Tourism is rapidly transforming from a business segment into a scientific field, according to academics speaking at a recent conference in Dalaman in the southwestern province of Muğla.

According to the end report, the participants discussed four key issues at the conference and emphasized that the tourism sector was moving from being an applied study field to being a mature field of science.

Academics speaking at the Academic Tourism Education Conference, which was held last week, said tourism should be an applied field but underlined the lack of unique theoretic foundations to tourism that had so far prevented it from becoming a scientific discipline. They said the researchers of the field benefited from the theoretic underpinnings of business administration and sometimes other sciences in their applied studies.  

“Although all these studies also target the formation of a theoretical infrastructure for the field, as well as providing contribution to applied studies, in the end all these studies are carried out for sector-oriented purposes,” the report said.

The scholars also said tourism was an academic discipline and added that researchers had accumulated enough knowledge within the discourse to create a working discipline and methodology for the field. However, the experts agreed it was way below the level of becoming an independent field of science as opposed to being a very mature branch of the social sciences.

Some participants claimed tourism was already a field of science and an interdisciplinary science that investigates and researches phenomena in the tourism field by use of scientific methodology that aim to establish cause-effect relations.

“Therefore, we cannot talk about a single approach or mythology in studies carried out in the tourism field,” the report said.

The final report said tourism was a part of social science and benefited from all the qualitative and quantitative methods the social sciences traditionally employ.

“Studies in this field are rapidly developing in both national and international levels in terms of quality and quantity. And science has already acquired the maturity to be represented as a department in faculties, and as a main branch of science within the body of academic institutes,” the report said.

At the end of the conference, scholars agreed that the field had covered a great distance and gained recognition as an independent field of science despite their opposing positions on the field’s current status.

Experts participating in the conference came from a variety of disciplines, including tourism administration, philosophy of science, sociology, science history management, marketing, statistics, econometrics, public administration, finance and economy.

The conference was organized by Anadolu University Tourism Research and Application Unit and Muğla University Tourism Research and Application Center. The event was sponsored by the Turizm Araştırmaları Dergisi (Tourism Research Journal), according to a press release from Anadolu University in the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir.