Inter-organisational theories and stakeholders’ coordination: a qualitative study on the city of Edinburgh

In tourism literature the topic of inter-organisational collaboration and cooperation among businesses has attracted the attention of several scholars; yet, there is a dearth of studies on coordination of stakeholders working within the destination.Coordination and cooperation are two concepts that have been defined differently in academic literature: while some authors have considered them synonymous, others have viewed them as two distinct concepts. According to the latter perspective, cooperation is the act of sharing resources in order to take advantage of collective opportunities; meanwhile, coordination refers to the achievement of objectives common to many actors. Therefore, it is a process through which actions of different organisations are managed for achieving a common goal.Although coordination of stakeholders is a topic that has received little attention so far, in literature it has emerged that coordination plays a pivotal role for the management and marketing of destinations. For instance, coordination is tied to the destination branding, indeed Scott, Parfitt and Laws (2000, p. 202, cited by Fyall & Leask 2007) have stressed the relationship between coordination and effective destination branding by arguing that “the difficulties of co-ordination and control have the potential to undermine a strategic approach to marketing based on destination branding because campaigns can be undertaken by a variety of tourist businesses with no consultation or co-ordination on the prevailing message or the destination values being promotedâ€. Moreover, it has been acknowledged the role of coordinator played by the DMO.In the light of the importance of stakeholders’ coordination and the paucity of literature on this topic, this paper aims to fill this gap by studying how stakeholders within a destination can be coordinated by the DMO.