The management of emotion in collaborative tourism research settings

Increasingly, the management and future planning of a tourist destination is underpinned by research emerging from collaborative research undertakings, yet little is known of the ways in which the processes underlying these research settings facilitate or impair eventual project outcomes. While network theories of knowledge management acknowledge social relations as central to the possibility of learning, and organisational psychology recognises the role of affect in individual and group processes, the two have not been considered conjointly in attempts to understand the dynamics of collaborative research settings. The results of a 3-year qualitative study of a collaborative tourism research project1 show that there are five dominant factors that would influence research outcomes. These factors relate to communication, individual cognition, social contingencies, affect, and values. A model depicting the interrelatedness of these factors is presented in order to provide a platform from which to understand the dynamic processes inherent in a collaborative research setting.