The community tourism development which is regarded as the feasible strategy for sustainable tourism assumed the resident's participation and bilateral communications among stakeholders. Focusing on the social relations based on fundamentally inequal ...
The community tourism development which is regarded as the feasible strategy for sustainable tourism assumed the resident's participation and bilateral communications among stakeholders. Focusing on the social relations based on fundamentally inequal power in the community, this study was differentiated from the previous researches, the resident's individual attributes such as socioeconomic variables of which were measured in tourism development.
The mutual trust and bilateral communications among stakeholders in community tourism development were thought as the concept preventing conflict and on the other hand facilitating social efficiency. This study, based on the Putnam's research on the social capital, conceptualized trust and communication in the perspective of theory of social capital. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to drew the conceptual model as well as the research model based on the concept of trust and communications in community tourism development, and ultimately to test the validity of the models in empirical methods.
The type of stakeholders in both conceptual and research model was classified as either inner or outer on the basis of residence and power relations, residents and the community leader of which were named as the inner stakeholder, and legal institutions and environmental NGO of which were named as the outer stakeholder. The content analysis on both print and internet newspaper articles and interviews on both experts in tourism discipline and representative of each stakeholders except residents were conducted in order to test validity of the conceptual model. Finally, the validity of the research model was confirmed by the survey method to residents.
The first three hypotheses were set up by the concept of trust while the last five ones were on concept of communications. All eight hypotheses were examined by the statistical method, the regression analysis of which was carried out in this study. The overall results suggested that the community leader functioned as the influential communication channel in transmitting information of outer stakholders to residents while was barely effective in notifying need of residents to outer stakeholders. In addition, the leader's role was trusted by residents in both cognitive and emotive dimension while not in behavioral dimension.
The significance of this study was told to be threefold. Firstly, an new theoretical approach toward stakeholders in community tourism development was adopted. Secondly, the meaning of trust and communications was conceptualized based on theory of social capital, and the concepts were became measurable variables to confirm the hypotheses. Finally, type of stakeholders in community tourism development was systematically classified by residence and power relations, the former of which was geographical concept and the latter of which was socio-anthropological concept.
The further research is needed to test the validity of models developed in this study as well as to supplement a few limitations such as the survey sample frame restricted to residents out of stakeholders.