Strategic Alliances in the Tourism Industry
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Federation ResearchOnline Harambe: Strategic alliance formation and performance evaluation in the tourism sector of travel Jaloni Pansiri BA (University of Botswana, Botswana) MA (University of Essex, United Kingdom) This thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Business University of Ballarat PO Box 663 University Drive, Mount Helen Ballarat, Victoria 3353 Australia Submitted in October 2006 Abstract This thesis investigates the influence of company and executive characteristics on strategic alliance formation (decision to form alliances, alliance type selection and choice of alliance partners) and performance evaluation of alliances, in the Australian tourism industry sector of travel. The significance of forming strategic alliances as a way of achieving harambe is emphasised throughout this thesis. Harambe is a ki-Swahili term meaning “to pull together, or to work together or to pull the same rope together at the same time” in harmony (Murove, 2005). The idea here is that companies pool their resources together through strategic alliances to be able to achieve their strategic goals and objectives. The research focuses on three travel sub-sectors – travel agencies, tour operators and wholesalers and how these sub-sectors relate with those of transport and accommodation. A behavioural framework for investigating strategic alliances was developed. This framework provides a unique approach to assessing both executive characteristics (see upper echelon studies) and company characteristics (see organisational studies) in one integrated model of tourism strategic alliances. The pragmatist research program adopted for the empirical research allows for s triangulation of results that enables a depth of theoretical understanding not currently available in the tourism literature. A survey of Australian travel sector businesses was undertaken followed by interviews with six executives. The results indicate high level of interaction through alliances between the three sub-sectors and the two sectors of accommodation and transport in the Australian tourism industry. Company and executives’ characteristics were found to be influential in taking strategic decisions of whether to form alliances or not, choice of strategic alliance types, choice of alliance partners and alliance evaluation. However, company characteristics were found to be more influential than executive characteristics. This marks the difference between this study and other upper echelon studies, which have found executives characteristics as fundamental in the adoption of organisational strategy. Choice of alliance partners was also found to be influential in executives’ assessments of alliance performance. ii Statement of Authorship Except where explicit reference is made in the text of the thesis, this thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree or diploma. No other person’s work has been relied upon or used without due acknowledgement in the main text and bibliography of the thesis. Applicant Supervisor Date Date iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the University of Botswana who sponsored me to undertake this PhD project. Many people have generously contributed time, advice, information and assistance to this study and I am indebted to all. Special gratitude goes to: Dr. Jerry Courvisanos (my principal supervisor and mentor), for his many invaluable insights, guidance, encouragement, patience and friendship throughout the supervision of this study; my associate supervisor, Associate Professor Ian Clark for his insights in the early stages of this study; academic and administrative colleagues in the School of Business at the University of Ballarat for their unfailing support, generous help in clarifying ideas, and assistance in debating ideas with me; Special thanks to Jackie Tuck for her insights in the analysis and help in language construction; Nadine Zacharias for her idea about the preface and critique particularly on the preface and the last chapter of this thesis; The Research and Graduate Studies Office staff; specialist statistics assistance from Dr. Jack Harvey, University of Ballarat and my PhD colleagues in the Schools of Business for their continued support and engagement with my thoughts. I offer my thanks to Barbra for the burden she had in taking care of the kids in my absence, and the support she gave for the completion of this thesis. To my sons Obakeng, Calvin and Tashatha for the patience and understanding they showed through the challenges of undertaking this PhD. Finally, I offer my thanks to Shane and Leane Stockdale without whom life in Ballarat could have been a nightmare. iv Preface In this thesis, I employ two styles of writing. The first style only in this preface I write in the first person, unusual for me but I have found it irresistible given the fact that this section is a reflection of my journey into the unknown - the decision to enrol for a PhD program and subsequently coming to Australia, to pursue this dream. However, from Chapter One until the end of this thesis, I write in the third person the style that I have been socialised since my academic childhood into this approach. This thesis is premised on the ideas of pragmatism. How I came to choose pragmatism as a philosophy for researching social life was a journey that began at the University of Essex in 1995/96 under the discipleship of Professor Richard Laughlin and Dr. Jane Broadbent, themselves committed Habermas scholars who were open minded to explore various research philosophies. They generated my interest in debates about the social world and reality. My interest in the social world as socially constructed fitted well with Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interactionism has been a highly influential theory in sociology ever since it was coined by Blumer in 1937 when he wrote an article identifying Mead as a “Symbolic Interactionist.” Symbolic interactionism represents a “relatively distinct approach to the study of human group life and human conduct” (Blumer, 1969, p. 1) which “is concerned with the emergence of meaning in human interaction. Meanings are the definitions that individuals attach to the full range of objects (i.e. physical, social, cultural, political) that comprise their life world. Meanings emerge through social interaction with others and the self, and ultimately become the basis of human and collective action” (Burnier, 2005, pp. 501-502). Blumer (1969, p. 35) argues that the social world is the actual group life of experience and consists of the action of human beings, and that it is the world of everyday experience of people as they meet the situations that arise in their respective worlds. According to this approach, the empirical world has a ‘real’ character, which appears in the ‘here and now’, and is continuously recast with the achievement of new discoveries, which is achieved through careful and honest study. Hence, for my Masters dissertation, I set forth on a short v journey of a symbolic interactionist study of teams in a bureaucracy called Teams in a Bureaucracy: A Case Study of A Local Borough Council in the South-East of London. Graduating from the University of Essex in 1996, I soon realised that my dissertation lacked basic statistical information that could have further enriched the qualitative data. To this end, I became more disgruntled with symbolic interactionism – both the two schools, the Chicago School with its emphasis on methodological purity that viewed qualitative data collection as the only means through which the social world can be accessed and understood, and the Iowa school’s emphasis on M.H. Kuhn’s twenty statements self attitudes test which cannot be used effectively to study complex areas like alliance formation and management. When I enrolled for my PhD, I set out to find a methodological philosophy that I could identify with. These included but were not limited to critical theory and critical realism. Going back to Laughlin’s (1995) methodological themes, in one of his diagrams a link was made between symbolic interactionism and pragmatism. Laughlin (1995) made a claim that pragmatism’s ideas are essentially premised on the reflections of the Kantean/Fichte/Dilthy philosophical thought of the ‘projection of our minds.’ Laughlin (1995, p. 69) says this about pragmatism: that “typically American” (Kolakowski, 1972, p. 182) school of thought, following the thinking of Mead, James and Pierce, with its “getting-on-with-life” approach and its heavy borrowing from all and every way of thinking if it is deemed to be “relatively attractive” (Rorty, 1982) to the inquirer, can be seen to be located in this branching with its apparent belief in both subjective and objective dimensions to knowledge. The link between pragmatism and symbolic interactionism is rooted in the social theory of the pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1853-1931), a philosopher who has remained a marginal figure in the circles of pragmatists. Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionist approach was formed out of parts of Mead’s work (Joas, 1990) as an attempt at providing symbolic interactionism with a legitimate symbolic figure (da Silva, 2006). Blumer was one of Mead’s ex-students and perhaps the most prominent interpreter and devotee of Mead’s philosophy. My masters