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Commentary: Tracing the Commodity Chain of Global Tourism

Dennis R. Judd a a Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA Online Publication Date: 01 November 2006

To cite this Article Judd, Dennis R.(2006)'Commentary: Tracing the Commodity Chain of Global Tourism',Tourism

Geographies,8:4,323 336
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Tourism Geographies Vol. 8, No. 4, 323336, November 2006

Commentary: Tracing the Commodity Chain of Global Tourism

DENNIS R. JUDD
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA
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ABSTRACT It is argued that current denitions of tourism are decient because they dene tourism as a system of consumption rather than production. Because such denitions makes tourism appear to be unlike any other industry, the study of tourism is virtually absent from the literatures of economic geography and globalization, and relatively neglected in the social sciences as well. It is suggested that tourism should be regarded as a production process involving a distinct product and identiable inputs. As the rst step towards realizing this goal, the concept of commodity chains is applied to construct a prole of the global tourism industry. KEY WORDS: Tourism industry, commodity chains, the tourist experience

Introduction As Dimitri Ioaniddes and Keith Debbage (1998) noted in their book, The Economic Geography of the Tourist Industry, tourism is virtually absent from the literature of economic geography. This lacuna exists despite the fact that by all accounts it is one of the leading industries in the world, with some authors saying it is the leading industry. Tourism is also missing from the rapidly expanding literature on globalization. For example, in the fourth edition of his book, Global Shift: transforming the world economy, Peter Dicken (2003) does not include a single index reference to tourism, despite the fact that he intends to treat the most important economic sectors of globalization. Tourism is mentioned rarely by scholars who study globalization and cities. For example, in her book The Global City, Saskia Sassen (2002a) does not mention tourism even once, as the index references reveal. In her book Global Networks: Linked Cities, there are four index references, but in these cases tourism is mentioned parenthetically, with no analysis whatever (Sassen 2002b). The rst book dealing with globalized cities that takes tourism seriously was published nally in 2005 (Abrahamson 2005).

Correspondence Address: Dennis R. Judd, Department of Political Science (MC 276), University of Illinois at Chicago, BSB, 1007 W. Harrison, Chicago, IL 60607, USA. Fax: +312 413-0440; Tel.: +312 996-4421; Email: djudd@uic.edu ISSN 1461-6688 Print/1470-1340 Online /06/04/0032314 DOI: 10.1080/14616680600921932
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2006 Taylor & Francis

324 D. R. Judd It is very odd that an interest in tourism has emerged only recently among urban scholars, especially when one considers how pivotal it has been since the 1970s (and before) to urban economies and to the regeneration of central cities. In the social sciences, there was only one published discussion of tourism as a strategy of economic development in American cities until the early 1990s (Judd and Collins 1979). An indication of its absence from this literature is that when Susan Fainstein and the author published the edited book, The Tourist City, in 1999, it was the rst book of its kind to appear in the USA (Judd and Fainstein 1999). It is fair to say that the chapters in that book are largely descriptive, not theoretical: It was felt crucial to document the importance of tourism to urban development; theoretical discussions would have to wait. In 2000, when scholars were recruited into the International Tourism Research Group, most of the people contacted were urban specialists who had not written previously about tourism. In that way it was hoped to vitalize the study of tourism among urban specialists. Outside the realm of a specialized group of academic experts and practitioners, tourism has been slow to emerge as a serious topic for study because it does not t the usual prole describing an industry or recognizable economic sector. Tourism has been treated with suspicion, in part, because it is regarded as frivolous consumption and not as a productive activity (Ioannides and Debbage 1998: 5). In the tradition of Adam Smith and Karl Marx and the generations of their followers and detractors, work has long been regarded as the central organizing feature of human society, an activity essential to the material and spiritual well-being of human beings. Travel and tourism have been regarded as a break from the routines of daily life, the tiring obligations of family and work, an experience which contrasts with everyday experience (Urry 1991: 132). Posing tourism as a break from such routines entails, inevitably, the idea that tourism is purely a consumption activity, even an expendable luxury. This impression has been reinforced by tourism specialists who dene it as a consumption industry, in contrast to other sectors such as autos, apparel and coffee. Tourism is treated as if it, whatever it is, arises spontaneously, without producers and a production process. Such a position is untenable. In this article it is argued that the tourist experience should be understood as a product consciously produced and marketed, and that its value is determined by the costs of the inputs necessary for its construction. It is suggested that the concept of commodity chains offers a useful heuristic for understanding the basic elements that compose the tourism production system. Dening the Tourism Industry An overwhelming consensus exists among tourism specialists that tourism is an industry made up of an assortment of goods and services; in fact, as sometimes noted, by this standard it should not be regarded as an industry at all. For example, in their leading textbook on tourism, Clare Gunn and Turgut Var (2002) take care

