Empowerment and resident attitudes toward tourism: Strengthening the theoretical foundation through a Weberian lens

• Weber’s theory of rationality used to address critiques of social exchange theory.
• Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) used as substantive antecedent.
• Psychological empowerment has a direct and positive impact on support for tourism.
• All dimensions of empowerment influence resident perceptions of tourism impacts.
• Personal benefit from tourism scale adapted to personal ‘economic’ benefit.

This study expands Perdue, Long, and Allen’s (1990) original model of resident attitudes toward tourism in two significant ways. It first proposes Weber’s theory of formal and substantive rationality (WFSR) as a way to strengthen social exchange theory. Secondly, WFSR is operationalized by using the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) as substantive antecedents and the Personal Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale as a formal antecedent influencing resident attitudes. Ten of 14 hypotheses were confirmed, with Psychological Empowerment and Personal Economic Benefit having direct and positive effects on Support for Tourism. Implications include recognition of the importance of tailoring destination marketing and management efforts to empower residents psychologically, socially, and politically.