Power in Destination Branding

Tourism Events and the Nature of Stakeholder Power

“…Furthermore, it is evident that power was concentrated within the organizer and a few big private entities. This study confirmed Marzano and Scott's (2009) and Cooper et al's (2009) propositions that only limited number of stakeholders were considered powerful within a tourism destination, and they tend to be larger in size, have larger marketing budgets, and have more skills and knowledge. Similarly, Izzo et al (2012) found that the "core network" in festivals was made up of a few stakeholders, whereas the "extended network" was made up of a larger number of stakeholders.…”

“…Although there is substantial research on the power held by different stakeholders within the context of an organization or a destination (Beritelli & Laesser, 2011;Marzano & Scott, 2009;Nunkoo & Ramkissoon, 2012), there is a paucity of work examining event stakeholders' power. Previous studies examine power networks among event stakeholders but do not examine the different kinds of power that stakeholders (Getz, 2002;Getz et al, 2007;Reid, 2011).…”

“…Alternatively, Reid and Arcodia (2002) adopted a similar framework to Clarkson (1995), prioritizing primary versus secondary stakeholders based upon their 2007; Reid, 2011;Xue & Mason, 2011) it is clear that staging tourism events requires input and collaboration from numerous actors and stakeholders from the public and private sectors, respectively. Empirical investigations reveal that in the process of managing collaborative tourism activities, power is ubiquitous in every system of relations (see, e.g., Cooper, Scott, & Baggio 2009;Jamal & Getz, 1995;Sheehan, Ritchie, & Hudson, 2007) featuring differences in both the amount and the type of power that different stakeholders hold (Beritelli & Laesser, 2011;Ford, Wang, & Vestal, 2012;Hazra, Fletcher, & Wilkes, 2014;Marzano & Scott, 2009;Reed, 1997). Previous studies have explicitly addressed the concept of power within tourism planning and networks, as well as destination marketing and management, yet only a few studies (e.g., Clarke & Jepson, 2011;Larson, 2002) have analyzed the power relationships within the context of events and festivals.…”

“…Power is afforded to stakeholders controlling essential and critical resources (Mitchell et al, 1997) upon which organizations depend for growth and competitiveness (Donaldson & Preston, 1995;Pfeffer & Salancik, 2003). Resources can be almost anything that is perceived as valuable (Pfeffer, 1992), either tangible (e.g., money, material supplies, manpower, real estate) or intangible (e.g., knowledge, skill, reputation, image, authority), as well as individual attributes such as competence, innovativeness, and trustworthiness (Church & Coles, 2007;Marzano & Scott, 2009;Pfeffer & Salancik, 2003). A recent study on power distributions in tourism networks by Ford et al (2012) indicated that reputation, allies, and hierarchy were the source of influence.…”

Innovation for sustainable urban tourism: some thoughts on best practice

“…Compounding this fragmentation, we must also consider that, from a supply side perspective, the organizations involved in tourism vary significantly in size, influence and power (Doorne, 1998;Marzano and Scott, 2009). The larger organizations are involved with customers in multiple product markets and include airports, large visitor attractions, convention centers and international hotels, as well as those involved due to organizational mandates noel SCott • ChriS Cooper such as local government councils or regional tourism organizations).…”