The novel conceptual and theoretical developments in the field, beyond the
discourses of authenticity and the tourist gaze, are closely related to a broader metatheoretical
re-orientation in contemporary sociology and philosophy, which in turn
reflects some of the wider late modern social trends discussed above. Most significant
for present purposes is, first, a shift from a synchronic to a diachronic perspective,
involving a change of emphasis from permanence to flux, from being to doing, from
structure to agency, from sedimented social patterns to the process of their emergence,
and from a focus on the more stable fixtures of social life to the mobilities linking
them; and second, a post-modern tendency to stress the de-differentiation between
social domains, the break-down of conventional binary concepts, the interpenetration
between formerly opposite categories, and the blurring of the border between reality
and virtuality. We shall here discuss three important inter-related theoretical
developments sharing this perspective, the mobilities “paradigm”, the performativity
approach and actor-network theory (ANT).