Creating shared collaborative tourism identity in a post-communist environment

ABSTRACT Collaboration is important for fostering tourism in a region and the creation of a shared collaborative identity facilitates this process. This paper explains the role of individual identities in the process of creating a shared tourism collaborative identity in a post-communist environment. To this end, it uses multi-grounded theory to analyse 37 individual interviews and 1 focus group interview conducted in 2 tourist destinations in Estonia. In the constantly evolving post-communist tourism environment, collaborative identity creation relates to self-construction at the individual, interpersonal, and group levels. This study shows that the place, occupational, cultural, and environmental identities in a given place shape and form shared tourism collaborative identities; however, a collaborative platform is required for shared collaborative identity creation. Specifically, during the shared collaborative identity creation, stakeholders bring their own identities to the process through the platform, on which individual and collective identities interact. The platform magnifies or weakens the perceptions of the shared collaborative identity. As collaboration broadens, the platform shifts from a small group to bigger groups. Nonetheless, during this the shared tourism collaborative identity creation is vulnerable, as stakeholders may perceive threats to their individual identities.