Tourist carrying capacity: A critical look at the discursive dimension

Abstract

This paper argues that as tourist researchers continue to bemoan the absence of ‘scientific’ measures of tourist carrying capacity, they pay insufficient attention to the normative dimension of all social science work, including the relationship between tourists and their physical, social, cultural and political environments. The normative and discursive dimensions are an integral part of human studies, and we needlessly impoverish our research if we fail to confront those issues related to the status of normative judgments in social inquiry. It is concluded that the discursive and normative dimensions of social inquiry eventually add scholarly substance to our analysis of modern tourism by giving balance to the more abstract, formal and quantitative approaches in tourism research.