Is an axiological turn viable for tourism studies? Reinvestigating the Platforms model

ABSTRACT Tourism academics are institutionalised to enhance values determined to be of benefit to some greater good, and to play their assigned roles in both conscious and unconscious ways. Many find themselves in different faculties, colleges, and schools, doing their jobs based on values determined by their institutional belonging, but also based on their personal beliefs, and educational backgrounds. This interplay of academic roles is important because it creates worlds, real and imagined, that students, colleagues, and community members build theirs from. Worlds are made and evaluated quite naturally, they form and are formed by the academics’ values in interplay with the values of their contexts. Each tourism academic should therefore ask themselves: Why is tourism taught? This question might highlight vulnerabilities and viabilities of tourism studies. This article presents an investigation of tourism degrees offered at universities in the five Nordic countries. The data exposes what values dominate tourism education, but the significance of the argument in this paper arises from the theoretical framework, which is an axiological development of Jafar Jafari’s original Platforms model and its later adaptions. The conclusion drawn is that current tourism studies ought to be enriched axiologically, rather than ontologically or epistemologically.