This paper explores relational practice in strategic alliances. Focusing on how governance mechanisms and negotiation strategies evolve and form patterns of interaction that are under influence of both recursive and adaptive forces, four modes of relational practice are discussed: recursively integrative, recursively distributive, adaptive toward integrative, and adaptive toward distributive. Three longitudinal cases are examined. I find that different contractual conditions enable (or restrain) interaction patterns. Negotiation behaviour, in turn, affects future contractual conditions and their combination and recombination form the evolution of relational practice. As relationships progress, initial governance mechanisms are complemented and negotiation behaviours change. I explain how perceptions of both process and relational outcomes influence relational practice. In addition, I explicate why relational practices have both recursive and adaptive characteristics, and identify conditions that cause relational practices to move towards more integrative or distributive modes. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2009.

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Efficient inter-firm coproduction in the tourism industry can bear a resemblance to the concept of small-worlds, typically characterized by pockets of local clusters and shortcut ties that connect and decrease path-length between clustered network members. In this paper we analyze survey and inter-firm network data across several winter destinations, finding that innovating firms can reduce path-length, but uncertainty is a necessary catalyst for this process to take place.

The branding of tourism destinations has received increased attention, with scholars typically focusing at the regional level or on the customer demand side. This study takes the firm as its level of analysis and explores whether interfirm network position is related to the use of the destination brand as an explicit marketing strategy. Firms' use of the destination brand can be described as a co-branding strategy. We apply an unusual combination of survey and social network data across several tourism destinations. The results show that firms with interfirm ties to other central firms in the extended network (closeness centrality) co-brand with the destination brand, but we do not find a similar effect for firms with ties in the local network (degree centrality). The use of instrumental variables indicates that closeness centrality is a cause, and not an effect, of co-branding.