Doctoral Dissertation Research: Nations as Destinations: Tourist Sources as Local Fields of Global Production

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SES-1401064Jeffrey GoldfarbTim RosenkranzNew School UniversityThis research explores how destination marketing functions as a key mechanism through which the nation-state adapts to conditions of globalization and, in turn, co-constitutes global socio-economic processes. Tourism is one of the world?s largest industries, moving one billion people and 1.3 trillion US dollars in 2012. Nation-states compete for these global movements of consumers. Destination marketing, as tool to attract tourists, has become a central activity of the nation-state as tourist destination. The problem for the nation-state's actors, the National Tourist Offices, is that they have to rely on the cooperation of the local travel media and industry at the source, the places from which tourist come. This interpretative-comparative research analyzes the destination marketing efforts of several nation-states in two different field-sites (USA and India) to address the question of how do National Tourist Offices manage their production as tourist destination in local travel media and industry? This research breaks down the large scale of the global tourism economy into two distinct local sites, hypothesizing that these local, socio-economic arenas (fields) of interaction between destination marketing, travel media and industry significantly limit the nation-states? efforts to control the production of its commodity image. Situated in the literatures of Economic Sociology, the Sociology of Globalization and the Sociology of Culture, this study contributes to the debate about the relation between globalization processes and the nation-state. While engaging with the research on branding/marketing institutions that translate culture into an economic resource, transforming the nation-state into an actor and subject of global competition, this study moves from the ideology of branding to the empirical research of its practices. It therefore applies qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviewing as well as content and discourse analysis.Broader ImpactsThe research contributes to a better understanding of the production of the global environment that forces nation-states to reorder their societies under economic competition. Image constitutes value within this global competition, exemplified by the desire to "brand the nation," an imperative that treats people as stakeholders and assets. This study challenges tradition explanations by analyzing the local organizational fields' contestations of the nation-state's control over image production. Research findings contribute to scholarship in social sciences and also to tourism destination studies that are directly implicated in the ideological production of state policies. The collected data will be de-identified and made available for further study of the processes of informal practices in the spheres of marketing, media and industry.