Being Sustainable in Unsustainable Environments: The case of sustainable tourism

In recent years, contemporary western society has played witness to a growth in the production, promotion, and consumption of ostensibly ‘ethical’ products such as Fair Trade goods. Such commodities are characterised by an emphasis on rebalancing inequalities that ‘mass’ production/consumption are said to create. This book takes sustainable tourism as a novel example of such concerns. With recent inroads in psychology and the social sciences suggesting that the practice of consumption represents a prominent ‘mode’ for ‘identity work’ (including class identities), the consumption of ‘ethical’ products may arguably signify the manifestation of ‘ethical identity/identities’. However, ‘ethics’ and ‘identity’ are ambiguous words with significant concerns surrounding the ‘ethics’ of ‘ethical’ products, and the extent to which individuals exhibit ‘ethical identity/identities’ through the consumption of such goods. Building on Michael Foucault’s ‘technologies of self’ and ‘ethics’, this book seeks to contribute to our understanding of ‘ethics’, ‘identity’, and ‘practice’ in relation to sustainable tourism. This approach allows for an investigation in which individuals are conceptualised as both restricted and resistant, constrained yet ‘free’, passively ‘subjectified’ and ‘agentic’ subjects. In order to maintain such a position within the enquiry, analyses of the promotion of sustainable tourism on the internet, and interview data from sixteen self-defined ‘sustainable tourists’, are presented. The findings show that through the promotion of sustainable tourism individuals are invited to ‘experiment with subjectivity’ in ways that both restrict and facilitate a certain ‘ethics’. However, the interview data highlights that although a number of these ‘experiments’ are taken up by some; there is also resistance through the practices they adopt. The book concludes by suggesting that although problematic, Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘ethics’ offer valuable insights into the study of sustainable tourism and critical psychology more generally.