Editorial

Abstract

After some 25 years of editing Tourism Management, and after launching Tourism Management Perspectives, some readers might well askwhy a third journal? To which there are both personal and wider academic answers. First the personal reasons. Editing the first two journals was consuming more of my time, and eventually, despite passing the editorship of the latter journal to Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore, it was proving too much for me when my own class numbers were growing substantially and with two growing research units to care for. Not to mention complaints from family members, as yet another weekend was spent in front of a laptop. Yet, editing a journal is a wonderful way to keep abreast of changing concerns and research techniquesand is a series of continuing lessons as to how to be a better researcher. So, when Beijing Union University offered me an opportunity to launch what I describe as a "boutique journal" I was very happy to take on this new challenge.Sois this simply a "vanity project"? What are the wider academic reasons for yet another journal? In January 2019, in conversation with Mike Hall of Canterbury University, I admitted to a sense of disillusionment with many of the papers being submitted to Tourism Management and to the trend of asking what were, to my mind, relatively banal research questions, but analysed with growing technical sophistication. Those concerns are expressed by the very title of this journal, Tourism Critiques: Practice and Theory. Any review of the papers that attracts the most citations in many journals indicates that they are reviews of issues, criticisms and techniques and are contributions to the philosophies that underlie subjects, policies and research methodologies and trends. Equally, many of the more lively debates on media such as Trinet are about values, philosophies and political differences. By its very nature, tourism research is often strongly contextualised within a place and a time and it is not uncommon for research directed at visitation patterns and impacts to concentrate on specifics and not on the flow of processes that led to the specific situation being analysed. This is not to decry any analysis of the specific, for together such articles contribute to an analysis of the aggregate from which it may be possible to generalise or draw more insights, but those latter insights need to be voiced and distributed. The distribution of research findings itself has also been an issue which has come to a head with the Plan S initiative. This journal is wholly Plan S compliant. That is, authors do not pay for publication and fully retain the copyright and thus can make their papers open access through such Webbased sources as ResearchGate, Academia and others. The costs are born by the sponsors of the journals, but the authors also gain from the greater visibility of being published by one of the world's major academic publishing houses, namely, Emerald Publishing.The focus of the journal and its remit is not simply the reporting of empirical research, but the publicati...