A portrait of Chris Cooper

Introduction

This article provides a portrait of Christopher Paul Cooper, a scholar who has influenced the development of the tourism field of study over almost three decades. Chris Cooper has chaired the United Nations World Tourism Organization Education Council, the peak body for tourism education throughout the world, from 2005 to 2007 and was awarded the United Nations World Tourism Organization Ulysses Prize for contributions to tourism policy and education in 2009. Chris is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Dean of the Faculty of Business, and Professor at Oxford Brookes University and has special responsibility for internationalization. Chris was previously Director of the Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Centre at the University of Nottingham Business School, and before that Head of the School of Tourism at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Discussing the career, academic works, and contribution of a scholar such as Prof. Chris Cooper is a difficult task, both in collecting suitable and relevant information as well as in analysing it in a way that avoids imposing my own opinion which is equally problematic. In order to avoid these problems, I have sought information from Chris directly, from a number of his doctoral students, many now with successful careers of their own, from a number of his colleagues who have worked with him, as well as from my own experiences of Chris as a Ph.D. supervisor, Head of School, co-researcher, and co-editor, and as a mentor over 14 years. From my work with Chris, I am also familiar with his academic papers and contributions. I would like to thank those who have provided information and their opinions and have included verbatim quotes from emails received to provide a more rounded view of Chris and his work.

However, before beginning to discuss Chris's career and contribution, I would like to consider why such a portrait is both important and necessary. One reason is that learning how a person developed a successful career may be useful as an example for other aspiring to similar positions. A second is that knowledge of an author's career may help to better understand their work and enable that work to be seen in context. In Chris's career, I also perceive that his academic development and success reflects to some extent the development of the field of tourism as a whole from a niche area primarily studied by geographers to a diverse field taught in universities around the world.

Career

Chris was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire – the first coastal resort in the UK – a fact which may have inclined him towards a career in tourism. He went to Scarborough Boys High School and began his studies in the UK at University College, London and completed his Bachelor of Science (Honours) Geography in 1973. In Britain, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the establishment of a number of new universities. These were created in response to population growth, increasing national economic prosperity, rapid technological innovation with accompanying losses of industrial and agricultural jobs, and the need for a more educated workforce. For academic administrators of the time, social science degree courses such as tourism were attractive as they required relatively little capital investment and it was easier to recruit staff compared with laboratory-based subjects or medicine.

The 1970s then saw the beginning of a remarkable growth in the field of tourism and more recently, events along with establishment of the more established hotel and hospitality fields at degree level. The first tourism research journals such as Journal of Travel Research (first published in 1962) and Annals of Tourism Research (1973), and many international conferences were also established during this period. A number of universities established tourism schools in the 1970s, and by the 1980s a steady supply of tourism specialists (mainly with Masters Degrees or tourism management experience) were being recruited to teach a range of (mainly) undergraduate courses. As may be expected, the establishment of new tourism courses required the importing of skills from other disciplines and Chris is a geographer by training. Therefore, it may be logical to think that he went directly into a Ph.D. and then into teaching.

However, Chris decided to work in the tourism industry at the same time as completing his Ph.D. This is was a formative decision that led to an appreciation of tourism as a business and industry sector and helps in part to explain his latter interests in knowledge management and work at the United Nations World Tourism Organization, work that was both academic and practical in nature. This practical experience gave him insight into the nuts and bolts of tour operation and just how competitive it is. While completing his doctoral studies, Chris worked as a market planning and research executive for Thomson Travel Ltd, UK (now TUI) and Grattan Ltd, UK, a British catalogue clothing retailer. He completed his Ph.D. in geography in 1978 on the topic of the spatial and temporal behaviour of tourists on the island of Jersey.

After completing his studies, Chris felt a strong pull to academic life, and moved into the rapidly developing higher education sector, firstly at the Liverpool College of Higher Education from 1979 to 1982 as a Lecturer II in Geography and then as a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Studies at the Dorset Institute of Higher Education from 1982 to 1985. During this time, Chris published a number of papers in geography journals, his first being from his Ph.D. thesis (Cooper, 1981).

