Approaching Tourism as a Complex Dynamic System: Implications and Insights

Abstract

Today we know that we live in a complex world of emergent behaviour and attributes, in which our powers of prediction are limited (Allen, Strathern, 2005). This counter with the ‘classical’ views of competitive advantage that implicitly supposed a mechanical environment, in which breaking a process into parts would allow us to predict it and the overall system. Also, the conventional, traditional approaches that have prevailed in the tourism management are being increasingly considered unable to give directions for organizations to cope with uncertainty and unpredictability of the future. This failure is related with the fact that analyzing and studying the constituent parts separately, do not give much insights on how all parts can function together, on what directions the whole industry/or sector need to move on, what actions, decisions and policies need to be activated in order to leverage the entire system. Senge (1990) notes “.....we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our action; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole”. Indeed, modelling the complexity of the new environment requires new managerial techniques and strategies that swiftly respond to changing technology and markets. This paper describes a new conceptual shift away from mechanistic to dynamic-complex approaches for management of tourism organisations. According to this framework, tourism parts are not considered in isolation, but instead as networks of relationships with flexible structures to allow self-organising convergence and co-evolution (Kelly, 2005). We argue that tourism fims’advantage would be more related to efforts of coordination and interaction among its constituting parts that provide increased capabilities for delivering the best value for money for its tourists. The implications of this new conceptualization for tourism structures, approaches, competitive resources and strategic actions concern: (a) Knowledge become the strategic resource for tourism enterprise as well as the ability to acquire, integrate, store, share and apply them become the most important resource for building and sustaining competitive advantage (Grant, 2001, Penrose, 1995). As consequence the knowledge worker turns out to be the most important asset for organizations. (b) Co-evolution and innovation patterns require modular production structures and network organizational structures based on knowledge sharing, knowledge searching and creation, for continuous upgrading of resource basis and attainability of a sustainable competitive advantage. (c) The strategy centres around knowledge management and continuous learning. The competitive advantage depend on the capabilities to capture and absorb the resources and knowledge residing inside the network, on the relationships between firms, customers and suppliers.