Organisational social responsibility in tourism: the role of firm-stakeholder networks

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Copyright: Ahmed, Ehsan
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Abstract
The study focuses on how tourism firms relationships with others influence them to be more (or less) responsible to the surrounding society. In so doing, two processes of relational influence, communication (collaboration) and comparison (competition), are considered and delineated through the lens of social network analysis. Four types of relationships, power, legitimacy, urgency and definitive are identified. Responsibility to the surrounding society is entailed in terms of the organisational social responsibility (OSR) literatures, whereby tourism firms are expected to look after their negative and positive impacts on natural, social and economic environments. Several measurement instruments were developed in relation and tested for validity measures. Two types of data collection techniques, telephone interview and on-line survey, were used to collect relational and social responsibility data respectively. By using a snowball technique, 106 telephone interviews and 91 on-line data were gathered at the Blue Mountains region, Australia between August, 2011 and March 2012. It is found that the OSR attributes significantly varied across tourism sectors, and according to the size, profit orientation, and form of ownership of an organisation, whereas, no significant association was found in terms of industry experience and management structure of the respondent s organisations. The relational data indicated that the presence of relationships was more likely attributed through the process of comparison than the process of communication. OSR perceptions were more likely to be attributed through the process of communication than the process of comparison. This suggests that both communication and comparison have a significant influence on the attitudes of tourism stakeholders. The study reports interesting findings on tourism firms perceived relationship and social responsibilities. Using social network analysis, this study not only conceptualises the way tourism firms and stakeholders may influence one another, but also represents the aggregated view of their relationship with one another. Tourism practitioners can use these information to understand pattern of OSR perception across the industry, who is connected to who, how they influence others opinion and behaviours through their relationships. This may well help them to identify the broken or weak links, and amend or rearrange relationships to articulated effective OSR practices.
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Ahmed, Ehsan
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Publication Year
2012
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PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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