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The system of production within the tourism industry is now considered one of the world’s most powerful driving forces.

Stear et al. (1988: 1) provide this definition of the tourism industry: ‘[a] collection of all collaborating firms and organizations which perform specific activities directed at satisfying leisure, pleasure and recreational needs. It includes only those firms that are purposefully performing specific production and marketing activities which are directed at the particular needs of tourists. To be a firm within the tourism industry the firm must have a vested interest in tourism [and] do things to cause tourism in terms of both its volume and its qualitative aspects.’

Through mergers and concentrations, companies considered a part of the tourism industry have become agents of an interconnected network penetrating many sectors. The transnationals of tourism utilize strategies of capital internationalization in a system of tourist production that has evolved into network companies who operate globally (Coles & Hall, 2008). Decisions for whole regions or countries are made inside one company. This system aids the integration of regions and communities into the international whole as the host culture, society and identity become mass products when this form of tourism enters a country. These forms of international tourism are a powerful force in the universalization of culture and society. To accept it means not only the welcoming of foreign vacationers and their currency, but also means access to international planning, technology and finance, entering the world economy and approaching world modernity. One cannot understand volunteer tourism without this view of reality.

Marketing articulates supply and demand within a market economy, and societies embracing international tourism are plunged into this international system. Unlike other industries, the ‘products’ of the tourist industry are a pastiche of formerly homogeneous elements amalgamated by advertising for tourist consumption. Combined symbiotically they include services (lodging, dining, transportation, recreation), culture (folklore, festivals and heritage) and less palpable things such as hospitality, ambience and ethnicity. International tourism promotion, aimed at economic development, requires every location to offer something unique. By this logic, each country or region must produce and publicize its unique identity, with each ‘new recognition’ signifying superiority. Widespread marketing research determines what this image should be, matching aspects of local identity with the desires of its potential clients. The seduction of identity defines the seductive attributes and crystallizes them in an advertising image such that even locals may eventually recognize themselves in it (Carpenter, 1973).

Significantly here, it must be asked whether contemporary tourism offers an over-determined capitalist form of escape or a site of struggle and resistance. Is it folly in this respect to view tourist experience as paving the way towards self-realization or ‘consciousness raising?’ (Rojek, 1993: 212; McGehee & Norman, 2002). The separation of this problematic notion is fundamental to the conjunction of tourism and its commodification in the consideration of personal development as an element of alternative tourism. If the subject, ‘the self’, and ‘consciousness raising’ are themselves open to contrasting and changing interpretations, the opportunity may exist to move beyond consumerism, commodification and determinism in looking at volunteer tourism experiences.

Mass tourism appears to operate efficiently in the market system, particularly where there are few or no regulations to infringe on operations. A range of authors suggest that this is leading to unacceptable impacts on social and cultural values in some developing countries thus threatening the sustainability of tourism itself (Butler, 1991; Lea, 1993; Robinson & Boniface, 1999; Archer et al., 2005; Holden, 2008). If the market system is seen as dominating the entire process of tourism, then all experiences may be predicated on this approach. However, if areas of difference can be identified, then the possibility exists for approaches to, and provision of, alternative forms of tourism and its attendant infrastructure to be explored.

In a market system, economic principles provide the primary means of measurement and the organizational epistemologies, which orient and subtend the tourism system as a whole, despite varying regional differences in emphasis. In contrast, but operating necessarily within such a system, alternative forms of tourism reprioritize these operational principles. It is the conflict of interests engendered between these approaches that can often lead to a mutually exclusive operating environment. Fundamentally, tourism in the market economy uses and exploits natural resources as a means of profit accumulation in the commercialization of the human desire to travel.

The arguments surrounding modernity suggest that in the capitalist society of the early 21st century, commodification of experience occurs to an overwhelming extent, and in this respect, the promise of obtaining intrinsically satisfying experiences habitually eludes us. Commodification, within this argument, constructs needs that are fundamental in a consumer society, relying on and constructing unsatisfied need in order to foster demand (Baudrillard, 1970; Giddens, 1991: 172; Wearing et al., 2005).

Simmel’s insights into the modern metropolis illustrate this process. For Simmel (1978), the ‘metropolis’ is the epitome of industrialized society, characterized by a personality type, the division of labour through production and consumption, and dominated by monetary exchange. Human beings living within it are subjected to an increase in nervousness, requiring the development of psychological defence mechanisms to distance the shock experience of urban existence, including, for example, the encounters with innumerable persons in the course of a day. As a consequence, individuals become ‘blasé’, experiencing all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue. However, there is a thirst for increasing amusement and greater excitement, which has not been satisfied by the fleeting, intense stimulations of the city (Simmel, 1978).

