AN INAPPROPRIATE PARADIGM
Either explicitly or, more often, implicitly, tourism is viewed as
an external force imposed upon a static community, causing change
in that community and leading ultimately to the establishment of a
new equilibrium. This is what Wood (1980) has termed the billiard
ball assumption. In fact, none of the components of the billiard ball
assumption is usually tenable. First, tourism is not simply an external
force and may in fact be sought and welcomed by members of
destination areas. In practice, it is extremely difficult to distinguish
between internal and external forces of change. Secondly, few communities
are static. Vibrant cultures are likely to be in a continual
state of flux for a diversity of reasons—not simply because of the
onset of tourism. It is virtually impossible, and perhaps unrealistic,
to separate the consequences of tourism from other causes of change
which may be occurring in the same place at the same time. However,
since it is usually impracticable to study everything at the same
time, it is often pragmatic to abstract tourism from the broader
context of change to make investigation more manageable. However,
the milieu in which those changes occur should not be forgotten
and, ideally, should be incorporated into the analyses. Thirdly,
residents of destination areas are not simply acted upon: some respond
to opportunities and thus play an active role in contributing
to and directing change. Thus, in this post-modern world, destination
areas are exposed to global and local forces of change as well as
factors operating at intermediate scales making the attribution of
cause and effect a particularly difficult challenge.