Many of the problems facing the world today, such as climate change and poverty, require collaboration across different groups in society. The interests of community groups, vested stakeholders, governments, NGOs and, of course, business, often collide over these issues. Yet there are also times when they work together for a win:win solution. What are the ingredients that enable this to happen?
Researchers Jakomijn van Wijk, Wouter Stam, Tom Elfring, Charlene Zietsma and Frank den Hond asked this question with particular reference to the Dutch tourism industry and the movement there to promote sustainable tourism.
As they explained, “in the early 1980s, sustainable tourism was a fringe outsider movement of little interest to tour operators. By the mid-2000s nearly all tour operators had committed to a sustainability framework, and major firms worked on developing sustainable tour packages. How does collaborative work between activists and field incumbents emerge and affect the organizational field under challenge?”
Through interviews, extensive document searches and fieldwork, they showed how a social network and common framework for managing sustainability concerns came to be formed over time between different actors, and the result of this development.
In the first period, 1980-1997, activists started critiquing the Dutch tourism industry and the consequences of mass tourism. By the end of the 1980s, these criticisms were being acknowledged by the Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators (ANVR), the main industry body, which created an executive committee on sustainable tourism.
All of this happened as networks were forming between different groups of players, or “cliques”, that increasingly became more structured. However, there was fragmentation in terms of the different views and actions of the sustainability campaigners who were concentrated into “People” and “Planet” cliques, representing their chief concerns.
In the second period, 1998-2005, differences between the camps – not only People and Planet, but also industry and campaigners – began to be bridged. For example, the Association for Sustainable Tourism (IDUT), which was formed in 1996 with a pro-Planet bias, included People advocates among its members by late 1997. This enabled the platform to oversee developments in both camps and in turn made it easier to advocate with the industry for change, which began to happen rapidly through the launch of a sustainability scheme and the emergence of a small-world network. However, these achievements came at a price.
“This confluence of cultural and relational structures resulted in a ‘tipping point’ in the evolution of the movement and the field, at which the pace of innovation accelerated but its radicalness became diluted, creating conditions for ongoing, incremental field change,” the authors said.
As advocates interacted more closely with industry, and industry adopted the goals of the advocates, a meeting-in-the-middle occurred that meant actions were less drastic than the change advocates originally hoped for. For example, a quota on the number of flight vacations allowed per person was rejected in favor of simply informing consumers about carbon offsetting. Thus, the movement’s ultimate goal of developing a fully sustainable tour operating business proved to be unrealistic.
With these patterns established, the authors developed a model to describe activist-instigated field change that could apply more broadly beyond the Dutch tourism industry.
The model centers on the levels of cultural and relational structuration of movements over time and has two key characteristics. One is “movement permeability” which allows activists and incumbents to cross fairly fluidly into each other’s domains (such as the ANVR and IDUT) and influence each other.
The other is collaborative work and the risk of co-optation, in which one group tries to displace the other and take charge of the agenda. Co-optation can take drastic forms, for example, if the industry swamped change advocates or change advocates refused to budge on their purist ideals; under such a scenario change could not be achieved. But the authors argued this need not be the case, presenting an empirical example of mutual cooptation.
“Movement co-optation is generally seen to have negative consequences for a movement’s mobilizing capacity to accomplish field change, but our study challenges this assumption by revealing an example of mutual co-optation as movement and field participants negotiated cultural structures and created a small-world network that significantly impacted their innovative outcomes,” they said.
The authors said there were several boundary conditions under which they expected their model to hold. For example, it mattered what issue the movement was promoting and how it affected the field. And both the movement and incumbent actors had to have enough authority with their members to promote change and lead collaboration.
“Our study has shown how a relatively unorganized movement with limited power, resources and support was able to instigate change in an established organizational field, even when elites in the field were attempting to defuse the movement through co-optation. The results show the power of shared relationships and culture to change the way actors think and act, and to change opportunities open to them.
“Given the myriad of social problems the world faces that require collective action, we need to know more about the enabling effects of collaboration. This work takes an important step in this direction,” they concluded.