The authors analyze the nation‐state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation‐states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world‐level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional authority; (4) dynamic features of world culture and society that generate expansion, conflict, and change, especially the statelessness of world society, legitimation of multiple levels of rationalized actors, and internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

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World society and the nation-state

Authenticity and commoditization in tourism.

Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

A Space for Place in Sociology

The relevance of materialism to consumer behavior is discussed. Materialism is advanced as a critical but neglected macro consumer-behavior issue. Measures for materialism and three subtraits—envy, nongenerosity, and possessiveness—are presented and tested. The subtraits are compared over three generations of consumers from the same families, and measure validity is further explored via responses to a sentence completion task. Based on these results, a call is made for research into related macro consumer-behavior issues.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/254373.pdf

Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the Material World

Two processes at work in contemporary society are the secularization of religion and the sacralization of the secular. Consumer behavior shapes and reflects these processes. For many, consumption has become a vehicle for experiencing the sacred. This article explores the ritual substratum of consumption and describes properties and manifestations of the sacred inherent in consumer behavior. Similarly, the processes by which consumers sacralize and desacralize dimensions of their experience are described. The naturalistic inquiry approach driving the insights in this article is advanced as a corrective to a premature narrowing of focus in consumer research.

The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey

Foreword by Lucy Lippard The Tourist in 2013 Introduction to the 1989 Edition Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Modernity and the Production of Touristic Experiences 2. Sightseeing and Social Structure 3. The Paris Case: Origins of Alienated Leisure 4. The Other Attractions 5. Staged Authenticity 6. A Semiotic of Attraction 7. The Ethnomethodology of Sightseers 8. Structure, Genuine and Spurious 9. On Theory, Methods, and Application Epilogue Notes Index

The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

Erving Goffman never wrote about tourism and it may, therefore, seem strange to reflect, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, on his contribution to the study of a phenomenon that he never undertook to study directly. However, many lessons can be drawn from Goffman’s sociology towards an understanding of certain central issues in tourism. By the way he captured and analyzed society in the 1950s and 1960s, Goffman offers to all those who undertake to study tourism a fundamental basis for understanding its genesis. Much of what he taught us remains unexploited, and the links that can be established between Goffman and tourism are therefore mostly indirect. However, making Goffman’s sociology a source of inspiration for the study of tourism is not far-fetched. A pioneer of the anthropology of tourism was heavily indebted to Goffman. Indeed, the tour de force that Dean MacCannell achieved in 1976 with the publication of The Tourist was largely inspired by Goffman and his unique approach to sociology. By returning with its author to the Goffmanian part of The Tourist we pay homage to what tourist studies owe to the author of The Presentation of Self. As we continue the study of tourism, what, from Goffman’s sociology, opens up a new of set of problems? Not just those that, have already influenced our analyses through Dean MacCannell, but also some that remain, a source for new interrogations 40 years after Erving Goffman’s death. 

Dean MacCannell

Papers

The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

Back to Front: Erving Goffman’s Past and Future Impact on Tourism Research. An interview with Dean MacCannell