He moved to the University of Surrey as a Lecturer in Tourism Management in 1986 and was appointed a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management in 1992. The Head at Surrey then was Brian Archer and was very supportive of Chris's move. His transition to the University of Surrey anticipates a dramatic expansion in the number of students in the UK studying tourism around 1988 (Cooper, Ruhanen, & Scott, 2004). Also, Chris joined the University of Surrey in the same year that the UK introduced its Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This has been repeated at five yearly intervals and the results used in decisions concerning the funding of universities and also by universities for schools' budgets as well as individual academic promotion. Research activity is defined by publications and Ph.D.s awarded and therefore directs attention to these areas. Chris, employed at the University of Surrey, was in a good position to capitalise on this emphasis on academic training and scholarship in tourism and related topics (events, hospitality, marketing, and so on). Zhao and Ritchie (2007, p. 481) commenting on their analysis of tourism research authorship in the period 1985–2004 in the eight leading tourism journals found a very strong correlation between doctoral training and academic leadership. In this study, Chris is listed as the 28th most published author in eight tourism journals.

Chris, along with John Westlake and John Fletcher, moved to Bournemouth University in 1996 and was appointed as a Professor of Tourism. This move was partly in response to the appointment of a new Vice Chancellor at the University of Surrey who wanted a mainstream business school and not to specialise so much in tourism and hospitality. Chris, John Westlake, and John Fletcher joined Steve Wanhill who was already at Bournemouth, to form a strong group. They set up the International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research and drew in research contracts and international students under John Fletcher as Head.

Chris then moved to Brisbane, Australia to become the Foundation Professor of Tourism and Head of the School of Tourism at the University of Queensland from 1999 to 2007. The School of Tourism began in 1974 as part of the Queensland Agricultural College outside Brisbane (now part of The University of Queensland). Its tourism programmes evolved from earlier sub-degree programmes in hospitality. Like the UK, in the 1970s and 1980s there was a binary system of higher education in Australia with Colleges of Advanced Education focusing on vocationally applied degree programmes and universities focusing on more theoretically focused degree programmes (Breakey & Craig-Smith, 2011). This industry and vocationally focused tourism programme did not fit well with the research intensive University of Queensland, and in 1999 Chris's appointment signalled the university's intention to improve the research output of the School.

I joined Chris at The University of Queensland in 2002 after my Ph.D. supervisor at Griffith University, Prof. Bill Faulkner, then Director of the Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism (RCST), met his cruel and untimely death from cancer. By that time, most of the staff at the School of Tourism were undertaking or had completed their doctoral studies and were beginning to increase their research output. Chris also established links with a number of universities in China especially Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou which led to a joint degree in Events Management established in 2005. During this time, he was heavily involved in the CRCST both as a researcher and as Editor in Chief for the CRCST's publications from 2002 to 2008.

In 2007, Chris moved back to the UK to become Director of the Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Centre of the University of Nottingham. He now works at the Oxford Brookes University, as Dean of the Business Faculty and Pro Vice-Chancellor. A list of Chris's appointments is given in Table 1.

Table 1 Chris Cooper's career appointments.

1976–1977	Market Planning Executive, Thomson Travel Ltd, UK
1977–1979	Marketing Planning Executive, Grattan Ltd, UK
1979–1982	Lecturer II in Geography, Liverpool College of Higher Education, UK
1982–1985	Senior Lecturer in Tourism Studies, Dorset Institute of Higher Education, UK
1986–1992	Lecturer in Tourism Management, University of Surrey, UK
1992–1996	Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management, University of Surrey, UK
1996–1999	Professor of Tourism, Bournemouth University, UK
1999–2007	Foundation Professor of Tourism and Head of School School of Tourism, The University of Queensland, Australia
2007–2009	Director, Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Centre,
2009–2010	Dean, Business School, Oxford Brookes University, UK
2010–to date	Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean, Business Faculty, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Academic supervision

In my opinion, one of the most rewarding parts of an academic's job is that of supervising research students at Honours, Masters, and Ph.D. level, and that much about a supervisor's personality and interests can be understood through their management and interaction with their students. Chris has supervised 23 graduate students to completion and I consider myself fortunate to be one. Most of his students have gone on to have an academic career including his first student Dimitrios Buhalis who completed his doctorate from the University of Surrey in 1995 and is now Professor at Bournemouth University. Carlos Costa is Head of the Department and Professor at the University of Aveiro, Portugal; Atsuko Hashimoto is Associate Professor at Brock University, Canada; Gui Santana is Professor at Universidade do Vale do Itajai, Brasil; Dr Dimitrios Diamantis is at Les Roches Hotel School, Switzerland; Associate Professor Eman Helmy is at Helwan University; Dr Paul Barron is a Reader at Edinburgh Napier University; Drs Michelle Whitford and Sasha Reid are at Griffith University, Australia; David Solnet, Lisa Ruhanen, and Noel Scott are at The University of Queensland Australia; Norain Othman is Deputy Dean (Research & Industry Linkages), Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia; Dr Mary Hollick is at the University of Ballarat; Dr Shi Na Li is at Leeds Metropolitan; Dr Vanessa Gowreesunkar is at the University of Technology, Mauritius; and Dr Rodolfo Baggio is at Boccioni University, Italy.

