Editorial: A Reflection on the Work and Legacy of Professor David Harrison (1941–2021)

Bianchi, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0998-9025, Sharpley, R and Andrews, H (2022) Editorial: A Reflection on the Work and Legacy of Professor David Harrison (1941–2021). Tourism Planning and Development, 19 (1). pp. 75-80. ISSN 2156-8324

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Abstract

David Harrison was a major intellectual figure in tourism studies whose work as a scholar, writer and educator made an enormous contribution to the sociology and anthropology of tourism and the political economy of tourism development. His legacy of published work is brought together in his final book, published only this year (Harrison, 2021). His was an unconventional career path compared to many of his academic contemporaries. Aged 16, David left school to work as a bank clerk, then as an HM Customs officer and finally as a teacher in a boys’ secondary school in a working class, increasingly diverse borough in West London that was beginning to experience mass immigration from south Asia. These early working experiences undoubtedly helped to shape both his undogmatic intellectual outlook and commitment to giving voice to the people who experience and enact tourism in everyday life, typically through ethnographic fieldwork.