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to emphasize that tourism is unique by noting, There is a prevailing misconception that tourism is an industry. Instead it is an agglomeration of land development and programs designed to meet the needs of travellers. They go on to assert that tourism reverses the relationship between product and market that is observed in other industries: Tourism involves a tremendous diversity of products. Tourism products, loosely dened as visitor experiences, occur at destinations. The distribution system transportation services moves the markets to the products. This is completely opposite of industries manufacturing products that are distributed to markets (Gunn and Var 2002). In their book Tourism and Economic Development, Williams and Shaw (1994: 2) echoed the concern that tourism must be dened as an industry with unique features: [T]he denition of the tourist industry is crucially important. In most countries tourism is statistically invisible and, usually, only the most obvious sectors or those exclusively devoted to tourists are enumerated in ofcial tourism data. Inevitably, this tends to be the accommodation sector and, perhaps, cafes and restaurants. Yet the tourist industry is far larger than this. Tourists also spend money directly on recreational facilities, tourist attractions, shops and local services. In a similar vein, Debbage and Daniels (1998: 23) maintained that, ... tourism is a fundamentally different type of industry from other forms of commodity production. Tourism is no single product but, rather, a wide range of products and services that interact to provide an opportunity to full a tourist experience that comprise both tangible parts (e.g. hotel, restaurant, or air carrier) and intangible parts (e.g. sunset, scenery, mood). They noted that as a consequence, it is exceedingly hard for researchers to estimate with any degree of accuracy the sectors magnitude or signicance in terms, for example, of generated revenues or employment (Debbage and Daniels 1998: 23). Commenting on this state of affairs, Stephen Smith (1998: 34) argued that the fact that tourism statistics are suspect makes the idea of a tourism industry hard to sell. Despite these very signicant drawbacks, the denition of tourism as an industry composed of a diverse array of goods and services has become rmly established. In 1992 the World Tourism Organization (WTO), a UN agency, devised an accounting system called Tourism Economic Accounts and, three years later, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued guidelines for Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSAs) as a way to measure the contribution of tourism consumption to national economic accounts. After a series of reports and conferences, in 2000 the UN adopted the TSA framework. Subsequently, the WTO dened tourism as an industry that included all establishments whose principal productive activity

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326 D. R. Judd is a tourism characteristic productive activity, and thus the volume of tourism was estimated as the supply of goods and services to tourists. Tourism would then be determined by what and how much the tourist establishments produce (WTO 2000). The World Travel and Tourism Council, established in 1990, adopted the WTOs TSA model. The Council has said, [T]he industry does not produce or supply a homogeneous product or service like traditional industries (agriculture, electronics, steel, etc). Instead, Travel and Tourism is an industrial activity dened by the diverse collection of products (durables and non-durables) and services (transportation accommodations, food and beverage, entertainment, government services, etc) that are delivered to visitors (WTTC 2004: 9). The TSA methodology is fraught with difculties. It is extremely ambiguous about what businesses and services are included; the estimates of the proportion of use by tourists are suspect; and the surveys needed to obtain the information are expensive and complex. For this reason reliable statistics are hard to come by. An example of the various ways people apply the TSA can be seen in a recent article published in Urban Studies (Jones et al. 2003). The authors cited the OECDs procedure and reached the conclusion that, The construction of a fully edged account is potentially expensive and methodologically complex (Jones et al. 2003: 2778). They followed the OECDs suggestion that initial studies map the more straightforward elements related to tourism rst. Thus, the authors used core sectors including hotels and accommodation, restaurants and other eating places, bars and public houses, museums and visitor gardens, amusement parks, fairs and other tourist attractions, other recreational activities not elsewhere classied (Jones et al. 2003: 2778). The results they reported are necessarily ambiguous, forcing them to apologize for the shortcomings of the TSA procedures but nevertheless justifying them as the most comprehensive method available (Jones et al. 2003: 2793). The WTO has recognized the problems with tourism statistics as well: The World Tourism Organization is aware of the limitations of the available statistical information on tourism . . . International tourism statistics are often not uniform, because denitions and methods of collection tend to differ (WTO 2006). It is no wonder that non-specialists do not regard tourism as a genuine industry, or even as a recognizable activity. If the specialists who write about tourism assert that it is unlike any other industry and that it is difcult or impossible to apply its principal statistical procedures reliably, then how should it be incorporated into broader literatures? If it overlaps other industry groups, is it an industry at all? As troublesome as these questions may be, the most serious deciency of the conventional denition may be the absence of a singular product that can be placed into market arbitrage mechanisms for the purpose of determining price and value. The term product is thrown about in a cavalier manner in the literature on tourism.

