A literature review of tourism management (1990–2013): a content analysis perspective

Abstract

Tourism activities can refer to an extension of a brand–consumer relationship. While growth in many industries is flat, worldwide tourism revenues continue to grow. A literature review is not only a crucial endeavour for any academic research, but also the foundation and inspiration for substantial, useful research. Among extant studies on tourism management (TM), few are on literature review while most are concerned with specific issues or countries/areas. This paper aims to draw up an integrated framework of TM. Little effort has been made to systematically examine the vast TM-related literature so as to facilitate better understandings of TM. To eliminate the gap among the extant studies and develop the TM trajectory, a content analysis was undertaken using keywords “TM” in 5 online electronic databases from 1990 to 2013. Based on 773 articles, we discovered the number of publications on TM has significantly increased since 2000 and a steady growth since 2008. While 773 articles are scattered across 196 journals, most appeared in 11 academic journals. We also categorize articles into 10 conceptual groups based on a proposed conceptual framework. The main contribution is to provide a conceptual framework incorporating keyword indexes to operationalize the coverage of TM.

Keywords:

• tourism management
• literature review
• application
• classification
• content analysis

Notes

1 The popular term presently used as external environment is PEST, including Politics, Economy, Society and Technology.

2 Borg et al. (1996) have broken down Ogawa and Malen’s (1991) method into eight steps: (1) Create an audit trail; (2) Define the focus of the review; (3) Search for relevant literature; (4) Classify the documents; (5) Create summary databases; (6) Identify constructs and hypothesized causal linkages; (7) Search for contrary findings and rival interpretations; (8) Use colleagues or informants to corroborate the findings.

3 Tourism Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, International Journal of Tourism Research, Current Issues in Tourism, Annals of Tourism Research.

4 The abbreviation of MICE stands for Meeting, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions.

5 Portugal, Thailand, Austria, Turkey, Canada and Norway were tied for seventh.

6 Here we mentioned Drucker’s basic corporate functions.

7 The ESCAPE model consists of six components, including environment (E), strategy (S), capability/culture (C), competitive advantage (A), performance (P) and evaluation (E) while the ESC model represents the first three parts of ESCAPE.