Disruptive Methodologies

Research agendas the research methodologies and the underpinning thinking in tourism studies and related fields have increasingly been focused on transformation informed by qualitative methodologies.

Despite this refocus that has been echoed in publications and conferences there is still a primacy of management ways of thinking about the phenomenon (quite often only described as industry) of tourism, heavily influenced and driven by neoliberal agendas.

This is evidenced by significant problems and unrest in major cities against neoliberal development of tourism, research agendas still heavily favouring quantitative and positivistic / post-positivistic approaches and the primacy of management and marketing approaches to tourism as industry in the way we design our curriculums.

In this work I propose that transformation cannot happen before disruption and I want to examine how soft sciences and the methodologies we employ, can be disruptive first, drawing from some of the experiences and thinking from a number of fields such as education, nursing, sociology etc.

The focus is on disruptive research that has broader implication that critical theories although it draws on some of thinking of those approaches it does not neatly or easily fit into the critical social theories tents.

This work then seeks to examine the nature of research and its purpose, explore the need to disrupt before we can transform by building upon the work of Brown, Carducci, and Kuby (2014) and their five ways for scholars to disrupt qualitative methodology, namely to disrupt dominant notions of research roles and relationships, collection and analysis of data, dissemination of research findings, epistemological and methodological boundaries, and disciplinary boundaries and assumptive frameworks on how to do tourism research.

It seeks to examine the areas of this broad agenda where tourism and related fields have made strides and where there is need for more work to be done.