Resumo

BEZERRA, Éder Danilo; CONCEICAO MELO SILVA LUFT, Maria  e  ROCHA DACORSO, Antonio Luiz. Tourism in Information Society. A Conceptual Approach on the "Post-tourism". Estud. perspect. tur. [online]. 2012, vol.21, n.5, pp.1262-1280. ISSN 1851-1732.

The goal of this theoretical essay is to raise the debate about the post-tourism, a concept coined by Molina (2004), which refers to the new conceptions and challenges for tourism in the present moment and in the future and born by the transformations which changed the activity over time, lined with the post-modernist thinking that arose as a response to the globalization process and the ever-growing immersion of technology in society and organizations. The research focus is directed at the changes brought to tourism by the Information and communications technology - ICTs, building a bridge between the human factor and the technological factor of the activity which seem to converge because of innovations caused by the high technology. In this sense, the emergence of a new paradigm and the break with old rules in tourism is linked with the rise of the information society, both as a concept and as an ideology. Therefore, a theoretical study about the dynamics of innovation and the usage of ICT in tourism is needed, especially when it comes to the organizational change and work's reconfiguration in such sector. Thus, this article presents a reflective analysis about post-tourism and the role of technology and innovation in tourism, and for that purpose presents the classical model of the dynamics of innovation postulated by Utterback and Abernathy (1975), adapted by the authors of this paper in order to elucidate the historical evolution of tourism under the prism of innovation.

Palavras-chave : Post-tourism; Information society; Innovation; Technology.