Ontology and Epistemology of Tourism: A Realist Approach (Routledge Insights in Tourism Series). This item is unavailable.Ontology and Epistemology of Tourism: A Realist Approach (Routledge Insights in Tourism Series)

By integrating social ontology and epistemology, the book offers a systematic realist account of tourism, explaining how tourist entities, institutions, and practices are constituted, how tourism reality is structured as a domain of social reality, and how knowledge about this domain can be justified.

It provides a clear philosophical foundation for understanding tourism by learning how tourism reality is constituted and how knowledge about it can be justified. The book delivers these benefits through a systematic framework that integrates social ontology and epistemology, drawing on realist philosophy and Searle-inspired social ontology. It clarifies key concepts, distinguishes types of entities and facts within tourism reality, and explains the institutional mechanisms, such as collective intentionality, status functions, and constitutive rules, which structure the tourism domain. These theoretical arguments are illustrated with real-world examples from tourism practice that help explain how particular aspects of the framework operate in concrete contexts. By combining conceptual analysis with a coherent epistemological account of how tourism knowledge can be evaluated, the book provides researchers and advanced students with a rigorous meta-theoretical framework that supports clearer interpretation, stronger theoretical grounding, and more consistent research in tourism studies.

The book is intended primarily for scholars, researchers, and postgraduates in tourism studies who seek a deeper theoretical and philosophical understanding of tourism as a social phenomenon. It will also be of interest to academics in sociology, human geography, economics, anthropology, and philosophy of the social sciences, particularly those concerned with social ontology and epistemology. It may also benefit advanced graduate students and researchers engaged in theoretical, conceptual, or interdisciplinary work on tourism and social reality for its analysis of tourism reality.

Leszek Butowski (born 1965, Warsaw, Poland) is a full professor of human geography and tourism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw and later obtained his post doctoral habilitation at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University. He also pursued postgraduate studies in international tourism at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. His research lies at the intersection of geography, tourism studies, and the philosophy of the social sciences, with a particular focus on the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of social inquiry. Butowski’s work explores the conceptual and theoretical bases of tourism studies, combining a reflective perspective on spatial and socio-economic processes with both quantitative and qualitative empirical research. His recent publications focus particularly on the philosophical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of tourism studies.