Social constructionism as a tool to maintain an advantage in tourism research

Abstract

Social constructionism is commonly understood as one of qualitative approaches in the social sciences. It takes the ontological viewpoint that the meaning of the social world cannot be discovered, but is rather constructed by humans along with their histories, societies, ideas and languages. Historically, social constructionism is anchored in Kuhn’s idea of the paradigm, but its foundations can be traced back to Kant’s philosophy of knowledge and his rejection of the naturalistic ‘tabula rasa’. Social constructionism as the main idea of ‘non-classical sociology of science’ has assumed relativity of knowledge, where knowledge is seen primarily as a social product. Thereby, it acknowledges the role of various perspectives created in different social circumstances. In tourism research, social constructionism started to develop in the 1990s and has become one of the dominant approaches among qualitative methodologies in the recent years. Paradoxically, social constructionism, which is based on the pluralism of perspectives, can also be used as a tool to maintain an advantage. This can be easily observed with respect to the production of knowledge on tourism. Analyzing the content of leading journals, we note that the dominant position is occupied (all too often) by one language, one tradition, one chosen set of research topics, and one group of scholars, who serve as the ‘gate keepers’ or ‘power-brokers’ of tourism knowledge. We find this problem important and believe that the described phenomenon can limit the freedom of research on tourism, which is illustrated through quantitative and qualitative analyses of the leading journals in terms of the represented traditions, languages, authors, and editors.