Current Issues of Tourism Research

I am professor Adam R. Szromek. I am Member of Editorial Board of Current Issuess of Tourism Research and the Board Member of the Faculty of Organisation and Management of the Silesian University of Technology. I am so excited to have the opportunity to introduce our honorary Member of the Editorial Board, and my friend – Richard W. Butler.
Professor Butler is a world-renowned and frequently quoted academic authority whose interests include many tourism-related issues. He is also a fascinating individual, and we are grateful for his presence among us. Without further ado, I encourage everyone to read prepared by prof. Z. Kruczek and me the biography of our scientific authority and friend – professor Richard W. Butler.

Brief characteristics of academic achievements and contribution of R.W. Butler

Richard W. Butler (1943–) is a geographer by education. He defended his PhD thesis at Glasgow University in 1973. Merely a few years later he published one of the most frequently quoted concepts of the evolution of tourist regions, presently known by its acronym: TALC (Tourism Area Life Cycle). The publication of the TALC concept and its subsequent development not only brought him recognition and popularity in academic communities around the world; it also swiftly turned Professor R.W. Butler into an acknowledged academic authority and advisor. He joined D. Pearce in editing an oft-quoted book devoted to the problematics of academic research into tourism (Tourism Research: Critiques and Challenges). His professional career has been tied to his work at the Services Sector Management Faculty of Surrey University (Great Britain), the Tourism and Recreation Sector Management Faculty of Strathclyde University (Great Britain), and also the Geography Faculty of the University of Western Ontario in Canada (which he ran for many years). As an outstanding authority on tourism and the development of tourist regions he has also functioned as an advisor for some governmental agencies in Great Britain and in Canada. R.W. Butler is a founding member and former chairman of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism (IAST) and also a member of many academic societies, including the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies. For many years he also served as editor of The Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research and a member of editorial committees for seven other academic journals. The research subjects explored by Professor R.W. Butler concern such fields as:

- the evolution of areas of tourist reception,
- development indicators,
- sustainable development in tourism,
- island tourism,
- health resort tourism,
- tourism and the media,
- tourism and safety.

His academic oeuvre includes many works published both in the form of articles and of chapters in collective works, as well as over a dozen academic monographs and collective works of his own. R. W. Butler’s most celebrated article is a work he published in 1980 in Canadian Geographer, entitled The Concept of a Tourist Area and Cycle of Evolution: Implications for Management of Resources. Here the author described a theoretical model for the evolution of a tourist area, based on a six-phase cycle of development (exploration, introduction, growth, consolidation, flourishing and collapse or rebirth). The model is chiefly based on a symptomatic variable – the number of tourists visiting the area over the course of a year. R. W. Butler’s concept was revolutionary in a number of respects. Over the three decades since its publication, the academic literature has provided dozens of examples confirming its accuracy. Moreover, one finds dozens more articles attempting, with varying degrees of success, to modify the TALC concept. The tourist site development cycle was revised by the author himself twenty years later (The Resort Cycle Two Decades on). In the related literature, both in Poland and abroad, we find various explanations of some of the phases; the flourishing phase of a tourist region, for example, is explained by Polish authors as a stagnation phase, citing R. W. Butler’s model as evidence. Butler, however, was not speaking of stasis or recession (let alone depression), but the precise opposite – a period in which the financial situation of the area is at its peak. In similar fashion, the development phase has been called the ‘growth’ phase, and the ‘collapse’ phase indicates the site’s downfall (crisis). Some experts (such as S. Agarwal) have described the phase that occurs immediately after the flourishing phase with the more all-encompassing term ‘post-flourishing’.
In 2000 R. W. Butler supplemented his concept with eight more features, and six years after that, he developed the concept further, having collected experiences of other academics using his model. A key addition to his concept was to indicate the weaknesses and virtues that the literature had extracted over the course of two decades, and to put forward concepts to elucidate the causes of development, change, restrictions and interference in tourist areas. Butler lists eight issues under key word headings:

• dynamism – change over time – one of the most characteristic traits of tourist activity;
• process – a trait characterising changes occurring in the tourist area, facilitating a model depiction of development;

• tourist absorptiveness and capacity or development restrictions – a model based on the idea that, if the number of visitors crosses beyond the tourist absorptiveness and capacity of the area, the quality of the visitor’s experience decreases;
• initiating factors – causing changes in the tourist area, e.g. through innovations;

• management – it is vital to stress the management of a tourist area as a whole (a complex strategy), as many elements of these areas with their own separate resources and attributes are unmanaged;
• long-term perspective – the necessity of a farsighted perspective on an area’s development in the initial phases is indicated by the effectiveness of the actions

undertaken to defer the ‘collapse’ phase and of preventative actions, to spur a new revival directly following the stabilisation of the flourishing period;
• spatial components – when the development of an area has ceased, the spatial shift of the tourist centre into new areas is recommended – this allows development to begin once more, or to be continued;
• universal application – the model has been designed for all tourist areas.

