INTRODUCTION
Tourism is a major socio-economic phenomenon producing massive economic, social and environmental change. The effort to understand the complex and elaborate set of interactions between tourists, tour operators, governments and local communities has led to the develop- ment of models and general accounts of tourists’ behaviours (Leiper, 2004). Despite the ontological and epistemological challenges that this presents, these models have successfully informed the management of tourists and their economic, social and environmental impacts (Decrop, 2006).
Some have argued that tourism research has evolved from a commer- cially driven agenda of ‘boosterism’, through adverse criticism of tour- ism’s social and environmental impacts, towards an informed empirical and theoretical basis and the widespread adoption of rigorous scien- tific research methods (Jafari, 1990,2003,2005). Such progressive, evo- lutionary accounts of phenomena may be criticised because of their