简介
Michael is currently Dean's Chair in Marketing, Sustainability and Society, School of Management and Marketing – Te Kāhui Kahurangi, Massey University Business School Te Kura Whai Pakihi; Visiting Professor and Docent in Geography, University of Oulu, Finland; Adjunct Professor at Sunway University, Malaysia; and a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism, University of Johannesburg. Since 2026 he has been based as a Dean's Chair in the Massey Business School, Te Kura Whai Pakihi at the Massey Auckland campus at Albany, returning to the University where he first worked when he came to New Zealand. He is also a frequent visitor to the geography department at Umeå University, the Service Studies department at Lund Helsingborg, and the Department of Marketing and Tourism, School of Business and Economics, Linneaus University, Kalmar; Prior positions in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere include Professor in Tourism at the University of Otago where he was also head of department for six years; Professor in the Department of Management, Marketing and Tourism at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand; Professor of Tourism and Service Management at Victoria University of Wellington; Guest Professor in the Department of Service Studies at Lund University Helsingborg campus, Sweden; Visiting Professor at Linnaeus University; Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Visiting Professor, Centre for Tourism Studies, University of Eastern Finland; Adjunct Professor, Taylor's University, Malaysia; Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, South Korea; and Honorary Professor in the Department of Marketing, Stirling University, Scotland. As well as positions of head of department or programme at various universities he has also twice held the position of faculty or school research director.
His doctorate is in geography from the University of Western Australia (UWA) with a thesis on wilderness and international heritage agreements in Australia. He also received an honours degree in politics from UWA with a thesis on water resource management of the Peel Inlet. His masters is from the faculty of environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in geography/resource management with a thesis on hydroelectricity and wilderness policy in Tasmania. For those interested in ancient history his schooling was from Honinton House (UK), Victoria Park Primary, and Guildford Grammar (WA). He has honorary doctorates from the Universities of Umeå in Sweden (2008), Oulu in Finland (2012) and Lund University, Sweden (2016) and in 2024 became a member of the urban tourism research hall of fame of the International Tourism Studies Association and the International Journal of Tourism Cities. He is a member of numerous editorial boards and, most notably, is Co-Editor of Current Issues in Tourism and Field Editor of Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism. According to Google Scholar analysis for the category of tourism he is currently the most cited scholar in the subject area and is also highly cited in geography, regional development, sustainability and global environmental change, while the Elsevier science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators also rank him as the most cited scholar in the sports, leisure, tourism field and among the top 1000 most cited scholars in the world in all subjects. The 2025 P-ranking of the ABDC list found him ranked fourth in the world on the basis of this business school journal list. In 2009 he was named the Elsevier ScienceDirect ‘For Great Thinking’, Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences category winner.
