A realist investigation of mechanisms in tourist experience: a case of outbound Chinese tourists to the UK

Tong, G (2026) A realist investigation of mechanisms in tourist experience: a case of outbound Chinese tourists to the UK. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University. doi: 10.17870/bathspa.00017609

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Abstract

Research on tourist experience, as a social phenomenon, has not had a consensus to explain the process of its generation. The existing literature has mostly focused on the influential factors on the tourist experience, whilst rarely explained how these factors operate the process/mechanism of its manifestation. This study aims to provide an explanatory account on how the leisure tourist experience emerges from tourists and their surroundings through a critical realist lens. It was achieved by applying Archer's Realist Social Theory (RST) as the underlying theory-laden to unpack the interplays between the external (tourism system or structure) and the internal (tourists or agency) factors. This theory argues that social phenomena, i.e. the tourist experience, can be analysed in three domains - structure, agency, and culture (SAC), and along three phases - structural conditioning, sociocultural interactions, and structure elaboration. From a realist perspective, the world is an open system; events and discourses are irreducible to present individuals and collectives. Thus, identifying the processes or mechanisms is key to help researchers understand how social reality is brought about. Based on the conceptual nature of the tourist experience, the research focuses on Chinese tourists (from mainland China) to the United Kingdom as a destination and British culture conveyed through the concept of the destination image. Thirty individual interviews were conducted to reveal the underlying causes of lived experiences of the tourists. Secondary data was also collected to understand how British destinations are portrayed to Chinese tourists. It used an intensive approach along with abduction, retroduction and retrodiction inferences to discover the mechanisms/processes of the emergence of the tourist experience. The findings indicated several properties from three domains, i.e. economical structural enablers and socio-political prohibitors in the structural domain; cultural differences and sociocultural patterns in the cultural domain; cognition, emotions, reflexivity and identity in the agency domain. Structural and cultural properties allow/prohibit agents' actions, while agents/tourists act back and update their cognitions based on reflexivity, emotions and identity, that reshape social structures through sharing activities after the trip. Within the agency properties, emotions and identity/ties are attached to agents' reflexivity, which altogether generate the tourist experience. Furthermore, it elicited how properties at three domains interplay with each other. Theoretically, this study contributed new insight from Critical Realism (CR) to unpack some of the causes of the tourist experience. Archer's realist social theory and the morphogenesis approach (M/M) offered a new feasible time frame to investigate the process of the tourist experience at different stages, i.e. before, during and post trip. Moreover, the methodological contribution applied new methods by bridging two fields of study, i.e. tourism and CR. It introduces the intensive approach from CR to the tourism sector, along with the retroduction and retrodiction inferences to investigate the social reality. Therefore, this study has enhanced the understanding of the emergence of tourist experience.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	tourist experience emergence, critical realism, Realist Social Theory, morphogenesis/morphogenetic approach, structure-agency-culture (SAC) framework, reflexivity, identity
Divisions:	Bath Business School
Date Deposited:	02 Mar 2026 10:53
Last Modified:	02 Mar 2026 11:14
URN:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17609

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