As mentioned above, the course has a twofold objective: on the one hand it intends to show what the main practices of communicative interaction among people consist of and how they constitute the basic material of which societies are made; on the other hand, it wants to show students, also through concrete cases, how these communicative dynamics take form within the practices of communication typical of the tourism industry.
To this purpose, the course will introduce some of the classics of sociology that have formulated the vocabulary and concepts that are used to critically analyse the phenomena of social and communicative interaction nowadays. Then, some of the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the empirical analysis of practices of communicative interaction will be illustrated. In particular, the first part of the course will address the following topics: communication as a social relationship; the structure of the communicative relationship; the communicative process; the functions of communication; the forms of communication; the reason beyond the success/the failure of communication.
The second part of the course is dedicated to the sociological study of tourism. The lessons will reconstruct the experience of the journey from its origins to its postmodern evolution, analyzing the different forms of tourism up to the affirmation of the so-called new "tourism" (sustainable tourism, responsible, identity, and experiential). Travel and tourism will also be analyzed in their communication dynamics, tourism has indeed been one of those sectors in which the effect of digital communication technologies has been profound, anticipating the evolution of the market dynamics that the internet has generated. We will investigate how the network, through blogs, social networks and mobile applications, has changed the behavior of tourists.