Power-knowledge and tour-guide training: Capitalistic domination, utopian visions and the creation and negotiation of UNESCO’s Homo Turismos in Macao

• Uncovers the formation and workings of power-knowledge in tour guiding.
• Identifies the capitalistic and utopian underpinnings of tour guide training.
• Examines the consequent subject-position, the homo turismos, shaped and wrought.

This paper offers insights into the power-knowledge situations within tour guide training in Macao and queries the associated embedded capitalistic domination and utopian pressures. Drawing upon a tour guide trainer’s autoethnography, ethnography within the classroom, life and work history interviews with tour guides, and critical discourse analysis of key training materials, it is observed that tour guide training in Macao encouraged capital-induced normalization processes relating to categorising and moulding malleable workers for the dominant and dominating tourism industry. UNESCO-endorsed training materials and their projections of utopian visions are found to promote a new ‘breed’ of self-regulating specialist tour guides the authors termed, the homo turismos.