Project Manager : Cécile CLERGEAU
Tourism is a social practice which consists of world inhabitation in a mobile and temporary manner. This mobility is based on the world’s diversity which gives tourism meaning but encounters otherness, which raises the question of otherness and how tourists manage the phenomenon. In order to control this dialectic, tourists rely on organisations (tour operators) that facilitate movement and access to places of the world. Now these organisations can not, for reasons of cost and investment capacity without mentioning the risks inherent in some destinations (political instability, terrorism ...), construct institution networks consistent and standardised. To organise the global circulation of their clients, tour operators thus pass agreements with multiple partners. Some are also global firms - sometimes even competing in certain markets (agreements between TO), sometimes not (agreements between a TO specialty segment and a horizontally integrated company in the lodging segment) - the others are territorialized players who therefore have different professional cultures and with which we can assume that it is more difficult to establish cooperation. The project aims to analyse the dynamic operation of these international service firm networks with different statuses and powers but complementary.