Paper info

Interpartner legitimacy in a regional strategic network in tourism

Anna Emmoth, Sabine Gebert Persson and Heléne Lundberg

The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

Network interaction by non-business actors for business purposes is receiving increased interest within research (cf. Hadjikhani and Ghauri, 2001) but much remain to further research. A typical example of such network interaction that still is little researched is collaboration in tourism destination networks. The purposes of this paper are to contribute to research on the formation and evolution of relationships within the tourism industry, and to test the interpartner legitimacy effect on network formation and development. The chosen method is a case study of a Swedish network formation initiative. Faced with the situation that their region was lagging behind other Swedish regions in the development of tourism, actors within the Dalarna region were spurred to form a Regional Strategic Network (RSN). Its central purposes were to consolidate the regional tourism industry, to strengthen the name of the region as a brand and to establish the entire region as a single destination. This paper contributes by showing how different types of interpartner legitimacies hinder and facilitate the network formation process.