In this article, we demonstrate how Actor-Network Theory has been translated into tourism research. The article presents and discusses three concepts integral to the Actor-Network Theory approach: ordering, materiality, and multiplicity. We first briefly introduce Actor-Network Theory and draw attention to current Actor-Network Theory studies in tourism with a focus on how the approach is sensitive toward heterogeneous orderings. The following section discusses how more recent Actor-Network Theory approaches emphasize multiplicity and thus multiple versions of every ordering attempt. This leads us toward ontological politics, which have bearings on how we approach and understand research methods and how we perform tourism research. In conclusion, we argue that Actor-Network Theory enables a radical new way of describing tourism by critically investigating its ontological conditions.

This article engages critically with recent social theorising about local development, with illustrative examples from Icelandic peripheral settings. People in resource–based localities have attempted to cope with the transformations of late modernity in various ways. Such coping strategies consist of reflexive social practices which simultaneously produce and make use of social capital. A view of social capital as embedded in practice is advanced: instead of considering it as being a quantitatively measurable property of individuals, communities or even nations, we suggest a qualitative, interactionist approach. Seen in this way, the analytical concepts of coping and social capital are helpful for understanding current trends from resource–based towards cultural economies. Tourism is one such trajectory which has become particularly significant in Iceland. Examples of coping and social capital are provided in the article, obtained from the authors’ studies of tourist operators in two Icelandic localities.

This article discusses Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and its utility for tourism studies. It argues that ANT can be an effective methodological approach for studying tourism development due to two reasons. First, its ability to deal with relational materiality of the social world, immanent in the concept of translation which highlights the net- workpractices of different actors; and second, its willingness to grasp multiple relational orderings, thus drawing diverse forms of tourism spatiality into analysis. The article begins by briefly sketching out the discourse on tourism and tourism development in relation to ANT. It then discusses the origins and characteristics of ANT. Special attention is paid to the concept of translation and how the approach provides an alternative focus for tourism research. The last part of the article briefly illustrates ANT as a methodological orientation through discussion of a tourism development project in Iceland.

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