Asian Qualitative Research in Tourism. (Ontologies, Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Methods)

Аннотация

This book is about Asian qualitative tourism research. Yes, it is exactly about these four words – “Asian”, “qualitative”, “tourism” and “research”. Can four words, just four words, be powerful enough to inspire the composition of approximately 150,000 more words that constitute this book? Can four words be powerful enough to attract the attention of 23 authors and 2 editors scattered around the world and then convince them to think, struggle and write about those four words? Can four words be powerful enough to initiate contentious debates amongst groups of academicians? The answer, as Malaysians would say in Manglish (and this is a fascinating sociolinguistics phenomenon on its own), is can. As we have found, these four words have been powerful enough to command the attention of a group of tourism scholars based in different corners of our planet. It is not just because qualitative research in tourism is no longer the Cinderella she used to be a few years ago, when her quantitative/positivist stepdaughters enjoyed their status of “proper research”. It is not just because discussions concerning paradigmatic, methodological and reflective ways of knowing tourism (as a phenomenon) in tourism (as a field of inquiry) are becoming more legitimised and visible in the current academic scenario. It is because these four words constitute the pieces of a puzzle that has not yet been solved. Indeed, although in the last 20 years calls for more qualitative, less positivist, more inclusive, less Western(ised) ways of approaching research in tourism have been consistent (see Phillimore and Goodson 2004; Ateljevic et al. 2007; Pritchard et al. 2011), Asian ways of producing and representing research have not taken up much space in the tourism academy (Mura and Pahlevan Sharif 2015).