The numerous publications using this concept, following R. W. Butler’s model to identify schematic similarities in the development of various tourist areas, have made the model itself undergo constant development. Some articles supply evidence to prove the accuracy of the concept in various parts of the world, and even in various aggregate depictions, while others demonstrate the imperfections of the model and the measures it applies, and still others recommend supplements to it. Professor Butler’s publications have been found in many world-distributed journals, including Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development, Tourism Geographies, Journal of EcoTourism, Tourism Recreation Research, Current Issues in Tourism, Tourismos, Problems in Tourism, European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation, Critical Issues in Tourism, International Journal of Tourism Research, and Tourism Recreation Research.

The latest works to develop Butler’s concept involve a multi-levelled approach to the development of a tourist site as a sphere of conflict between two social groups: the tourists and the local inhabitants. Although now retired, Professor R.W. Butler remains a very active academic. In 2010 alone, he published two books: Giants of Tourism: Key Individuals in the Development of Tourism and Political Change and Tourism. A significant position is held by the abovementioned two-part work The Tourism Area Life Cycle, which he both edited and co-created as an author.3 It contains the key works on the life cycle of the tourist area. The foundation for this publication is, of course, the TALC concept. Professor Butler has also written dozens of academic and popular science articles. He often lectures in universities around the world. He has also been active in Poland, participating in some conferences, and even supporting young academics with his thoughts and publishing tourism articles along with them. His preface, for example, opens the monograph Uzdrowiska i ich znaczenie w gospodarce turystycznej [Health Resorts and Their Significance in the Tourist Economy]. Therein he describes the reasons for the collapse of many famous resorts, and the changes in the functions of the health resort. He provides examples of the revitalisation of health resorts, such as Banff in Canada, or Bath in England. In the latter case, enormous funds went towards restoring an old health resort – founded by the Romans nearly 2000 years previous – to its former glory, adapting the Roman bath house to modern standards. This has made Bath one of Great Britain’s chief attractions. In the modern world of tourism, health resorts play an enormous role in the local economy. They exploit a major trend in today’s consumption – care for personal appearance and health (Spa and Wellness), becoming a fashionable addition to exclusive hotels (and not only franchises). Butler correctly observes that things were much the same two centuries ago, when the health
advantages of resorts were inflated in order to increase attendance, sometimes by pseudomedical ‘personalities’ who had a vested interest in the resort’s popularity (as evidence, R.W. Butler cites an opinion by Bowen Devis, local doctor for Liandrindod Wells, a small health resort in Wales, which much resembles a contemporary advertising slogan). At present, hotels add ‘Spa and Wellness’ to their names as a marketing hook.

R. W. Butler’s views on the issue of unsustainable development in tourist areas are also interesting. He notes that the notion of ‘sustainable tourism’ has two interpretations. The dictionary definition, whereby the term sustainable means ‘tourism capable of supporting itself on the market in a certain region over an unspecified period of time’,6 thus reflecting the state of the tourist industry. The second interpretation assumes that it is ‘tourism developed and maintained in a region (a society or environment) in such a fashion and on such a scale that it remains viable indefinitely and does not cause change to the natural environment to the extent that it obstructs the favourable development and the good of other undertakings and processes’. This second understanding of sustainable tourism stresses the maintenance of the scenery (social, ecological) in which tourism occurs, and not the maintenance of the tourism. It would seem to be closer to Butler’s way of thinking, in which tourism inevitably disturbs the ecological balance. In summing up his presentation in 2005 for the jubilee conference for the University of Physical Education in Krakow, he listed three ways of looking at sustainable development. Idealists perceive it as approaching the Holy Grail, touching something practically magical. Optimists treat it as a ‘guiding fiction’, i.e. something that does not really
exist, but which should be aimed for, towards which the tourist reception should strive. The third view defines it as ‘pragmatic realism’, i.e. using common sense to solve problems of ecological and sustainable social development. Professor R.W. Butler has also continued to be an active traveller. His journeys are not only tied to his lectures and conference participation, but also to visiting places that are
interesting examples of tourist phenomena.

(text edition by Zygmunt Kruczek and Adam Szromek)