The Tourist Gaze, by John Urry

First published in 1990 and republished twice, The Tourist Gaze, by sociologist John Urry, is one of the major works on tourism. In this book, John Urry argues that the centrality of the visual in contemporary culture is mirrored in tourism, and that our desires to visit places and the ways we learn to visually appreciate those places are not merely individual and autonomous but are in fact socially organised. Therefore, changes in tourism are necessarily related to wider transformations in society. Particularly relevant is the changing landscape of class, as not every social group has the same symbolic power to define legitimate forms of tourism.