Scott McCabe is Professor of Marketing at the Birmingham Business School, since April 2023. He becomes head of the Marketing Department in September 2023. Prior to joining Birmingham, Scott worked at Nottingham University Business School for sixteen years, serving in a variety of management roles, including as Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange for four years.
Scott is an internationally renowned scholar in tourism studies from a marketing perspective, with almost 30 years of experience in teaching and research positions.
He has been a visiting Lecturer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Universite d’Angers, France; NHTV Breda in the Netherlands and since 2018, he has held a part time role as Professor of Tourism Marketing/Management at the University of Eastern Finland, Business School at the Joensuu campus in Karelia.
Scott’s research focuses on the qualities of tourist experience and how people relates their experiences in social interaction, consumer behaviour and tourist decision-making. He is interested in how consumers engage in being tourists both in the real and virtual worlds (via photographs, blogs and social media for example). Scott has been interested in sustainability from a consumer perspective for many years, his work has engaged debates in pro-social and pro-environmental tourist consumption, as well as responsible and ethical consumer behaviour.
Since 2006, he has been working on a programme of research on the motivations, experiences and outcomes of holiday experiences for severely disadvantaged UK consumers. Working with a range of small and large charities, his research has helped to promote the concept of ‘social tourism’ in the UK, influencing policy and practice, raising awareness and establishing a link between holidays and subjective wellbeing outcomes. He has worked alongside European colleagues to promote social tourism internationally and within the academy. His research in this field led to an impact case study being submitted to the REF 2014.
Scott has undertaken a wide range of externally funded research, including being a co-investigator on E.U. projects, a UKRI/ESRC funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the Family Holiday Association, and for consultancy companies and the East Midland Development Agency.
He has published extensively in the tourism field, with one textbook, five co-edited volumes, around 80 scholarly research articles, a total of almost 150 outputs. This research work has been widely cited.
Scott was an elected fellow of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism in 2019 and elected as a member of the ‘Tourism Research Centre’ in 2023. He has served as Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 50 on International Tourism from 2014-2023 and has become co-Chair of the SIG in Tourism Marketing for the Academy of Marketing in 2023.
He is also the current Editor in Chief (alongside Professor Sara Dolnicar, University of Queensland) of Annals of Tourism Research and sits on the board of a number of other journals. He was previously an Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Research from 2016-2018.
Scott has supervised over 20 PGRs to successful completion and has acted as an external examiner for around the same number of PhD candidates. He has served as an external examiner for MSc programmes in Tourism and Hospitality at numerous UK institutions between 1999 and 2019.