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In economics it has meaning only within pricing systems. Unless a tourism product can be dened in this manner, the concept of a tourist industry will continue to be regarded with disdain. Commodity Chains The concept of commodity chains is useful for identifying the organization structure of the tourism industry, its spatial characteristics, and the relationship between inputs and outputs (Clancy 1998). The commodity chains concept is well established among economists and globalization scholars. Commodity chains (alternatively known as value chains) reveal complex global networks, a whole range of activities from primary production to nal consumption and [the] linkages binding them (Raikes et al. 2000). They offer a way of showing how networks of supply and demand have evolved over time. They provide a means of identifying institutions, actors, modes of production, the movements of materials needed for production, the distribution of products, and marketing and consumption dynamics. They are especially useful for revealing the spatiality of production relationships; for example, they have been employed to show the relationship between sites of corporate management and sites of production. Schematic representations of commodity chains have become a mainstay of the literature because they reveal the complicated web of interactions that characterize most industries, especially on a global scale. As of 2006, it appears that only two authors have attempted to theorize a commodity chain of tourism. In a 1998 article published in the Review of International Political Economy, Michael Clancy observed that the hotel and airlines sectors were situated at the centre of a tourism commodity chain but it was unclear, he said, what other goods and services should be incorporated into the chain. He concluded that tourism has globalized like other industries, but that the commodity chains concept must be modied to account for the unique organization of the global tourism industry (Clancy 1998). The difculty he encountered in applying the concept was that he accepted the standard denition of tourism as composed of a complex mix of goods and services; as a consequence, it was difcult to know which businesses to include and which to leave out. Recently, Jan Mosedale has attempted to unravel the structural organization of package tourism in the UK by tracing the commodity chain that ties tours to St Lucia, an island in the Caribbean. Mosedale (2006: 2) asserted that It is the relationship between all the actors within the tourism sector both at the origin and the destination that shapes the general development of tourism. In answering the question what, exactly is the commodity of the tourism industry?, Mosedale observed that it is the overall experience that is sold to the client (Mosedale 2006: 5). He noted that this experience differs greatly from place to place, and even from tourist to tourist. However, he then confuses the issue by retreating to conventional denitions: The tourism sector is . . . producing a product that is constituted of both tangible products

