Social embeddedness and its benefits for cooperation in a tourism destination

Abstract

According to the concept of social embeddedness, economic decisions are affected by the social networks in which economic actors operate. One such decision relates to business cooperation. The benefits of social embeddedness have not been presented with regard to entrepreneurs in tourism destinations, especially in relation to decisions on cooperation. The aim of the paper is to identify and characterize the benefits of tourist entrepreneurs' social embeddedness for establishing economic cooperation, as well as the development and effects of such cooperation. This aim is achieved on the basis of semi-structured interviews conducted among 48 tourist entrepreneurs – members of the Wisła Tourism Organization operating in Wisła – a popular tourist destination in Poland. The identified benefits include: access to resources, flexibility of activities, shaping partners' common identity, reducing transaction costs, generating positive ‘domino effects’ in the destination, elimination of dishonest partners, limiting inappropriate market behavior, and easier knowledge acquisition and transfer.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 109 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.