This article reviews the development of motivational theories underpinning the study of tourism and discusses the limitations of such an approach. The actor–network theory is used to show how beliefs, politics, laws, government agencies, and pressure groups in China interact to create outbound tourism as a new way of ordering. The analysis highlights how a hitherto nontraveling culture suddenly becomes a traveling culture and how outbound tourism has been accommodated, justified, institutionalized, and allowed to flourish in China. Tourism is analyzed as a social phenomenon concerning a complex interaction of heterogeneous objects in the formation of a dynamic network and ordering of human and non-human objects.
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Tony S. M. Tse (2011) studied this question.