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328 D. R. Judd (transportation, accommodation etc.) as well as intangible products (tourist experiences) (Mosedale 2006: 6). It would be preferable to treat the tourist experience as the singular product of the industry and to specify the inputs that determine the nature of that experience. As a concept, the commodity chain of tourism can make sense only if it is organized around a product priced through market mechanisms, much like, for example, autos, textiles and coffee beans. Finally, some of the spatial characteristics of the industry must be theorized. These topics are explored briey in the next sections of the paper. The Tourism Product The product of the industry is the tourists experience (as it happens, in their textbook Gunn and Var seem to agree). It must be understood that this experience is manufactured by institutions and actors and that it is priced within a market system. The three main inputs to the tourist experience are image, investments in place infrastructure and labor, as represented through the work of tour operators and some other providers and workers. By specifying the nature of these inputs in some detail, one can begin the task of determining their relative contribution. First Input to the Commodity Chain of Tourism: Marketing and Image Just as in most other global commodity chains, the highest value-added inputs to the commodity chain of tourism ow from design, marketing and information technology and management. It would be strange indeed if the commodity chain of tourism was exceptional in this regard. In all industries, design, product image and marketing require a mix of raried skills that marry media to the work of creative talent. In autos, advertising comes together with the artists, industrial engineers and computer design specialists who work for major auto companies and specialized design and fabrication companies such as Bertone, Giugiaro and Pinanfarina. In the apparels industry, we are all familiar with the dozens of labels, and we know that nearly all of the value in designer clothing arises from design and marketing. Raw materials, fabric and assembly account for a very a small proportion of the nal price. As a substantial literature demonstrates, the imaging and constant re-imaging of products create consumer desires. Few people buy a car, or a dress, purely for its functional value. They buy because the product signies social standing, sophisticated taste and other values that marketers are adept at exploiting. The tourist experience is similar. People visit places because they have been exposed to images transmitted constantly through television, magazines and newspapers; through brochures and websites prepared by tour operators, airlines and countless other businesses; by government tourist agencies, convention and visitors bureaux, and cities and towns; and by travel writers who churn out hundreds of new titles a year. The Internet has rapidly democratized image-creation and dissemination by

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making it possible for would-be tourists to construct their own composite images of the experience or experiences they seek. Obviously, more information is needed about how tourist images are produced, but there is little mystery about the basic process. What goes into tourist images? The promise of comfort and familiarity and, ironically, the opposite uniqueness, adventure, entertainment and excitement. Tourism providers are preoccupied with the art of distilling a collage of images into a promised tourist experience. The production of nature programmes is analogous. On the Nature Channel, every second something exciting is happening in the natural world; the television viewer is not privy to the long hours of tedium that have been edited out. A standard repertoire of images is used over and over again; in fact, such images are bought and sold in a free-wheeling media marketplace; thus, there is the lioness licking her cubs; the lioness stalking a gazelle; the pride of lions at the kill. In tourist marketing, there are the palm trees listing over a white sand beach against a sunset on the far horizon. In the case of cities, historic architecture, iconic sites and exciting street scenes and night life make up a typical montage. Design and image have little, if any, intrinsic value. Instead the value is incorporated into products as brand names and designer labels, new styles and other signatures of the designers work. Image is an essential component of the product; rarely can it stand alone. Certainly this characteristic describes the tourist experience. On a daily basis, potential tourists which includes just about everyone are bombarded with the ubiquitous images of travel contained in television advertisements and programmes, newspapers, billboards, Internet sites, magazines and books. Considered as a whole this works as generic marketing for travel of all sorts. When potential tourists begin the process of winnowing this ood of information to design a particular trip, the product they seek the tourist experience comes into sharp focus. Second Input to the Commodity Chain of Tourism: Place Infrastructure However spectacular their natural or cultural attributes may be, all places that hope to attract tourists must build an infrastructure in which to move and house them. Even in areas where local residents already support systems of roads and airports, these systems must be built to larger scale and new services must be provided to accommodate visitors. In addition, an infrastructure specically designed to make visitors comfortable must be built. This process is particularly transparent in the case of urban tourism. In the past quarter of a century, older industrial cities in the USA have transformed their built environments by building, at great expense, a specialized infrastructure of tourism (Judd 2003). In the rst phase, older industrial and port cities built tourist bubbles that were isolated from the crime and physical decay of surrounding neighbourhoods and downtowns (Judd 1999). Over time, most of these cities have entered a more mature phase that involves making the city as a whole more attractive to visitors (Judd 2004). The policies used to make this happen

