Miami Geographer Investigates Tourism and Sustainability

Miami geographer and visiting assistant professor, Paul Kingsbury, recently completed a dissertation at the University of Kentucky entitled, "Transforming Corporate Tourism: Sandals Resorts International in Jamaica and the Politics of Enjoyment." Kingsbury's dissertation analyzes one of the most recent and important transformations in international tourism - the adoption and adaptation of alternative tourism policies and practices by conventional mass tourism corporations.

In 1998, Sandals (the largest all-inclusive corporation in the Caribbean) transformed its Negril facility in Jamaica by creating environmental-sustainable programs that mimic those of alternative developments. In so doing, Sandals Negril became the first all-inclusive hotel in the world to be certified to the Green Globe 21 Standard for its environmental policies and management.

The dissertation involves an organizational ethnography to investigate not only the difficulties a traditional mass tourism corporation faces in implementing policies of sustainability, but also the corporate rationale lying behind such transformations.

Kingsbury's dissertation examines the decisions behind Sandals Resorts' move to "mass ecotourism," and investigates how the corporation develops, implements, and evaluates programs of sustainability. Kingsbury's research also uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the ways in which various kinds of enjoyment are implicated in the production of economic, cultural, and environmentally sustainable spaces for tourists, managers, employees, and local residents. In thinking through a "politics of enjoyment," Kingsbury applies the most recent critical theoretical approaches in cultural geography and uses them to further environmental and tourism geography studies.

The dissertation contributes a much-needed corporate case study to the literature on tourism development in less developed countries. Kingsbury's research on the tourism and sustainable geographies of the most successful tourism corporation in the Caribbean was funded by a three-year fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.