We would like to take this chance to welcome readers to this new journal and sketch out some of its aims at what we think is an exciting and challenging time for work on tourism.The main impetus for founding a new tourism journal was that in our view and in the minds of many key contributors to the tourism field, tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless. At a time when John Urry has just launched his Sociology Beyond Societies-Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (in which mobilities are argued to have 'reconstituted social life in uneven and complex ways'); when Anthony Giddens' 1999 Reith Lectures were called 'Runaway World' and when the subject of the 2000 Theory Culture & Society conference in Finland was cosmopolitanism, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times (Urry, 2000; Giddens, 2000).And yet, it is not. The first trouble with tourism studies, and paradoxically also one of its sources of interest, is that its research object, 'tourism' has grown very dramatically and quickly and that the tourism research community is relatively new. Indeed at times it has been unclear which was growing more rapidly-tourism or tourism research. Part of this trouble is that tourist studies has simply tried to track and record this staggering expansion, producing an enormous record of instances, case studies and variations. One reason for this is that tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalize industry led priorities and perspectives, leaving the. .. research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market.

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This article offers an entirely different way of understanding the origins, significance and relational materialism of tourism. Borrowing from the emergent sociology of ordering, which combines aspects of Foucault’s notion of governance with ‘post-ANT’ insistence on relational materialism, it shows how tourism came to be a heterogenous assemblage ‘at large’ in the world, remaking the world anew as a touristic world; a world to be seen, felt, interpellated and travelled. In doing so it underlines the paradoxical significance of nationalism as an ordering with clear implications for the emergence of the tourism ordering. It also, at last, invites research on the relationality of technologies and objects of tourism as well as key individuals whose dreams of tourism were essential to the history of the tourism ordering. Seen as an ordering this conception of tourism offers an alternative to structuralist accounts that have long influenced and inhibited tourist studies. It also explains why tourism was so hard to define, until now.

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