Epistemological issues on sport tourism: challenge for a new scientific field

International audienceThe epistemological approach is best suited to seize and understand the basis of sport tourism, for it allows aquestioning of the produced knowledge in this area. Historically, scientific domains are defined in relation to eachother by specifying, more or less quickly, their subject. This is a generalised process from which no sector ofknowledge escapes which seeks to be autonomous. This a situation that sport tourism must face today. Can sporttourism be considered as an independent scientific domain ? Do the activities of sport tourism fall within thecategory of sport tourism ? If various historical, sociological, psychological and economical approaches are likely toshed light on the various aspects of sport tourism, these approaches are not able to specify its domain. Only carefulthought on how knowledge is structured in this domain can provide a critical and constructive view on theframework of sport tourism. In this perspective, the purpose of this article will be to identify the recurringquestioning on this subject. Three types of questions will be addressed.The first type concerns the boundaries of the field of sport tourism. What are the elements that define andcircumscribe this field ? From their listing to the classification of their activities, a concern for thoroughness hasbeen overpresent. Nevertheless, to question what may constitute this domain's relevance is legitimate. The nature ofthe activity, the context, its duration and the interactions it produces are such that they differentiate the productionsof sport tourism from those of sport and those of tourism.The second type of questioning concerns the nature and the type of relations that link sport tourism to othersactivities that relate to sport or to tourism. On the one hand sport tourism contributes to the expansion of sport andtourism in general and on the other hand it trends to occupy a unique economical niche from the stand point of amanagement or a marketing perspective.The third type concerns the analysis of various processes and mechanisms that occur in this domain. From a generalperspective, economical and sociological mechanisms determine the outputs of sport tourism, but the evolution ofthese outputs is characterised by processes of innovation, massification and diversification. These elements tend toindicate that sport tourism represents a specific domain of service production connected to tourism and sport