ABSTRACT
The founding parents of sociology and anthropology have developed a pejorative meaning of market, industrialism and capitalism. As Professor Emile Durkheim puts it, the advance of the industrial ethos would inevitably result in the creation of new institutions and negative effects on the integrity of social scaffolding. Several social pathologies would have been accelerated by the erosion of social trust (Durkheim 1976, 2014). In this respect, Max Weber raised the alarm that the rational logic and its effects of depersonalization would cause irreversible changes for the style of life of Europeans. Rationality which depends on the market will somehow monopolize the culture in order to commoditize consumers (Weber 2009). Unless otherwise resolved, money will mediate between citizens in the same way as language. More recently in the literature, Zygmunt Bauman has suggested that the adoption of consumption as a main value of society paved the ways for workers to become consumed goods (Bauman 2001). Doubtless, the attention which was drawn to the theory of consumption, from the inception of sociology, led towards some conceptual limitations which were univocally accepted by sociologists of tourism. At a first glance, theorists not only developed a romantic view of evolution, where primitive cultures will disappear at the hands of modern ones, but also trivialized the role of fear in the configuration of the modern market. Secondly, consumers are not determined by rational goals, as the literature suggests; rather, they are moved by emotional bases that sometimes are impossible to forecast. This behaviour can be associated with impulsive buying decisions (Hadjali et al. 2012; Beatty and Ferrell 1998). In the first section, entitled ‘From production to consumption’, we discuss the reason behind the passage from a society of producers to a society of consumers. Secondly, in the ‘Consuming tourism’ section, three senior sociologists are placed under the lens of scrutiny in order for readers to expand their current view of consuming and tourism. This method can be to some extent compared to the Delphi method characterized by the interpretation of expert responses (Hammond and Wellington 2013). Although the original negative connotation formulated by Durkheim and Weber was carried on by modern sociologists like MacCannell and Urry but not by others like Meethan, the idea that globalized consumption was prone to commoditize cultures, landscapes and peoples nonetheless resonates in the sociology of tourism to date. The present chapter explores the ebbs and flows of the theory of consumption in tourism as well as the most relevant lines of inquiry to be investigated in the coming years. The crux of this discussion is to understand why these scholars have developed a negative connotation of tourism.