As part of my preparation for this portrait, I asked several of these past Ph.D. students to write about Chris's supervisory style and their recollections of him from their doctoral studies. In reading through their responses, I am struck by a number of similar themes. The first concerns his strategic and “laid back” style. For example, Paul Barron writes that Chris was:

very hands off and this allowed me to focus the study on what I felt was important rather than having him impose any strong personal feelings or thoughts that he might have had concerning the topic. This was something I really appreciated as it made the study much more of a personal issue for me. (personal communication, 2014)

Similarly Dimitrios Buhalis talks of being given the freedom and space to develop his ideas. (personal communication, 2014)

In his personality, Chris is described by his students as quiet, gentle, and humble with a strong sense of responsibility to his students. Atsuko Hashimoto sees him as typically British and recollects fondly his concern over her adding milk to her tea. All his students respected his knowledge, expertise, and approachability. Rodolfo Baggio writes:

He has the incredible capacity of being always available for a discussion, a chat or simply for answering a question without being haunting or stressing with regard to what one is doing. His quiet and gentle way of handling any possible issue is one of the characteristics I have most appreciated. (personal communication, 2014)

Chris also operated as a mentor for his students during and after their studies and as Carlos Costa says has left his foot-print on us. Dimitrios Buhalis writes: Chris always treated me as a colleague and an apprentice, making sure that he will show me the tricks of the trade and open doors and avenues for me. In this way, one of Chris's lasting contributions is in helping to develop a new generation of tourism scholars.

Scholarly writing

As mentioned earlier, the field of tourism has developed into a significant area of university education during Chris's career. Along with this goes a need for textbooks and development of curriculum and pedological pracrtices. This is an area where Chris has made a significant contribution by writing a number of leading textbooks, including Worldwide Destinations – The Geography of Travel and Tourism (along with B. Boniface and R. Cooper), Tourism Principles and Practice (along with Alan Fyall, John Fletcher, David Gilbert, and Stephen Wanhill), and Contemporary Tourism – An İnternational Approach (with Michael Hall). In particular, Tourism: Principles and Practice has been a key tourism textbooks during its many editions between 1993 and 2013. In these books, Chris has helped to provide the theoretical and conceptual basis for the study of tourism. Chris is also the Series Editor for Aspects of Tourism, Channelview Publications and for Contemporary Tourism Reviews, Goodfellow Publishers.

Another issue for the development of an academic field such as tourism is the availability of journals as these encourage publications from scholars. Chris founded and co-edited the journal Progress in Tourism, Recreation and Hospitality Research (1989–1994), which transformed into Progress in Tourism and Hospitality Research (1994–1998) and then International Journal of Tourism Research (editor 1998–2000) as well as Tourism and Hospitality Research (1994–1998); he is now co-editor (with Michael Hall) of Current Issues in Tourism (2000 – to date). He is also an editorial board member of 24 journals including Tourism, Culture & Communication, Tourism Analysis, Journal of Tourism Studies, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Tourism Recreation Research, Journal of Ecotourism, China Tourism Research, Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, and International Journal of Hospitality Knowledge Management.

İn addition to these contributions to the development of scholarship in tourism, Chris has also published a number of his own research articles. His early papers have a distinctive geographical flavour examining tourism development on the Isle of Man and developing the concept of the destination lifecycle (Cooper & Jackson, 1989). He also began publishing on a topic around the same time that has continued throughout his career – tourism education (Cooper & Westlake, 1989). In the early 2000s, he became interested in knowledge management (Cooper, 2002, 2006). He has also published with his students on topics such as tourism network analysis (Scott, Cooper, & Baggio, 2008), sustainable tourism planning (Helmy & Cooper, 2002), and computable general equilibrium modelling (Li, Blake, & Cooper, 2010).

