Elsevier

Annals of Tourism Research

Volume 64, May 2017, Pages 139-149
Annals of Tourism Research

ANT: A decade of interfering with tourism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.03.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • It shows how ANT has sparked productive controversies in the social sciences.

  • It discusses contributions of actor-network theory to tourism studies.

  • It sketches out avenues by which ANT offers new ways of interfering with tourism.

Abstract

Ten years ago actor-network theory (ANT) entered this journal. To illustrate how the relational ontology and sensibilities of ANT lend themselves to particular kinds of research, we first interrogate the main controversies as a way to open up and discuss the main premises of ANT. These debates concern the status and agency of objects and non-humans, ANT’s denial of the explanatory power of social structures, and the political implications of ANT. Second we present ANT’s relevance for tourism studies and discuss what ANT ‘does’ in practice. After summarizing a decade of relations between ANT and tourism, we conclude by tracing three future trajectories of how we have ‘moved away with’ ANT into new areas of discovery.

Introduction

Ten years ago, in September 2007, this journal published an article in which actor-network theory (ANT) was introduced as an alternative way of looking at and researching tourism. In this article, Van der Duim (2007) proposed that tourism should be seen in terms of tourismscapes, contingently assembled and interdependent socio-material configurations consisting of people, organizations, objects, technologies, and spaces. These tourismscapes are economic, physical, technological, political, spatial and social at the same time and “should not be reduced to any of these individual ‘factors’” (see Urry, 2016: 62–63). Before this entry, a small number of forays had already been made where ANT was translated into the realm of tourism studies (Cloke and Perkins, 2005, Franklin, 2004, Jóhannesson, 2005, O'Neill and Whatmore, 2000). Soon, they were succeeded by others, notably (Ren, 2010, Ren et al., 2010). Although differing in their use of ANT, these early accounts provided alternative descriptions of tourism development and its implications for and relationship with society and space. They did so by taking the role of materialities and non-humans into account and hence brought forth diverse relational orderings of tourism. Over a decade and through such studies, ANT has managed to interfere with tourism research, tourism realities and tourism futures as ANT has gradually—and in the last few years increasingly—been translated and performed in the field of tourism studies where it has raised interest as well as controversies.

The latter is illustrated by one of the reviewers of the aforementioned 2007 article, arguing that:

as a celebratory display of the impenetrability of advanced postmodern vocabularies, this manuscript is a virtuoso performance. As a meaningful contribution to human understanding, to actual communication of scholarship, this manuscript is a dismal failure. Thus, the real question is not the nature of the ultimate recommendation requested of reviewers but rather a question for the editor: what does Annals want to be? Is it to be the outlet where members of a select guild display their skills at parlor games designed solely for the amusement of fellow guild members, or, is it to be an outlet for meaningful communication of scholarship? (Anonymous reviewer of the 2007 article Tourismscapes, 2006).

This reviewer pointed especially to the ‘language’ of ANT studies, which sometimes comes across as impenetrable. We will come back to some of the reasons for this below, but at the moment we argue that a specific ANT-jargon is not necessary to make use of the toolbox it offers. What is essential is an interest in exploring tourism relations.

Eventually the article on tourismscapes was published as the other three reviewers were far more positive; acknowledging the potential contribution the article could make to rethink tourism and tourism research. This also reflected an earlier decision taken by the editorial board of this journal to dedicate the journal to developing theoretical constructs, reflecting a broader ‘conceptual turn’ in tourism studies (see also Cohen & Cohen, 2012).

The debate continues as ANT still interrupts common understanding of the role and value of social science research. As Michael (2017: 1) recently summarizes: “whether as a positive resource or source of irritation, ANT has become a conceptual framework (or latterly, an analytic and methodological sensibility) that many writers feel obliged to reference.” Tourism studies are no exception. For instance, in a 2015 discussion of ANT on the online forum of TriNet, Juergen Gnoth questioned the relevance of ANT for tourism research by asserting that “it does not really bring anything new to the table as far as I can see, other than a renewed consciousness for positivists”. This statement echoes much previous critique against ANT and expresses some of the controversy surrounding the approach.

The aim of this article is to review ANT’s entanglements with and effects on tourism studies as well as point towards potential future trajectories of ANT and tourism research. The question ‘what ANT brings new to the table’ serves as a unifying thread of our discussion. We will not explicate what ANT definitely ‘is’, but describe ANT as a multiple, complex and often disparate resource “that opens up a space for asking certain sorts of methodological, empirical, analytic and political questions about the processes of the (more-than) social world” (Michael, 2017: 3). Using ANT as a tool, or a travelling device, to move along the actor-network of ‘ANT and tourism studies’, we will analyse the effects of the encounters between ANT and tourism studies; effects which result from the (net)working of researchers and authors, a series of overlapping networks (of scholars, schools of thought) and non-human things (like books and articles) that are in constant flux—appearing and disappearing, joining and parting (see for a similar approach Ren et al., 2010, Tribe, 2010).

On our journey, we start by discussing some of the basic premises of ANT, revisiting some of the principle characteristics of ANT inspired studies. Those are the grounds that have both attracted interest and sparked controversy in different corners of the social sciences. We will attend to some of the main points of critique as a way to further open up and discuss the potentials of ANT. We will then turn to tourism studies to illustrate and discuss the relevance of ANT for tourism studies. Third and final, we will explore and discuss the workings of ANT in practice. We conclude by summarizing ten years of ANT and tourism studies and sketch out potential trajectories of ANT in tourism research.

Section snippets

Following ANT

As has been pointed out, to describe ANT as a whole or a unified approach is somewhat a betrayal (Baiocchi et al., 2013, Law, 2007, Law and Singleton, 2013, Michael, 2017). In Law’s (2007: 2) words: “there is no ‘it’. Rather it is a diaspora that overlaps with other intellectual traditions“ making it difficult (and undesirable) to situate ANT once and for all or describe its development in a linear way. Below, we touch on three issues that illustrate the conceptual controversies of ANT related

ANT and tourism studies

As already illustrated in the above, in the last ten years ANT has stirred new outlooks on tourism and tourism research. The network of ANT inspired scholars has gradually grown, just as the number of publications (see references) and citations. With around 200 citations in Google Scholar, the tourismscapes article now belongs to the top 10% most cited publications in the research field of social sciences. In the 2007 article two main concepts were introduced: tourismscapes and ‘modes of

Future trajectories

In this article we have summarized what happened with ANT and tourism studies since the publication in this journal of the article Tourismscapes in 2007. We have traced some of the routes and pathways of ANT, revisiting particular sites of controversy and trailed some of the avenues along which ANT has successfully interfered with the knowledge system of tourism research (Ren et al., 2010, Tribe and Liburd, 2016). We have argued that the strengths of ANT lies in empirical studies where tending

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