Against this background, Simmel (1978) is critical of those ‘fillings-in of time and consciousness’, which lie outside the sphere of work and which constitute leisure. Individuals in the city still wish to assert their individuality and differentiation through leisure pursuits, while seeking to belong to their own social group and its lifestyle (Frisby, 1989). New fashions for old distractions and stimulations constitute an essential part of leisure consumption and this rapidity of turnover in fashions is ever increasing. Sites of entertainment in all modes are increasingly devoted to the titillation of the senses and intoxication of the nerves by colour, glamour, light, music and above all, sexual excitement. Simmel (1978: 376) suggests that a range of sites, such as world exhibitions, trade exhibitions and large shopping malls, are where this predominantly occurs. The effect of the concentration of a world of commodities in a confined space is to overpower, disorientate and hypnotize the individual, whilst the ostentatious presentation is appropriate to the stimulation of overexcited and exhausted nerves.

The ultimate commodified leisure escape today can be seen in specific forms of tourism, where travel to far distant and different places is held out as ‘paradise gained’ (the return is never presented as ‘paradise lost’!). Perhaps the ultimate example of this commodification is the photographing of such experiences in an attempt to possess them and make them desirable. The image becomes all important, the personal experience of secondary consequence. As Jamieson (1962, cited in Bennett, 1998: 17) points out:

The American tourist no longer lets the landscape ‘be in its being’ as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby transforming space into its own material image. The concrete activity of looking at a landscape — including, no doubt, the disquieting bewilderment with the activity itself, the anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human wonder what they are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a confrontation might be in the first place — is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting it into a form of personal property.

It is within the context of contemporary touristic practices that questions arise as to the possibility of alternative forms of tourism arising as leisure in modern society; it is not only conceived as ‘free time’ but also as ‘freely chosen activity’ (Roberts, 1978) and as ‘self-enhancing experience’ (Kelly, 1982; Rojek, 2006). However, its commodification has the potential to constrain rather than enhance freedom (Cook, 2006). ‘Broader questions of freedom and control’, they say, ‘have been narrowed around the right to consumer choice’ (Clarke & Critcher, 1985: 232).

Glasser (1976) applies a similar argument to the notion of identity itself. He claims that the overriding compulsion governing actions and attitudes of individuals is the pursuit of a desired identity. In earlier societies, an ideal culturally constructed identity was promulgated and facilitated by religious observances or shamanistic practices. Today the pursuit of a desired identity, he says, has been channelled into consumerism through the circulation of an ideal consumer whose main ‘freely chosen’ leisure activity is consumption. Moreover, the construction of identity has come to be characterized by the objectifi-cation and commodification of one’s body and personality, where the market prompts the individual to promote and sell themselves (Baudrillard, 1998: 135; Bauman, 2007: 6). Under these conditions, identity becomes a kind of cultural resource, asset or possession (Lury, 1996: 8).

In this view, the tourist can therefore never achieve what they seek. The experience becomes a tranquillizer, a form of therapeutic leisure, rather than raising awareness in attempting to cancel out the stress of life. The individual is left with an unsatisfactory and unending search for some form of identity. Glasser (1976: 43) notes:

While the high priests of old aimed at an unchanging model of an ideal identity, the new priesthood aims to mould an ideal consumer, one who willingly makes the changes in his (sic) lifestyle demanded by competing marketing policies, accepting too, the idea that his (sic) immediate anxieties can be assuaged by buying new and more products, imagining that each piece of emotional comfort so obtained will be long lasting.

Thus, under the guise of a legitimate conservation activity leading to awareness and appreciation of nature and the exploration of the relationship between nature and the self, alternative forms of tourism — such as ecotourism — may themselves be underpinned by the consumption of nature in modern society.

Campbell (1983), following Weber, argues that the ‘spirit’ of modern consumerism rests upon an attitude of restless desire and discontent that produces consumption as an end in itself. Romanticism, he claims, conceived of as a ‘cultural movement which introduced the modern doctrines of self-expression and fulfilment’, is the most likely source of an ethic that legitimates such a spirit. Thus the ‘romantic ethic’ of the enlightenment provides a contradictory and compensatory ethic to the self-disciplinary future orientation of the Protestant work ethic, but one that is necessary for perpetual consumption. Campbell (1983) suggests that the two contradictory ethics have been accommodated in contemporary society by separating out the sphere of leisure, with its emphasis on self-expression and fulfilment, from the sphere of work with its self-denying disciplinary ethic. In this respect, alternative tourism experiences, such as those provided by ecotourism, may not in themselves legitimate nature as an entity but may simply provide another avenue for overtly consumptive leisure practices.

These ideas provide a key tension for this book. They are unlikely to be answered conclusively but they will be necessarily explored with a view to providing a better understanding of the difficulties that exist in moving toward an understanding of volunteer tourism experiences. The following section examines several of the underlying tenets and structural principles of the tourism industry in order to provide a specific context for tourist experience at the industry level. This analysis will provide an inclusive context for the idea of volunteer tourism.