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Abstract
Community-based tourist destinations can be understood as networks of tourism service providers, which need to combine their resources and competencies to generate the overall holiday experience. Building on strategic management theories, the study aims at exploring the relationship between the destinations management's reflexive capabilities and the cooperative core competencies of a tourist destination. By means of reflexive capabilities, destination management is suggested to be able to induce a high level of network quality, which in turn may be a pre-condition for the interlacing of the service providers' competencies and resources, i.e. for the development of cooperative core competencies. Based on a quantitative survey in Bavaria, the results support these assumptions and indicate that reflexive capabilities may promote the development of cooperative core competencies in tourist destinations. The paper advances tourism literature by introducing, operationalizing and testing the idea of cooperative core competencies in the context of tourist destinations.
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Keywords: destination management; destination governance; networks; cooperative core competencies; reflexive management capabilities
Introduction
Extant literature repeatedly recognized tourist destinations as complex service networks (Dredge, 2006; Pforr, 2006; Shian Loong, 2012; Tinsley & Lynch, 2001). Within destinations, complementary services are provided by a large number of inter-dependent businesses, including hotels, ski resorts, other sports businesses, theatres, shopping centres and attraction points as well as local or public authorities (Pechlaner, Herntrei & Kofink, 2009). Due to this fragmented nature of tourism supply, cooperation in destinations is needed (Augustyn & Knowles, 2000).
'Cooperation' and its corollary 'coordination', with their various building blocks (Camagni, 1991), are major functions of destination management and governance (Beritelli, Bieger & Laesser, 2007; Bramwell & Lane, 2011; Derco, 2013; Kozak, 2004; Nordin & Svensson, 2007; Pechlaner, Raich & Beritelli, 2010; Pechlaner & Volgger, 2012; Raich, 2006; Volgger & Pechlaner, 2014). As a focal actor in the tourist destination network, the destination management organisation (DMO) is usually called to account for these duties (Flagestad & Hope, 2001; Presenza, Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005; Ritchie & Crouch, 2003). According to Sainaghi (2006), a DMO's tasks may be grouped into primary and supporting management tasks. The primary tasks include strategic or operative ones. Operative tasks deal with the management of tourist infrastructure, whereas strategic ones involve the development of...