Modernity

The idea of “modernity” as a distinct era became increasingly important in social sciences from the late nineteenth century onwards. Although different theorists have concentrated on different social phenomena as modernity’s defining features, they have all tended to stress aspects such as the dissolution of customary bonds and practices that allegedly characterized “traditional” small-scale societies. Consequently, the move towards forms of sociality that are at once more atomized and individualized while being more mass-produced by widespread industrialization and mass-consumed through the spread of market relations took center stage for interested scholars.

Tourism in social science

Tourism tends to be analyzed in social science research as an archetypally “modern” phenomenon that relies upon the development of the kinds of large-scale infrastructures of transport and accommodationthat are characteristic of the Modern Age. Therefore, as an archetypally modern phenomenon, tourism...