330 D. R. Judd were expensive: policing and other strategies to lower crime rates, and high levels of amenities such as redeveloped waterfronts, parks and other public areas. Without these overt strategies, these cities could not have entered the national and international tourism sweepstakes. Likewise, sites of ecotourism can accommodate large numbers of tourist ows only when an infrastructure has been built to transport, house and mediate the environmental impacts of tourists. The infrastructure of place decisively inuences and, in some cases, determines the experiences of tourists. For example, like all Fordist production systems, Fordist tourism infrastructure is composed of globalized architectural styles and is designed to serve (or process) efciently large numbers of consumers with standardized services at minimum cost. Cruise ships, resorts, festival shopping malls, sports facilities, tourist bubbles and entertainment complexes provide a highly regimented and predictable experience for their users (Hiernaux-Nicolas 2004). Frequently, efforts are made to incorporate a thin veneer of the local into Fordist environments curry dishes at McDonalds in India, for example, or Mexican motifs in the resorts at Puerto Vallarta. Still, standardization prevails. Unlike Fordist tourism, which works with small prot margins and large numbers of tourists, post-Fordist tourism, which emphasizes unique experiences and variety, adds high value to the tourism commodity chain. Such facilities as boutique hotels, shing lodges and ecotourist complexes (which are often built as miniature cities combining lodging, dining and waste management), normally represent locality and difference through manipulated images of authenticity. Highly elaborated architectures and design are signatures of locality, ethnicity and culture. Because they tend to offer a high degree of luxury and exclusiveness, the tourist experiences they offer are expensive; even so, both Fordist and post-Fordist tourism are corporate nodes in the production system of global tourism. The capital that ows in and out of them mostly bypasses local economies. Artisanal production is a component of the tourist infrastructure in most destinations, but its importance varies. It is virtually absent in Fordist environments and is still rare in China, where tourist shops are stocked with mass-produced state goods masquerading as authentic. Of course, this sort of slight-of-hand exists in any place where large numbers of tourists congregate. The sites of genuine artisanal production are usually (but not always) easy to recognize because of their vernacular architectural styles and physical environments (such as outdoor markets) that reect local social and cultural histories and traditions; Oaxaco, Mexico, and the surrounding villages provide a good example. Here. the inimitable character and distinctiveness of a place emerges (though it is always changed to some degree by the presence of tourists and their money). Tourists in such places can buy from artisanal food producers, hire local guides, stay in small hotels or B&Bs, eat in local eateries and buy from local artists. As they do so, they contribute directly to local economies and may help raise the level of amenities available to local residents.

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As in many other globalized industries, the tourist product is composed of a mixture of Fordist, post-Fordist and artisanal modes of production. Tourists have various tastes, and producers are keen to satisfy any group with enough purchasing power. Some tourists elevate comfort, security, predictability and cost above all other considerations. Some tourists disdain Fordist environments in favour of boutique pleasures, a sense of authenticity and local colour. In actuality, in the course of a trip most tourists are likely to experience all three environments, unless the nature of the local place infrastructure makes this difcult (in resorts and on cruise ships, for example). There is, of course, a close interaction between image and place. The marketing that they have been exposed to ensures that tourists will have rather xed expectations about their destinations. To a considerable degree, therefore, marketing drives the nature of place infrastructure. According to Briavel Holcomb (1993: 134), Place marketers do not see their task as purely promoting and advertising, but also as adapting the product (that is, the place) to be more desirable to the market. In its broadest conception, place infrastructure is composed of an almost endless list of facilities and amenities, everything from convention centres to restaurants to owers in parks. Ioannides and Debbage (1998: 211) have said that places are produced as commodities to be promoted and sold to consumers .... But it is more accurate to regard place as an input; considered in its entirety, place infrastructure is an input that helps to shape the tourists experience. To determine the value of this input it is not necessary to calculate the value of each component; it is all in the mix of amenities and built environment (Terhorst et al. 2003).

