Drawing from ethnographic work in five continents, this book demonstrates how different regimes of value in tourism can coexist, collide, and compete across a varied geographic terrain. Much theory in tourism economics defines ‘value’ as a measure of monetary worth, a concept governing commodity exchange, and a gauge for tourist satisfaction. The research included in this volume shows that tourism not only feeds off existing conceptions of value as a monetary category, but that it is also instrumental in reproducing and reinforcing those subjective, morally heightened, and highly intangible values that make tourism and the tourism economy a complex social, cultural, political, and psychological phenomenon. The book pushes the debate about the tourism economy beyond a simplistic understanding of producer-consumer relations, instead suggesting a refocus on the social, spatial, and temporal lags in tourism production, and the ensuing differentiated regimes of values.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.