Collaboration is important for fostering tourism in a region and the creation of a shared collaborative identity facilitates this process. This paper explains the role of individual identities in the process of creating a shared tourism collaborative identity in a postcommunist environment. To this end, it uses multi-grounded theory to analyse 37 individual interviews and 1 focus group interview conducted in 2 tourist destinations in Estonia. In the constantly evolving post-communist tourism environment, collaborative identity creation relates to self-construction at the individual, interpersonal, and group levels. This study shows that the place, occupational, cultural, and environmental identities in a given place shape and form shared tourism collaborative identities; however, a collaborative platform is required for shared collaborative identity creation. Specifically, during the shared collaborative identity creation, stakeholders bring their own identities to the process through the platform, on which individual and collective identities interact. The platform magnifies or weakens the perceptions of the shared collaborative identity. As collaboration broadens, the platform shifts from a small group to bigger groups. Nonetheless, during this the shared tourism collaborative identity creation is vulnerable, as stakeholders may perceive threats to their individual identities.
This study investigates the collaborative ties between rural and urban tourism enterprises and their networks in the post-communist Pärnu region of Estonia. For that, two research questions were answered: what is the nature of collaborative ties between entrepreneurs and sub-networks in a tourist region and how different ties between regional tourism networks foster and hinder the development process of rural-urban tourism network? This study bases on stakeholder theory, actor-network theory, social network analysis, and social network theory, uses multi- grounded theory as a methodology, and qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with the regional tourism actors. Results indicate mutually beneficial relationships between prominent and small urban enterprises. Prominent urban enterprises gain by services offered by small enterprises, the latter benefit by the visitors brought in the town by the big ones. Regular collaboration is a common practice among rural enterprises. However, a collaboration between rural and urban entrepreneurs and networks at the regional level is minimal. However, some collaborative ties between tourism enterprises in a regional network exist between urban and rural entrepreneurs in different collaboration levels. The urban tourism network influences regional tourism much more than rural networks does.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.