The Language of Sustainable Tourism as a Proxy Indicator of Quality

Abstract

Sustainable tourism (ST) has recently become the mainstream of the tourism industry and, accordingly, has influenced contemporary tourism research. However, ST is not just theories about indications and contraindications of global travel, but also a specific language that needs mastering to take sustainability work forward. In other words, what research receives recognition depends on the proficiency in how the articulation in research proposals and within assessment under the heading of “research impact”. The aim of this paper is to investigate how tourism research gains recognition within research evaluation, by investigating the national research appraisal in the United Kingdom (Research Excellence Framework). By using content analysis, we disentangle the rhetorical choices and narrative constructions within researchers’ impact claims. Our findings suggest that researchers adopt a rhetorical style that implies causality and promotes good outcomes facilitating ST. However, the structure of the assessment format enforces an articulation of sustainable research impact without stating the methodological limitations of that such claim. Therefore, the rhetorical choices of ST researchers merely represent a proxy indicator of the claimed impact. We conclude that the lack of rigor in accounting for the impact of ST research may inadvertently restrict attaining ST.

The Potential of Albanian Tourism Sector

“…Sustainable tourism research is an important topic in the sustainability domain and elements such as communication, methodological rigor, and integrity contribute to the practical approach to the tourism sector in crisis [52]. The social benefits of the research will be more visible if the researchers build a bridge between literature and practice.…”

Culture and Sustainable Tourism: Does the Pair Pay in Medium-Sized Cities?

“…Importantly, this development is carried out from the local scale, through the scale of individual regions and countries, to the global scale [2]. The strategies of sustainable development understood in this way have also been transferred to the tourism industry for several decades [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. This may be evidenced, e.g., by the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment or the first World Conference on Sustainable Tourism organised in 1995.…”

An approach to the understanding of sustainable tourism through a linear regression

“…Joining the problem, tourism researchers have also found qualitative ways to approach the measurement of tourism with cartographic analysis methods to study the evolution of the recreational tourism system. (Koroleva & Brazales, 2020), or content analysis with a rhetorical nature and that sustainable tourism represents a union of indirect indicators of the impacts of tourism activity (Brauer & Dymitrow, 2021).…”

“…Likewise, the measurement of sustainable tourism allows a better use of resources and participation of residents (Vivek, 2021), in addition to a balance between heritage and mass tourism with the life of the locals (Valls & Roca, 2021), and ultimately the general progress of the economy in the long term (León-Gómez et al, 2021), thus becoming the term sustainable tourism in the mainstream of tourism studies (Brauer & Dymitrow, 2021) and even a world-class badge (Bilbao-Terol & Bilbao-Terol, 2020).…”