Model, tourism

An abstract model is commonly defined as a simplified representation of a system which would be otherwise hard to visualize and directly observe, mainly due to its complexity and/or large scale. Such a model depicts the form and the flow of relationships between and among concepts, elements, or even other systems. Synonyms include framework, construct, simulation, paradigm, theory, archetype, prototype, and blueprint.

The construction of abstract models has historical antecedents, most notably in mathematics, information systems, operations management research, and decision sciences. The increase of interdisciplinarity in the 1960s, pioneered by the father of cybernetics Gregory Bateson, opened the way for a revolution in soft system modeling within social sciences through the departure from the linear track of reasoning (Ivanovas 2007). Model construction was introduced in tourism epistemology in the 1980s. Jafari’s seminal tourist model (1987) leads to the developmentof an expanded...