Small Tourism Firms: Owners, Environment and Management Practices in the Centre Stage of New Zealand

Abstract

Hosts in the small tourism and hospitality sector usually display their happiness in front of the customers as they realize that a smile can improve business performance, so the smile often becomes part of the package or product they offer. Nevertheless, ultimately a question arises: what is really behind the smile? This thesis explores the background of the 'happiness' of small tourism business owners/managers. In fact this research uses the notion of the every day problems that face the small tourism firm owner as a point of departure from which to gain a broader perspective of the major issues they face. The thesis argues that the dynamics of internal and external factors shape small business management practice and resulting performance. In this respect, the research aims to challenge (he often pessimistic picture depicted by management literature on email (tourism) firms and their owner/managers who carry the main responsibility for the high failure rate of businesses within the small sector. The owner of small tourism firms, and the social/economic web that the owner exists within is crucial to the theoretical and methodological context of this work. This embeddedness is therefore brought into the process of this research and analysis by adopting a less conventional methodological approach to understand the small firms' reality. Triangulation within the dominant qualitative methodological approach is adopted in the research process, which used inductive analysis and interpretation to allow a practical and theoretical understanding of the small firms reality to emerge from the data. A central part of New Zealand encompassing four localities integrated in a marketing entity, the Centre Stage macro region, provides the geographical scope of this study. Moreover, the area exhibits a blend of urban and rural contexts offering a unique opportunity to explore entrepreneurial process in the growing tourism sector. The research clearly demonstrates the existence of an internal-external dialectic where the responsibility for the small tourism firm's survival and success not only rest upon owner-manager capacity, while there are a number of factors from the small firm's specific business environment beyond the firm's control. Contributing factors to the small business survival and management practice are evidently complex, amalgamating a range of forces from both the internal and external pillars as proposed in the conceptual framework.