TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF TOURISM?

VALENE L. SMITH (ed.). Hosts and Guests, The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977     

Partnerships of a feather flock together? An analysis of the emergence of networks of partnerships in the global cocoa sector

In this article, we move away from the case study approach dominant in the literature on partnerships and explore the emergence of networks of partnerships. Taking the global cocoa sector as our research setting, we examine 55 partnerships to analyse the linkages between them, their evolution over time, as well as the simultaneous occurrence of cooperation and competition. We discover that the partnerships are connected to each other through overlapping memberships of organizations and increasingly also through institutional linkages. The linkages between the partnerships channel the flow of resources and thereby reinforce the capacity of individual partnerships. A meta‐governance organization, which steers and coordinates the broader sustainability efforts of the cocoa industry, enhances the impact of the linkages. Our analysis shows that partnerships should be studied not only as autonomous entities but also as networks of partnerships.     

Business–NGO Interactions in a Multi‐Stakeholder Context

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the conditions under which Business–nongovernmental organization (NGO) interactions lead to improvements in corporate social responsibility (CSR), by assessing the role that the stakeholder context of the firm plays in the processes. As a case study it takes an interaction process between one NGO and one company with both collaborative and confrontational traits, spanning eight years and two issue fields, palm oil and soy, which are characterized by varying stakeholder contexts. The analysis demonstrates that the business–NGO interaction induced a change from a direct to an indirect corporate responsibility, and clarifies how interdependencies between the company and other stakeholders than the NGO influenced the interaction. The stakeholder interdependencies vary per issue field: In some issue fields, the stakeholder context allows for effective, collaborative interaction between business and NGO, while in another issue field, characterized by different stakeholder interdependencies, collaborative, constructive interactionbetween the same business and the same NGO is not feasible and, in addition, less effective in terms of CSR than confrontational interaction.