Network Structure and Performance in the Tourism Industry

Tourism industry has been attracting a growing academic interest especially in the last decade. A bibliometric indication of both the breadth and the growth of attention paid by researchers could be the number of hits in Google Scholar for the keyword “tourism”: from about forty one thousand in the year 2000 to more than eighty two thousand, ten years later. The economic and social relevance of tourism industry is increasingly recognized by scholars. Yet, this fast growth is also an indication that the field remains far from theoretical or methodological maturity, typically achieved when the number of publications stabilizes over time. Consequently, a number of approaches are adopted by researchers or implemented from other fields of study such as regional development, sociology, or management in order to contribute to our understanding of tourism and related fields. Those inspirations offer opportunities of applying established ideas as well as emerging threads of scrutiny to the distinctive empirical setting of tourism. However, it is advisable to identify peculiarities, pitfalls, or dead-ends, which have already been detected elsewhere, in order to advance tourism research.