Measuring institutional thickness in tourism: An empirical application based on social network analysis
Introduction
Institutions are key in mobilizing social, political, and economic stakeholders and in generating capacities to produce growth, innovation, and structural change through the operation and governance of the economic system (Vázquez Barquero, 2005). According to Swyngedouw (2000), the economic success of regions is highly dependent on the local institutional environment and the governance framework in which they are integrated. Institutions understood as factors able to explain differences in economic development started to gain popularity by the early 1990s (Chang, 2011). The interest on this topic lead to the creation of a new approach, the New Institutional Economy (NIE), emerging a new vision to discuss how the institutional dynamics of a territory activates its development potential. In this frame, institutional thickness, theorized by Amin and Thrift (1994), is considered a key condition to promote economic development as well as mobilize actors, organizations, and resources (Restrepo & Anton Clavé, 2019).
Even though institutional thickness has become a key reference for a large body of works related to institutions and regional economic development, few attempts have been made to measure its components and to reflect on its empirical application (Zukauskaite, Trippl, & Plechero, 2017). The operationalization of the study of institutional thickness' factors represents a challenge from the standpoint of its empirical application. This is especially relevant as far as related theory links institutional thickness to economic development. Some attempts have been carried out to develop quantitative indicators (Beer & Lester, 2015; Coulson & Ferrario, 2007; Escobal & Ponce, 2011) but most of them still display ambiguities (Zukauskaite et al., 2017) and cannot be applied to different contexts or used for comparative studies.
Discussions on institutional thickness have also emerged within the framework of the ever-growing literature on socioeconomic networks and territorial embedding, which highlight institutional and sociocultural factors as the basis of economic success (Keeble, Lawson, Moore, & Wilkinson, 1999). Thus, it is not illogical to claim that there may exist a close relationship between the analysis of institutional thickness and the characterization of socioeconomic networks that substantiate the relationships identified in a territory. In fact, there are analytical proposals that share the idea that research on networks and on institutions should align themselves (Owen-Smith & Powell, 2008), as economically successful regions are networked regional economies in which the cognitive, organizational, social and institutional proximity between their stakeholders promotes their growth (Boschma, 2005).
In tourism, research regarding institutional environment considers the study of the role of stakeholders (Ritchie & Crouch, 2005) and, particularly, the analysis of stakeholders' networks in destinations as a key factor (Baggio, 2011; Baggio, Scott, & Cooper, 2010; Baggio, Scott, & Cooper, 2011; Hazra, Fletcher, & Wilkes, 2017; Scott & Cooper, 2007; Scott et al., 2008a, Scott et al., 2008b). Recent studies reflect how tourism development depends, to a great extent, on the action of human agency (Brouder, Anton Clavé, Gill, & Ioannides, 2016) and discuss how research needs to move towards to know how and why (Brouder, 2014) it can occur. Additionally, because it is generally accepted that the relationship between tourism and economic success is not automatic (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD], 2013), a current challenge for tourism research is to explore how and under which circumstances this relation produce distinctive economic results. As general policies, regulatory frameworks and the density of public and private institutional structures and their coordination and interaction play a role within the general economics dynamics, (Ménard, 2011), it looks of interest to explore if the nature and relations of institutions in a tourist context influence the management, planning, and performance of destinations and its general economic development.
In this vein, this article seeks to help to address the first of the two factors included in the relation between institutional thickness and economic development through tourism development making the contribution to incorporate the institutional thickness analysis in tourism research using Social Network Analysis. This is understood as a first and necessary step that can be used further to analyse the role of institutions in the economic dynamics of tourism destinations. To do so, from a theoretical standpoint the paper identifies some key elements in the relation between institutional thickness and networks, arguing that because institutions are embedded in relational contexts, thus networks are essential components of a strong institutional context. Therefore, the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) contributes to bridge the gap in the measurement of the institutional thickness factors. In consequence, the main contributions of the paper are, first, to provide a new approach to the study of institutional thickness by applying a social network analysis methodology and making possible to measure factors such as institutional presence, levels of interaction, structures of domination, and common agendas in tourism. Second, it highlights the importance of advancing in the understanding of the role of the institutional environment and the governance framework of tourism destinations to better plan and manage their dynamics and effects.
