Cricketers as tourists; analyses of culture shock, travel motivation and learning

[Extract] It is the working assumption of this chapter that it is possible to view international cricketers as tourists. It can be immediately noted that they are a very special kind of tourist since both their sporting performances and personal lives are of public interest and exposed to much media scrutiny. In the terms of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) formal definition of tourists, professional sportspeople are included in the international arrival statistics but, in common with other travellers who cross boundaries for work-related purposes, they are outliers in the more generic everyday conceptualisation of the term tourist. The perspective that cricketers are outliers or tenuous cases in our understanding of tourists is of particular advantage to this chapter. Eisenhardt (1989), Diamond (2005) and Yin (2009), among others, have argued that in social science research a focus on outlying cases is often an insightful tool for testing the limits of our models and conceptual frameworks. In this chapter two concepts will be tested and potentially enhanced by a consideration of the cricketer as a tourist. First, the concept of culture shock, and its updated and allied counterpart culture confusion, will be considered. It will be argued that the experience of cricketers, like that of other travelling sports stars, offers some under-researched areas within the culture shock/confusion concepts.\ud \ud A second application of another conceptual scheme - the travel career pattern approach to tourist motivation - will also be explored. Again the discussion will consider the ways in which viewing the international cricketer as tourist can both help frame the travel behaviours of those who wield the willow and refresh the core ideas of the concept. In these analyses, examples of cricketers' experiences in international travel will be drawn from autobiographies and biographies, mostly but not exclusively from the writings of and about Australian players. The ways in which cricketers deal with culture confusion and the learning they derive from these experiences will be used to form a better understanding of the dynamics of travel motivation