In summary, I can only agree with the comments from his doctoral student and now Associate Professor Atsuko Hashimoto:

As for Chris' contribution to scholarship, I believe we, tourism scholars today, owe a great deal to Chris and his generation of scholars who expanded the multidisciplinary platform of tourism studies. I do not know how Chris managed it, but his numerous contributions in the form of journal articles, books, editing books and journals, guest lectures and consultancy have all touched us at one point in our scholarly life. (personal communication, 2014)

Within the academic sector, Chris's contributions have been recognized through his membership of the prestigious International Academy for the Study of Tourism. He is also a Member of the United Kingdom Research Excellence Framework Sub-Panel for Sport, Exercise Science and Tourism and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Industry leadership

Perhaps because of his early experience in the industry, Chris has often worked outside purely academic circles. This manifested early in his career in numerous visitor studies and strategy reports. He also worked extensively on education visits to attractions in the UK and has extensive experience in providing executive education for managers and practicioners. Chris has provided leadership to the tourism sector at an international level through his work for the UNWTO. One of his main contributions that started during his time at the Universty of Surrey was work on tourism education with the UNWTO. As part of this involvement, he ran road shows on training the educators around the world along with Eduardo Fayos Sola. Chris has worked for the UNWTO as a Senior Special Advisor – Human Resources, and as a member of the Leadership Forum, Market Panel of Experts and the TEDQUAL Assessment Committee. He was Chairman of the UNWTO Education Council from 2005 to 2007. In 2009, he was awarded the UNWTO Ulysses Prize for contributions to tourism policy and education. Today, he works with the European Union, the International Labour Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). In these roles, Chris has promoted improvements in the standards of training of tourism and hospitality staff, development of education standards at tertiary level in tourism and hospitality, and better utilization of tourism knowledge through improved dissemination of information.

Contribution

If we look back over the material presented earlier, we may see a dedicated academic who has made a real contribution to the academic scholarship and international leadership of tourism. Tourism is an important and vibrant field of study that aspires to be a discipline and a newly recognized sector of the economy that contributes significantly to the economy of many countries. Examining the rapid development of tourism, we may consider that this was an inevitable outcome of technological, social, and economic changes from the 1960s onwards. However, while these megatrends provide the drivers for the development of tourism, they do not create the present conditions, and instead it is the actions of individuals that have tangible consequences. The independent academic field of study and research of tourism has arguably only began in the later quarter of the twentieth century (Pearce, 2005). Chris has been central to the development of tourism scholarship through his involvement in founding of new journals, training of Ph.D. students, his own papers especially on knowledge management, and his work with the UNWTO and other industry bodies. In the sense that a discipline is a group of academics sharing a common interest, Chris Cooper is central to the evolution of tourism to disciplinary status due to his efforts at creating a body of knowledge and future academics (through his Ph.D. teaching). As Dimitrios Diamantis writes:

Chris is an outstanding scholar to say the least. He not only was concerned for and guided all his PhD students but also he managed us as future educators where eventually most of us become ones, Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Professor Carlos Costa, Professor Noel Scott and many others. In short, Chris contribution to scholarship has been thought provoking from its early work on TALC in late 1980s, to the educating the educators' contributions in the 1990s and to the knowledge creation articles in 2000s. He has been one of the academics that have sharpened and shaped the tourism body of knowledge, a name that always reflects a postmodernism with syntagmatic dimensions. (personal communication, 2014)

Conclusion

At the beginning of Chris's career in the 1970s, tourism was a growth sector for academia. Today in some countries, student enrolments are falling and it may be that tourism will revert back to a field where academics from other subjects and disciplines work. There does seem to be a strong movement in Australia for tourism and hospitality to be combined into business schools and taught as a major rather than as a standalone degree. However, through the work of Chris Cooper and other pioneering scholars, there is now a strong academic research community supported by texts, monographs, and journals that can provide a centre for the study of tourism.

It appears evident from this portrait that Chris has made a major contribution to tourism scholarship and in addition, his career provides some lessons for aspiring academics. Chris benefited from a grounding in the business of tourism, developed a network of colleagues through his doctoral training, and worked with international organizations to mutual benefit. A colleague once told me that his opinion was if an academic had only completed their Ph.D., then they “ain't done much”. Chris has done far more in his career to date than just getting a Ph.D. and provides inspiration for those scholars with their new doctoral certificates who aspire to do more.