Third Input to the Commodity Chain of Tourism: Tourism Providers and Some Categories of Service Workers In the age of the Internet a complete account of tourist entrepreneurs is impossible, but a list of the most important, or at least the best organized, would include tour operators, airlines, corporations that run hotels and resorts, and government agencies. Ioannides maintains that tour operators, who are wholesalers of diverse tourist services, are the gatekeepers of tourism (Ioannides 1998: 139). According to Ryan and Hoontrakul (2004: 5), As a rule, the services provided by travel intermediaries have been centered on three areas marketing, design and nancing. New reservation systems, computer technology, international quality standards and co-ordinated investment by nancial institutions and corporations have extended the reach of tourism providers vastly. The Internet has become extremely important in facilitating the marriage of these three elements with the desires and decisions of tourists. Tour operators are middlemen who knit together an astonishing array of institutions and actors. They market inclusive tour packages; provide information and advice about destinations; co-ordinate different modes of travel and lodging, dining, sightseeing and cultural activities. Because they are able to minimize risks, offer convenience and prices far

332 D. R. Judd lower than if an individual tourist makes these arrangements separately, they are taking over a constantly expanding share of the market. Tourism providers include not only entrepreneurs, but workers who specialize in providing valuable services essential to the tourists experience. Although the jobs associated with tourism tend to be low-wage, tourism is also labour-intensive and thus it creates a lot of jobs, especially entry-level opportunities for new immigrants and people with few skills (Gladstone and Fainstein, 2003). However, the employment prole of tourism varies enormously from place to place, and there are undoubtedly good opportunities, especially in web design, place and facility marketing, and in convention centres and cultural institutions (Fainstein et al. 2003). But more research on tourism employment is needed to get a x on how tourism sectors are associated with varying job structures. Tourism providers are not merely in the business of discerning what tourists want and trying to satisfy their desires. On the contrary. Tourist producers attempt to shape the wants and tastes of consumers. But are some tourists able to escape the connes of place infrastructure and the clutches of tour operators? It is true that a traveller may stop off at scenic overview, take a walk in the woods and undertake many other activities without making contact with tourist entrepreneurs. But these experiences invariably occur as interludes between commodied experiences. Perhaps, by denition, to be a tourist means that one is situated within the commodity chain of tourism. The Sources of Change The commodity chains for all products have been transformed by new information technologies. Information management and technology makes it possible for corporations to expand their reach, but it also allows new players to enter the game. According to Gary Gerif (2001), the digital era is melting the informational glue that holds corporations and global value chains together. Power has shifted towards Internet navigators in infomediary-driven chains. Centralization and decentralization occur simultaneously. In many industry groups, products can be sold directly to consumers without the intercession of companies that previously presided over marketing and distribution, through on-line selling, catalogues and global delivery services. The tourism industry is being transformed by these same developments. Airlines, hotel chains, rental car companies and tour operators have achieved global reach. At the same time, tourist entrepreneurs can enter almost at will. This is one of the circumstances that forces providers to constantly market new tourist experiences. Globalization has intensied the competition between places. Place entrepreneurs are under constant pressure to improve infrastructure and adopt policies friendly to visitors. Because they depend so much on repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations, tour operators and other non-local tourist entrepreneurs constantly search for new destinations and abandon those that no longer satisfy their customers.

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Ioannides (1998: 147) observed that, Tour operators frequently protest about rises in airport taxes, inefcient infrastructure or environmental pollution in key resorts. Tourists desires are changing constantly. The experience that was satisfactory yesterday no longer satises. In addition, when new products become available competition induces a copy-cat logic among place-entrepreneurs. Mackun (1998) has indicated that tourism is particularly prone to rapid transformation. In his account, The customers are seeking a pleasurable experience that is both different and more exhilarating than their daily, mundane experiences at home; one that justies their expenditure of time and resources as well as their choice of a certainly locality and a particular establishment within that locality (Mackun 1998: 261). The producers of image, the builders of place infrastructure and tourism providers try to tap into that motivation. Redening Tourism: The Challenge The tourism system cannot logically be a system of consumption unless there are also producers. Producers seek to shape the tourist experience; it does not arise by accident. It is important to study the demographics of tourists and their desires and patterns of consumption. But what tourists want or think they want, and the choices from which they choose, are determined at least as much by those who consciously produce the tourist experience as they are by the consumers. Specifying the inputs to the tourist experience is a challenging task and gathering the data to trace spatial relationships and to estimate pricing is even more daunting. But these problems characterize all industries and all commodity chains, and there is little reason to believe that tourism is inherently more complex than many other economic industries. The only reason that we have a detailed knowledge of commodity chains in agricultural products, for example, is that a great deal of research has been devoted to tracing out the linkages and the pricing mechanisms for particular commodities. Fordist and post-Fordist tourism environments illustrate the strategy for discovering the linkages and pricing mechanisms for the tourist industry. It is possible to get a precise x on the valuation of the tourist experience provided by package tours, cruise ships and entertainment complexes because one charge covers nearly everything. Pricing the inputs to such experiences is also straightforward: cost data kept by the companies running these businesses will yield up the estimated values that have been added by marketing, the costs of infrastructure and personnel. The task is more difcult for a more complex tourism environment, but the logic of research is similar. Tracing the commodity chain for all industries requires the construction of indicators and sampling studies to estimate the value of inputs, but as previously noted, the overall mix is as important to discover as the component pieces.

