Critically discuss the relationships between tourism and leisure Essay - 1

Critically discuss the relationships between tourism and leisure behaviour, and the implications of these relationships for the understanding and management of tourism - Essay Example It is widely acceptable however, that leisure and tourism as areas of research have developed in complete seclusion. For example, Smith and Godbey (1991) commented that while there is evidence that attitudes are changing, the "traditions of recreation and leisure studies have historically ignored tourism". Throughout this paper, the implications of these relationships will be analyzed, in terms of psychological and sociological concepts as well. For their importance, when it comes to understanding and managing the tourism industry. People are classified into economic status, cultures, gender and skill. The perception of leisure is compound and based on factors such as social, economic, cultural and political factors. It has four major approaches; first approach is defined as leisure as time, then is leisure as activity, third is the attitude based approach and leisure as a state of mind while the fourth approach is leisure as a quality of action. Murphy (1974) defines leisure as â€Å"The most common conceptualization views leisure as that portion of time which remains when time for work and the basic requirements for existence have been satisfied. Leisure can be viewed as casual behavior in which people engage during free time. If we accept the notion of prepotency and the idea of different levels of need, then we can re-state the Aristotlean definition of leisure. Leisure is the state or condition of being free from the urgent demands of lower level needs.† (Murphy, 1974). It is therefore a mental and spiritual attitude. Tourism refers to travel for frivolous, spare time or business purposes. There is a variety of different perspectives when it comes to defining tourism. Tourism is about an activity that covers dealing with different people, individual behaviour, utilization of resources and different environments (Ball, 1995). As per Burkart & Medlik (1981), tourism definitions can either be technical or