CIn this article we reviewed the broad social trends and specific historical events that
have affected both the nature of contemporary tourism and sociological approaches to
its study. We showed how the focus of sociological inquiry in tourism shifted from
the earlier discourses of authenticity and the tourist gaze, respectively, to three key
innovative theoretical approaches, mobilities, performativity and ANT, which reflect
a broader meta-theoretical re-orientation in contemporary sociology and philosophy.
Although these novel approaches offer fresh horizons for tourism studies, their
deployment in tourism research has to date been limited. We attributed this partial
hiatus between innovative approaches and their application to key research issues to
the radical re-orientation implicit in these perspectives, their relatively new import to
tourism studies, and in the case of the mobilities approach, its potential to create
unease amongst students of tourism as to the discrete identity of tourism as a field of
study.