Moral agency in tourism: is there a future for ethical tourism?

Given the growing concerns about global sustainability, morally-guided tourism should play a significant part in tourism development. However, research on moral agency in tourism has been neglected. This paper discusses critical problems in existing ethical tourism research and develops an innovative critical realist framework that is more ontologically robust, epistemologically correct and methodologically feasible. In addition to this theoretical contribution, the paper reports on the author’s empirical investigation that is premised on the framework to examine the moral mechanisms of a group of 31 undergraduate Chinese tourism students. The research discovers: (1) moral template and reflexivity are constitutive elements of moral agency; (2) these agential properties have generative powers (when activated) permitting four mechanismic processes to emerge; (3) these moral mechanisms explain the participants’ moral muteness. The close examination of the mechanisms reveals the forces exerted from the structural levels of social structure and culture, and that from the social interaction level. This finding suggests opportunities for China’s social and institutional systems to responsibly develop tourism. The study has significant practical implications for (1) China’s moral development of current and future industry personnel, and (2) for the future of its morally-guided tourism practice