Abstract
Many tourism-based community development studies have been published in recent years. The mainstream tourism-based community development studies focus on showing successful examples of tourism-based community development and creating practical manuals for success. In the process, communities where tourism-based community development is practiced have been regarded as passive and static, and so power and its manifestation, conflict have been paid little attention. However, in reality, communities are multi-faceted and dynamic, and power is manifested in various ways in tourism-based community development.
In this paper, I summarize the power concept discussed in the sociology of tourism and the anthropology of tourism to show that they are not made use of in the tourism-based community development studies. Then, I suggest five areas in tourism-based community development studies, in which the introduction of the concept of power is necessary. They are: power embedded in tourism as a consumption industry of culture-information, power involved in local tourism resources, power in gender, state power, and community power structure. In addition, I examine how to deepen our understanding of tourism-based community development using the theories of community power structure and the critical theories of power, which are considered to be useful in the analysis of power in community.
