ABSTRACT
Tourism destinations have an ever-present imperative to create and sustain competitive advantage, which has led to increasingly large volumes of marketing appeals about a seemingly limitless range of destinations, all contending for the traveler’s attention. Differentiation has become difficult to achieve since any number of destinations can now provide the benefits sought by any particular group of travelers, and destinations have become highly substitutable (Pike, 2002). It has become common in the postmodern world for destinations to conceive themselves as simulated places that have been created for consumption and within which consumption can occur (Urry, 1995), such as a Disney theme park or Las Vegas. This has happened in response to the much more open and fluid consumer culture ushered in by postmodernism, which has required a more adaptable and flexible consideration of the relationship between the tourism experience and the tourist (Hanefors & Mossberg, 1998). But are such simulated places the only possible competitive strategic option for destinations? What alternatives might exist for a destination that wishes to market itself in a different way? In their discussion of postmodern tourism, Oakes and Minca (2004) argue that the most revealing quality of tourism is the expression of postmodern subject formation as tourism occurs in actual places, and that tourism presents an enormous range of field sites for study. The present study engaged this challenge, and took the study of postmodern subjectivity out of the concept’s textual home and into a living tourism environment where postmodern subjectivity could be empirically tested, the Australian tourism destination of the state of South Australia.
