped

in well-constructed

paragraphs.

Demonstrated

2

quotations.

Failure to group

ideas in well-

constructed

paragraphs.

Some repetition of

points already

made.

correctly

provided for

quotations.

Failure to group
ideas in well-
constructed
paragraphs.

Some repetition

of points

already made.

needed in choice

of concise words

and

other written

expressions.

Minor

improvements

needed in choosing

concise words and

other written
expressions.

chosen. understanding of the

difference between a

summary and a

paraphrase.

Summary comment & grade

The Graduate qualities being assessed by this assignment are indicated by an X:

x
GQ1: operate effectively with and upon a body of

knowledge

GQ5: are committed to ethical action and social responsibility

GQ2: are prepared for lifelong learning

x
GQ6: communicate effectively

GQ3: are effective problem solvers

GQ7: demonstrate an international perspective

GQ4:can work both autonomously and

collaboratively