To do this, Section 2 presents a review of the literature addressing the institutional thickness concept, the close relation between institutions and networks, and the nature of them in the context of tourism. Section 3 describes the methodology implemented. Section 4 introduces the empirical evidence obtained and discusses results with reference to existing literature thereon so far and Section 5 summarizes the contributions and poses several concluding observations.
Section snippets
Theoretical framework
This section explains the institutional thickness concept according with the original work of Amin and Thrift (1994) but also considering recent approaches (Zukauskaite et al., 2017) with the aim to build a conceptual and operational approach on the relationship between institutional thickness and networks analysis. This is based on the established evidence that both are inherently relational, and they refer not only to the interaction between their components but also consider issues such as
Methodology
Because of the well-known limitations in the operationalization of the study of the factors that make up institutional thickness (Zukauskaite et al., 2017) and taking into account the common issues introduced above about the relationship between institutional thickness and networks analysis, this paper adopts formal Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods to advance the empirical operationalization and the measurement of institutional thickness. To do so, it makes a pilot study in a regional
Results and discussion
The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the network approach is a comprehensive and useful tool to quantitatively operationalize the analysis of institutional thickness. The study, applied to the context of tourism, has the ability to empirically size a set of structural measurements that provide evidence related to a group of selected variables among those established in the seminal work of Amin and Thrift (1994) and empirically developed by MacLeod (1997), Raco (1998), Keeble et
Conclusion
The literature on institutional thickness has sharpened the view of how institutions influence regional development (Zukauskaite et al., 2017). However, even before considering the relationship between institutions and economic success, there are also limitations in the operationalization of the study of institutional thickness' factors, representing a challenge from the standpoint of its empirical application. Moreover, caution should be also the guide when discussing under which circumstances
Funding and acknowledgements
Research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [POLITUR/CSO2017-82156-R], the AEI/FEDER, UE and the Department of Research and Universities of the Catalan Government [GRATET-2017SGR22 and Grup de Recerca Economic History and Development (Industry, Business and Sustainability) (2017 SGR 1466)].
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Natalia Restrepo holds a BA in Business Administration by the University of Medellin and a Master's degree in Analytical Techniques and Innovation in Tourism by the Rovira i Virgili University. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Doctoral Program in Tourism and Leisure at the Rovira i Virgili University. She works as a Researcher at Sinnergiak Social Innovation Centre (University of the Basque Country). Her research mainly focuses on tourism destination governance, territorial development,
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Natalia Restrepo holds a BA in Business Administration by the University of Medellin and a Master's degree in Analytical Techniques and Innovation in Tourism by the Rovira i Virgili University. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Doctoral Program in Tourism and Leisure at the Rovira i Virgili University. She works as a Researcher at Sinnergiak Social Innovation Centre (University of the Basque Country). Her research mainly focuses on tourism destination governance, territorial development, innovation and tourism economics.
Sergi Lozano is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economic History, Institutions and Policy and World Economy of Barcelona University and also he is part of the Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He obtained his PhD in 2008 from the “Sustainability, Technology and Humanism” program at Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Since then, Dr. Lozano has held several positions, including postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and ‘Ramón y Cajal’ research fellow at the Catalan Institute of Paleoecology and Human Evolution (IPHES). His work focuses on developing quantitative approaches (mainly based on network and complexity sciences) to study long-term socio-economic phenomena, at regional and global scales.
Salvador Anton Clavé is a Full Professor of Regional Geographical Analysis at the Rovira i Virgili University where he serves as Principal Investigator of the Research Group of Territorial Analysis and Tourism Studies. He is Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute of Tourism Studies at the George Washington University. He has been director/dean of the School of Tourism and Leisure/Faculty of Tourism and Geography at the Rovira i Virgili University. His research concentrates on the analysis of the evolution of tourism destinations, visitor attractions, destination image, local and regional development related to tourism and visitors spatial behaviour.