Transforming corporate mass tourism: Sandals Resorts International in Jamaica and the politics of enjoyment

Through a comprehensive analysis of Sandals Resorts International, headquartered in Jamaica, this dissertation analyzes one of the most recent and important transformations in international tourism—the adoption and adaptation of alternative tourism policies and practices by conventional mass tourism corporations. Sandals is the largest and most successful all-inclusive mass tourism corporation operating in the Caribbean. In 1998, Sandals' Negril facility (Sandals Negril Beach Resort and Spa) became the first all-inclusive hotel in the world to be certified to the Green Globe 21 Standard for its environmental policies and management. This dissertation investigates Sandals Negril's economic, cultural, and environmental programs and practices to understand not only the difficulties a traditional mass tourism corporation faces in implementing policies of sustainability, but also the corporate rationale lying behind such transformations. Theoretically and methodologically, this dissertation fits within a critical research agenda that moves beyond impact studies and the modeling of tourism flows. This study is unique, however, because it provides the most comprehensive and rigorous utilization of critical psychoanalytic theory in tourism studies to date. The dissertation seeks to initiate a belated dialogue between critical tourism research and psychoanalytic approaches in geography and social theory. Critical approaches to Third World tourism development are united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as merely “innocent” enjoyment. Researchers have assumed, however, that enjoyment is a straightforward, homogenous, peripheral, and psychologically bound phenomena. A major thesis of this dissertation is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently critical. Psychoanalysis provides a highly spatial, rigorous, and critical theoretical framework that dialectically investigates (inter)subjective, material, symbolic, sexual, and politico-ethical civilities of desire, love, and pleasure alongside the discontentment of inhibition, anxiety, and subjugation. In formulating a “politics of enjoyment” this study primarily draws on the theoretical literature associated with Jacques Lacan because it currently offers the most comprehensive and critically incisive psychoanalytic approach available to interrogate the complexities of tourism, enjoyment, and power.