Introduction

This book has provided an overview of the existing literature on network analysis and tourism and mapped a body of knowledge that extends across concepts such as social capital, governance, leadership, policy and the dynamics of change and power. This disparate literature is united by the concept of tourism networks of stakeholders within a destination. However, this book is not the final work on tourism network analysis nor has it sought to be. Instead it provides an indication of the usefulness and importance of network thinking in tourism research and practice, a discussion of the various approaches that have been used to study tourism networks, an introduction to a more numerate and quantitative style of research and how, by embracing this style, researchers can open an enormous range of opportunities to study tourism phenomena using theory that has proven useful in other disciplinary areas. Nonetheless, network analysis is not the total answer to the study of tourism phenomena; indeed as this book has shown, qualitative or quantitative approaches to the study of networks each provide only a partial view of reality. However, the use of quantitative network thinking has proven apposite in a variety of research areas and the authors consider it a useful addition to the tourism researchers' toolkit. It is therefore pertinent to ask why more researchers in tourism do not use such a quantitative approach.

Firstly, network analysis focuses on relationships and the effect of the structure of relationships on individual behaviour. As we have argued in this book, thinking of relationships rather than individual actors represents a paradigmatic shift in the unit of analysis for research and is at odds with much of classical management, economics and sociological thought. It therefore may challenge researchers whose work is embedded in these literatures, and have an existing pattern of academic relationships and thinking that may determine their research activity. Perhaps then we should look to a younger generation of tourism researchers to adopt techniques of network analysis.