Conclusion
The CPE approach to urban heritage tourism developed in this paper responds to calls made by some researchers for tourism studies to integrate cultural and political economy perspectives (Bramwell & Lane, 2014). Thus, Bianchi (2009, p. 493) argues for more tourism research involving “a sustained analysis of the articulations between structural forces, discourse and agency”. Wearing and Foley (2017, p. 100) also assert that more work is needed on tourist experiences in cities that “critically examines interrelations between the material and ideational and also between representations and structural processes embedded in contemporary capitalism”. CPE potentially can provide a bridge between what may be seen as sometimes unhelpfully divided social science perspectives.
The CPE approach to interpreting heritage tourism in urban contexts adopted here was based on a relational view of the interconnectedness embedded within societal relations, including the position that the cultural/semiotic and the economic/political are co-constitutive of those relations. While analysis of relationships involved in urban heritage tourism may begin with either the cultural/semiotic or economic/political dimensions, the task must take seriously a return to consider the other dimensions and their inter-connections. The CPE approach focused on bringing together the agency and structural processes involved in heritage tourism because they are inter-connected and co-evolve. The dynamic interplay between agency and structure is considered to take place in the context of society’s multiple interdependencies and tensions. From this perspective, urban heritage tourism involves interwoven agency-structure and cultural/semiotic and economic/political relationships. The relationships discussed here were those around production and consumption, meanings and representations, power and governance, and commodification, including actors’ reactions to them.
Future research on urban heritage tourism, and tourism more generally, could draw on ideas and interpretations offered by other researchers in order to extend the core ideas behind a CPE “framing”. Inter-connected structure-agency relations, for example, could be assessed using Giddens’ (1984) structuration notion, Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic approach, or Long’s (2001) emphasis on documenting from below every-day micro-situations as situated social practices.
