Specialized literature does not provide a unanimously accepted definition of the term “tourism”. Regardless of the differences of approach and definition techniques, all definitions are generally based on the need for recreation and achievement of physical and emotional comfort, which are the driving forces for development and execution of various activities to meet those needs. Another approach used to clarify the essence of the term “tourism” allows not only for its social role, but also the economic logic for the development and the management of tourism as an economic activity. This approach, clarifying the essence of the term “tourism” from an economic point of view, allows for the creation of a number of hierarchically related concepts.

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the evolution that Tourism Research has undergone in Spain in the last few years as well as its present situation, on the basis of four different variables: (i) the PhD dissertations carried out in the last ten years; (ii) the papers published in any ISI source during the last five years; (iii) the scientific journals on Tourism edited in Spain; (iv) and finally, the active research groups, centres and networks concerned with Tourism that exist in the country at the moment. In general terms, it will be shown that, despite becoming more and more multidisciplinary and a subject mater of interest for a larger number of higher education institutions, the research carried out on Tourism in Spain seems to be still restricted to very few fields of knowledge, universities and regions.

The study of rural tourism has been addressed from different perspectives, such as geography, sociology, psychology, economics, business management, tourism marketing, etc. This positions it as a multidisciplinary research field of great interest which is growing in strategic importance. However it requires appropriate tools to improve its performance and become more professional. The level of interest it now produces is palpable in the quantitative increase in the attention devoted to it in the scientific literature over recent years. Nevertheless there is a need to improve the quality of this research effort, especially in fields related to economics and the management of businesses and even more so with regard to issues related to marketing, all of which would contribute to a better understanding of issues such as the planning, management and marketing of these destinations and businesses. This paper is an analysis of rural tourism as an area of scientific research that aims to classify the most relevant topics in the field, with particular reference to those that focus on marketing and market research. Its main contribution is a proposal of a research agenda for the coming years.

Building on a recent co-edited work (Dann and Liebman Parrinello, 2009), this account seeks to demonstrate that tourism studies as a field has been unjustifiably dominated by English speakers. The point is illustrated firstly in terms of its four major theories that claim to have their origin in the Anglophone world of the 70s in spite of the realisation that they had their antecedents in Continental Europe of the 30s. Objective statistical measures from the electronic files of the Centre International de Recherches et d’Études Touristiques (International Centre for Tourism Studies and Research) (CIRET) are then provided in order to reconfirm this linguistic dominance. These include recent data that relate to researchers, research centres, book publishers and journals. Finally a brief complementary analysis is undertaken of the subjective dimensión of such hegemony by examining the phenomenon of self-reflexivity in a number of leading tourism scholars.