Capitalist Globalisation, Corporatised Tourism and Their Alternatives

Any realistic understanding of contemporary tourism in the 21st century must be grounded in a context of the dynamics of capitalist globalisation. Sociologist Leslie Sklair's conceptualisation of capitalist globalisation and its dynamics as expressed in his Sociology of the Global System (2002) is employed to understand the corporatised tourism phenomenon and explain the resistance that it sparks. This discussion explains how a corporatised tourism sector has been created by transnational tourism and travel corporations, professionals in the travel and tourism sector, transnational practices such as the liberalisation being imposed through the General Agreement on Trade in Services negotiations and the culture-ideology of consumerism that tourists have adopted.