Introduction

We live in a networked world. The concept of a network of friends, of businesses or indeed of computers is pervasive in our conversations, newspaper articles or business plans. For many, the increasing importance of innovation and adaptation to turbulent environments is changing the nature of interaction with other organisations and as a response we increasingly encounter more networked inter-organisational relationships such as alliances, partnerships, clusters and communities of practice. These organisational forms often involve interaction between numerous individual organisations such that the flows of information and resources between them are complex. As a result these networks of organisations are becoming a dominant organisational form in the 21st century (Cravens & Piercy, 1994).

For many business sectors, the development of networks of organisations may be new or novel. For example, 'Just In Time' manufacture, which requires a network of suppliers working together, has been in place since the early 1980s (Huson & Nanda, 1995). In comparison, tourism has always been a networked industry and the usual description of tourism as a fragmented and geographically dispersed industry belies a pervasive set of business and personal relationships between companies and managers in businesses such as national tourism offices, hotels, attractions, transport, tours, travel agents and restaurants. It is this network of relationships that allows the tourism industry to deliver its product and to overcome the problems of fragmentation. Therefore it can be argued that the tourism industry provides the ideal context for study of networks.

The network concept is based around relationships between entities such as organisations or people (termed nodes), and the properties of networks studied by researchers relate to the structure of these relationships. The study of networks may be considered to have a number of paradigmatic characteristics (Wellman, 1988: 82) focusing on:

• Structural advantages and constraints on behaviour.

• The discovery of groups through their relationships rather than a priori allocation to categories.