The purpose of this paper is to reflect on advances in tourism research and related accountability issues for tourism economics and management. In particular, the paper focuses on a range fo theoretical paradigms that may inform research in the areas of tourism economics and management in a twenty -first century environment. The thesis of this paper, is that research in tourism economics and management has been predicated to western-based epistemologies as well as a positivistic and postpostivistic hegemony and that such epistemologies and hegemony no longer represent an accountable tourism research agenda in a twenty-first century world of flux and unpredictability.