The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Debates about political resistance crystallize

key trends incritical human geography.

marxist geographyhas a long tradition of

studying collective organizing and everyday

resistance toclassexploitation; and struggle

against patriarchy is well articulated in

feminist geographies. The geographical

embeddedness of political and cultural action

has been explored in work onsocial move-

ments, highlighting: how particularities of

placeinfluence the emergence, character and

strategy of movements (Routledge, 1993);

what geographical dilemmas labour unions

face in the age of global capital (Herod,

1998: and seelabour geography); and the

importance of social movements in shaping

political and social geographies (Miller,

2000).

An interest incultural politicsand the

persuit of thecultural turnled to two devel-

opments in the geographical study of resis-

tance. First, the interpretative frame was

enlarged to include myriad everyday symbolic

and material practices, which contested not

only class exploitation but also gender, racial,

sexual (and other) forms of domination and

oppression. James Scott’sWeapons of the weak

(1985) was a key text, in which he identified

foot dragging, desertion, false compliance, pil-

fering, feigned ignorance, arson, sabotage and

more as ‘everyday resistance’. These practices

required little or no coordination or planning,

made use of implicit understandings and

informal networks, and typically avoided any

direct or symbolic confrontation with author-

ity (1985, p. xvi). However, when almost every

action is conceptualized as resistance, critical

distinctions between effective and ineffective

political resistance, and commitments to col-

lective organizing and the coordination across

different forms of domination, may be lost

(Pile and Keith, 1997).

Second, resistant subjects were understood

as authoring their politicalidentitiesin rela-

tion to multiple axes ofpower, and dominant

structures, discourses and actors within soci-

ety (Castells, 1997). Identity formation is

thus complex in terms of both the multiplici-

ties of identities negotiated by each indivi-

dual and thehybridityof resultant resistance

practices (seethird space; Pile and Keith,

1997). Concerns with the latter have been

influenced by Foucault’s (1990 [1976]) version

ofpost-structuralism, which views power as

insinuated throughout all social activity, inher-

ent in practically all social and political relation-

ships. The operations of power, domination

and resistance are seen as integrally rolled up

in articulations of society andspace, resulting

in the entanglement of resisting and dominat-

ing practices; for example, through the creation

of internal hierarchies, the silencing of dissent,

or how various forces ofhegemonyare intern-

alized and reproduced within resistance prac-

tices (Sharp et al., 2000).

With the intensity of the processes ofneo-

liberal globalization, concerns over the

ways in which the production ofscaleis itself

an outcome of political struggle (Smith, 1993)

are now turning to networked forms of politics

and resistance (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994;

Featherstone, 2003, 2005b; Routledge 2003;

Massey, 2004). This challenges the way in

which resistance has been previously theorized

through bounded versions of space andplace,

and is crucial for engaging with the dynamic

transnational networks of opposition to glob-

alization (see anti-globalization; trans-

nationalism). pr

resort life-cycle model Originally devel-

oped by Butler (1980) (see figure), the tourist

resort life-cyclemodeldepicts an almost inev-

itable pattern of development in five phases.

First, there is a phase ofexplorationcharacter-

ized by small numbers of relatively wealthy

tourists ‘finding’ the destination. Second,

local capital and populations becomeinvolved

in developing the resort. Third, there isdevel-

opment as agglomeration effects lead to

increasing returns. Thus as visitor and busi-

ness numbers increase, the knowledge and

skill base expands. More visitors mean more

capital, which means more investment in

facilities and accessibility, which makes the

destination more attractive, and so on. This

develops into a fourth phase ofconsolidation,

where competition among increasing numbers

of providers to gain large volumes of tourists

Stagnation

Consolidation Decline

Rejuvenation

Development

Involvement

Time

Number of tourists

Exploration

resort life-cycle model (from Butler, 1980)

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 647 2.4.2009 9:12pm

RESORT LIFE-CYCLE MODEL