Migrant Tourist-Workers: Exploring the 'Contact Zones' of Post-industrial Tourism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight aspects of post-industrial tourism which suggest the emergence of new mobilities framed within the context of tourism and labour migration. It brings together some prelimiary ethnographic evidence as well as drawing on existing published material in order to develop the concept of migrant tourist-workers. It is argued that recent changes in post-industrial capitalism in Europe have created the context within which heterogeneous collections of mobile resort workers have emerged, who transcend the dualistic division between work and tourism in the course of their movements throughout a number of tourism destination areas. It is argued that the tourist-worker nexus poses important questions for the analysis of contemporary configurations of class and identity within the context of post-industrial tourism development. An attempt is also made to link the emergence of fluid and changing compositions of the tourist-worker nexus to the wider political economy as far as possible within the scope of this brief analysis. Some preliminary conclusions are drawn which emphasise the need to clarify these particular patterns of mobility through further comparative ethnographic research.