Social and discursive identity of the tourist: its construction through the offer of abstract values

Abstract

This article examines how hotel webpages commodify abstract symbolic values, and how this representation affects the discursive construction of the tourist as a social actor. To this end, a qualitative analysis is applied, following the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically Fairclough’s (2002) socio-cultural approach that relies on Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system. One would tend to think that hotels mostly offer material values. This is why it is of special interest to consider the commodification of the abstract precisely in this context: the mental representation of what counts as pleasurable and desirable for the tourist, of what they are being offered as consumers, reveals itself as an open concept, not as a delimited one. A corpus of 189 samples of hotel webpages in English was analyzed, covering four and five star hotels. The results confirm that the offer of the abstract and its semiotics is linked to the touristic category to which it belongs. They also point at an interesting dialectic between the discursive construction of the hotel and its consequent discursive construction of the tourist as a social actor. This study offers insights into the discursive, methodological and socio-cultural nature of the study of identity in the context of tourism.