Running away from, or with, the tourist gaze

The Tourist Gaze (1990) made John Urry a world-famous tourism scholar and the book quickly became a seminal text. It is John’s ‘best-selling book and more or less most cited book’ (personal email). Few tourism concepts are cited and commented upon more than ‘the tourist gaze’. Its massive impact dazzled John as it was one of his first pieces on tourism, and he never devoted himself fully to tourism studies. As John often told me, The Tourist Gaze taught him the importance of an excellent and cite-able title and he was grateful to his editor who suggested that title as an alternative to ‘The Sociology of Tourism’ (Larsen 2014).