Time and Space in Tourism Studies

Two categories - geographical space and social time - allows for the description of any kind of tourist travels. However, although the category of space is usually explicitly present in tourism studies, social time often remains implicit. The authors start their text with the idea that the astronomical concept of time used in economic and geographical studies of tourism cannot explain the complexity of the mobile world. The concept of social time, the authors argue, meets this challenge. Scrutinizing themes of authenticity (starting from MacCannell), a rite of passage from everyday life to the leisure time of tourism (from Graburn), and mobilities and tourism-scape (from Urry), the authors aim to reveal how social time has been "sutured" onto the main areas of tourism studies. This review precedes and brings together a collection of empirical papers on such different forms of tourism in Eastern Russia as cross-border shopping tourism, professional fieldwork travel, and Chinese inbound-tourism. The authors conclude that the attention to social time allows for an understanding that the democratization of tourism is one of the most critical ways to construct a shared experience of living in the modern world, to synchronize multiple temporal worlds, as well as to manage what can be called a politically non-neutral diversity of temporality.