On kindness of strangers in tourism

Abstract

Putnam captured the world’s imagina-tion by invoking the metaphor of a solitary bowler to represent a chronic drop in voluntary associationmemberships, including organized bowling leagues, a trend he characterized as havingdestructive impli-cations for the social fabric of America. In alerting scholars and policymakers to changes in the terrain ofcommunity relations, Putnam called for greater attention to the intensifying corrosion of generalizedtrust and reciprocity, values he regarded as crucial to the facilitation of social cooperation. Putnambelieved the dramatic decline in social and civic engagement meant relative strangers were less likelyto interact, thereby failing to build meaningful relationships and generate the social capital necessaryfor a well-functioning society. By social capital, Putnam (1993, p. 167) meant ‘‘features of social organi-zation, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coor-dinated actions.’’ In many ways, Putnam simply refashioned an age-old idea in a new way: the decline ofsocial capital, he observed, marked a significant loss of community.The purpose here is to argue that Putnam’s work can be uniquely forwarded in tourism studieswithin an emerging civic framework of tourism and positive psychology (the study of what makes lifeworth living). To be sure, social capital has emerged as a growing area of interest in tourism research,focusing on (1) tourism business networks, management, and economic development (see Hall T Jones, 2005; McGehee, Lee, O’Bannon, & Perdue, 2010; von Friedrichs Grangsjo G Zhao, Ritchie, & Echtner, 2011); (2) community engagement in tourism destina-tions (see Moscardo, 2008; Okazaki, 2008); and (3) social tourism issues (see McCabe, 2009;Minnaert, Maitland, & Miller, 2009). Nevertheless, tourism scholars remain surprisingly silent onsocial capital in the civic sense that Putnam invoked it.If anything, tourism experiences are routinely characterized as being complicit in the loss of com-munity that Putnam bemoaned. Bauman (2000) described tourism as symptomatic of developing‘‘peg’’ communities—that is, ‘‘. . . communities formed by the act of hanging individual concerns on