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334 D. R. Judd Current denitions of the tourism industry obscure rather than reveal the linkages and relationships that, when taken together, add up to a recognizable system of production. The main value-added inputs to the tourist experience include image (or marketing, if preferred), place infrastructure and the work of tour operators. The relationship between image (and how it is produced) and tourists use of place infrastructure; the activities of tour operators and other local tourist entrepreneurs: how do these components t together? Surveys can reveal the relative satisfaction of tourists and the nature of the experience they have had during a trip (or better, at each destination). What images did tourists have before they arrived? Where did they get those images from? Did the image t with their experience? Did they mostly use standardized facilities (and guided tours or tour packages)? How did they interact with the overall mix of services and amenities? The deciencies in the current denition of tourism are sufcient to justify the time and energy it will take to understand tourism as a system of production. The potential payoffs are substantial. Only by treating tourism as a system of production can the walls surrounding the specialized literature on tourism be broken down. Research on tourism will continue to be compartmentalized and largely ignored by non-specialists until it becomes accepted as an industry that looks just like other industry groups. Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Peter Billing, Director of the Center for Regional- og Turismeforskning (Center for Regional and Tourism Research), Nex, Denmark, for the invitation to conduct research and writing at the Center in April and May 2004. This research was catalysed by that wonderful experience. This paper was originally presented as a plenary presentation to the Recreation, Tourism and Sport Specialty Group at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, Illinois, 9 March 2006.
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336 D. R. Judd Notes on Contributor Dennis R. Judd is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and Fellow in the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago. R esum e: Retracer la cha ne de production du tourisme global
On argumente que les d enitions actuelles du tourisme sont d ecientes car elles d ecrivent le tourisme comme syst` eme de consommation et non de production. Cette fa con de d enir le tourisme le rend diff erent des autres activit es e conomiques et font que les publications en g eographie e conomique et sur la globalisation ignorent pratiquement le tourisme qui est aussi relativement n eglig e par les sciences sociales. On sugg` ere quil faudrait consid erer le tourisme comme un processus de production dun produit sp ecique a ` partir dentrants identiables. Pour atteindre ce but, dans un premier temps, le concept de cha nes de production est appliqu e pour construire un prole de lactivit e globale du tourisme.

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Mots-cl es: Industrie du tourisme, cha nes de production, exp erience des touristes

Zusammenfassung: Kommentar: Auf der Spur der Gebrauchsguterkette des globalen Tourismus
Der Autor legt dar, dass die gegenw artigen touristischen Denitionen unzureichend sind, da diese den Tourismus eher als ein System des Verbrauchs denn der Herstellung erkl aren. Da solche Definitionen den Tourismus v ollig anders erscheinen lassen als andere Gewerbe, fehlen denn auch Tourismusstudien weitgehend in der Literatur zur Wirtschaftsgeographie und Globalisierung und sind auch in den Sozialwissenschaften verh altnism aig vernachl assigt. Der Autor schl agt vor, dass der Tourismus als ein Herstellungsprozess betrachtet werden sollte, der ein bestimmtes Produkt und klar benennbare ,Rohstoffe beinhaltet. Als einen ersten Schritt hin auf dieses Ziel wendet der Autor das Konzept der Gebrauchsguterkette an, um ein Prol der globalen Tourismusindustrie zu konstruieren.

Stichw orter: Tourismusindustrie, Gebrauchsg uterkette, touristische Erfahrung