New technologies in tourism: From multi-disciplinary to anti-disciplinary advances and trajectories

Abstract

Technologies transform tourism management and marketing from a static and utilitarian sense (whereby managers and tourists use technologies as tools) to a transformative conceptualization whereby tourism markets and actors both shape and are shaped by technology. This paper unravels the transformative power of technologies on: the tourism actors and resources (both the traditional but also new actors, i.e. the technology agents); the ways actors interact to (co-)create but also (co-)destruct tourism value; and the context in which tourism actors interact from a linear supply chain tourism ‘industry’ to a complex socio-technical smart tourism ecosystem. To study such complex phenomena and transformations, the paper emphasises that research should not only adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, but it also needs to follow an anti-disciplinary thinking whereby new knowledge and constructs do not simply fall within existing paradigms, disciplinary silos and mindsets once developed by studying the ‘pure’ humans and their behaviours.