Pergamon PII: S0261-5177(97)00112-X Tourism Management, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 185-187, 1998 © 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0261-5177/98 $19.0(I + 0.0() Book Reviews Tourism - How Effective Manage- ment Makes the Difference Roger Doswell Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford (1997) x+319 pp £16.99 softcover. ISBN 0750622725 There are currently few texts available which attempt to explain how the public sector, internationaly, should be involved in managing tourism and its impacts; the organizing framework for this book is based on the perspective of the GTA - Government Tourism Administration. Doswell outlines his preference for this term over that of NTO (National Tourism Organiza- tion) though he does not comment on why NTA (National Tourism Admini- stration) is unsuitable. The reasons may be implicit in comments on pages 93 and 95, i.e. a GTA involves national, regional, area and municipal levels and covers all branches of government. Nonetheless, is another acronym in the industry necessary? Whilst the preface outlines the rationale for the perspective, the back cover does not indicate this; it is important since the reader dipping into only one or two chapters may wonder at the paucity of examples. For example, Chapter 4 'The Travel Trade' gives no examples of well- known companies in the industry yet refers to Mercedes, Rolex, Ford and Nikon. The explanation cannot be one of appealing to a range of national markets and, therefore, avoidance of British companies; in any event, tour operators such as Airtours and Thomson are international. Vertical integration is given a paragraph here though, arguably, other forms and diversification have an input to the background. There are fifteen chapters equally divided into Part One - 'The Background to Tourism Manage- ment', Part Two - 'Tourism's Impacts and Other Management Criteria' and Part Three - 'Planning and Manage- ment Strategies'. The final chapter in Part One is titled 'Government tourism administration'. This is where examples of named GTAs should be - if only to identify those with similar features and those which differ markedly in some way. Does FONATUR' function in the same way as Maison de la France? This is salient since Doswell comments that 'depending on the part of the world, public administration deficiencies tend to be of the following types ... patronage ... Government jobs may be exchanged for political support or favours' (p. 88). The following section refers to malpractice by government officials - with the only example given being the 1993 UK Audit Commission survey which revealed 54 cases of fraud regarding the award of contracts and granting of planning permission. Later, in the same chapter, QUANGOs are mentioned but with no examples of British ones let alone those overseas. This emphasis on examples is significant since students usually associate specific organizations by categorizing them; the omission of examples - good or bad - suggests an abstract approach, making the text drier than it need be. The last two pages of Part One identify a range of intergovernmental bodies. 'Tourism and the economy', the first chapter in Part Two, comprises 19 pages and discusses a range of concepts from national development plans to multipliers and what they measure; data for the latter is drawn from Archer and Fletcher (1990). 2 Examples of locations pepper the chapter on tourism and the environ- ment though, given the existing litera- ture, the types of carrying capacity could be identified - especially, if effective management is to make a difference, the potentially very different figures for physical, ecological and perceptual capacity on the same site should be noted. The European Union's environmental management standards are referred to later in this chapter. The remaining chapters in Part Two cover sociocul- tural effects, development issues ('bold GTA intervention can change the product markedly', p. 165, would benefit from examples), and planning and management. Part Three - Planning and Manage- ment Strategies - is indeed, compre- hensive - incorporating various lists; for example, what should be included in a GTA management information system. Given that the Caribbean is mentioned in the text, reference to the 1993-1996 EU-funded Tourism Development Programme could be made to illustrate both the market development and area tourism development aspects - of which post- employment education (p. 279) was a key feature. 'Managing public aware- ness programmes' is an apposite final chapter with many sound proposals; the use of host programmes, tourist newspapers and local community action groups are outlined. The biblio- graphy lists 106 works: the predictable but also authors such as Edward Said (Orientalism) and Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures). In the final analysis, this book will be put on the reading list for a second-year under-graduate module entitled Tourism Planning and Management since it provides a more detailed assessment of National Tourism Administration roles than Vellas and Becberel (1995)? Given the author's background, it is surprising that much more detail for both good and bad examples of GTAs is not given - this would illuminate 185