Movers and shakers: chaos makers in tourism development

Abstract Like most of their counterparts in other social sciences, tourism researchers have traditionally focused on aspects of tourism phenomena that exhibit order, linearity and equilibrium, while eschewing situations where disorder, non-linearity and disequilibrium are more apparent. Although constructs such as the Destination Life Cycle Model demonstrate the heuristic value of this approach, it results in aspects of tourism development that are intrinsically chaotic, being overlooked. Thus, for instance, the fundamental role of entrepreneurs in destination development has received scant attention, largely because their behaviour is not readily understood in terms of the conventional analytical framework. This paper argues that the Chaos/Complexity perspective provides a potentially useful alternative framework for providing insights into the underlying dynamics of tourism development and a case study involving the examination of entrepreneurial activity on the Gold Coast in Australia is used for illustrative purposes. In this context, chaos is presented as essentially a creative process and entrepreneurs play a primary role both as chaos-makers and as initiators of adaptive responses to chaos induced by external events.