Assessing the ‘poverty of cruise theory’ hypothesis

The field of tourism has been described as pre-paradigmatic and multidisciplinary. The acclaimed ‘poverty of tourism theory’ is attributed to the fragmentation, managerialism and lack of unifying theoretical perspectives characterising empirical research. Constituting a sub-category of tourism, cruise research is presumably subject to similar criticism. The niche character of the cruise sector implies a limited amount of domain-specific research, possibly exacerbating the relevance and intensity of those issues. Mainstream bibliographic databases were systematically queried, resulting to a collection of 145 cruise-related academic publications published between 1983 and 2009. The identified publications were analysed in terms of their content and meta-data. Apart from providing a comprehensive analysis of cruise research, the validity and relevance of the posed hypothesis are also challenged.

Research highlights
► Cruise-related publications are increasing exponentially.
► Cruise research appears to follow the social science tradition of tourism.
► Managerial and business aspects of cruise operating are under-researched.
► Cruise research is at an early stage of development and is relatively fragmented.
► Involving researcher communities in a systematic review significantly improves reliability and completeness.