Tourism Systems Thinking: Towards an Integrated Framework to Guide the Study of the Tourism Phenomenon

Abstract

Tourism is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon. Some academics, however, have studied tourism from their own specialization, contributing from the perspective of their specific fields. Others have argued that the complexities of tourism should be tackled more systemically and so have used diverse concepts from systems thinking theory. Nevertheless, nobody has yet presented an integrated framework connecting existing diverse systems thinking concepts, which serves as a more structured point of departure from which to study tourism. This article (1) starts by identifying seven complexities of tourism, (2) discusses eight systems thinking's key notions in the context of those complexities, (3) structures an integrated tourism systems thinking conceptual framework, and (4) provides an application example. Thus, this work contributes with a more structured theoretical foundation for the study of tourism as a system and with an integrated approach to understand its complexities.