Antecedents of Collaboration

Antecedents of collaboration are those discursive and non-discursive resources which participants have before the collaboration, which serve as a basis for further dynamics of collaboration. Antecedents can be divided into concepts and objects. ‘Concepts’ refer to existing mental formations such as concepts and ideas. They are constructed and reconstructed through various discursive activities. They can be drawn from outside of the collaboration, from other collaborations, or as pointed out in the previous sub-section, from broader societal discourses (coming for example‚ from culture, economy or politics) that have some relation to the collaboration at hand. For example, ‘place marketing’ can be understood as a concept which is developed by academics, practitioners and policy makers, and transferred through various genres such as academic literature and national or EU policy levels. When concepts are applied to real world objects or practices, ‘objects’ come into being. In this regard, objects have a physical existence, while a concept exists only on the ideational level. For example, place marketing can be considered as an object, when for example organizations decide to form a partnership

project in order to carry out place marketing activities. Discourse has a strong role in forming objects such as ‘place marketing’, because actors need to reach a common understanding on what concepts need to be applied to form the project. This negotiation process has a fundamental role regarding what the collaboration will finally turn out to be.

Tracing the antecedents for a collaboration based on an ambiguous idea like place marketing is a difficult task due to the sheer amount of possible sources where concepts and objects could be drawn from. In order to narrow down this complexity, the present study focuses on antecedents which are relevant for legitimating the practice of place marketing. By focusing on such legitimative antecedents, the study highlights not only the relevance of discourse for the antecedents to the cases being studied, but also provides a look at broader societal discourses which underpin the existence of the practice of place marketing in society. This approach frames place marketing not only as a practice or model, but also as a representation of certain ‘ideological’ aspects prevalent in the society, and especially in the contemporary field of regional development. In the next section, the concept of legitimation and its relevance for the antecedents of collaboration is discussed.

Originally, the concept of legitimacy meant a voluntary support for the use of power by a ruler (Weber, 1978). Later on, the concept has been developed, especially in organizational institutionalism literature (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Suchman, 1995) which has brought attention to how organizations enact support for their activities.

Suchman (1995) has described legitimacy as “a generalised perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”. This means that in the case that full legitimacy is achieved, the actions of an organization are not questioned and are taken-for-granted. Legitimacy is an important resource, especially for organizations coordinating collaborations such as partnerships as they are dependent on external stakeholder resources (Deephouse and Suchman, 2008). For example, Elbe and Emmoth (2014) have pointed out that regarding destination management organizations, the need for

legitimacy is essential for a successful collaboration with stakeholders and their mobilization. The same applies for place marketing collaborations, which need to engage stakeholders not only for funding projects, but also to cooperate in their management, content production and other activities. Furthermore, authors have underlined the significance of

legitimacy considering the public and political character of place marketing activities (Kavaratzis, 2012; Eshuis and Edwards, 2013; Stubbs and

Warnaby, 2015).

Several scholars of legitimacy have emphasized the socially constructed nature of legitimacy. For example, Suchman (1995) has argued that

legitimacy is bound to a socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions. This aspect of legitimacy has been studied more recently, especially in the discourse analytic tradition. Discourse oriented studies have elaborated on how legitimacy is produced through certain legitimative discourses (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 2007). This is done through an identification of linguistic strategies which are utilized to construct senses of legitimacy in discourses. These strategies resonate with particular culturally acknowledged systems of thought, and in

order to have a legitimating effect, they assume norms and values that are aligned with current legal or political systems, or the broader moral order of society (Van Dijk, 1998). Van Leeuwen (2007) has presented a theoretical framework to study how discourses construct legitimacy for social practices and public communication. This framework describes four main legitimation strategies, further divided into various analytical subcategories. The main categories are 1) authorization, 2) rationalization, 3) moral evaluation, and 4) mythopoesis. All of these strategies respond one way or another to the question of why we should do this first place, or why should we do this in this way?

Authorization strategies convey legitimation through the use of personal authority, which can be for example a statement of a recognized expert which supports the practice. Authority can be also conveyed though impersonal authority, such as laws, rules and regulations. For example, international organizations such as the European Union have control over local regional development discourses in this respect, as it steers the

regional development strategies with its policies and funding mechanisms.

Authorization can be also conveyed through customs, traditions or conformity.

Moral evaluations instead draw from conventional moral orders to frame practices as something “good”, or in the case of de-legitimation as

“bad”. Moral evaluations are conveyed through subtle ways such as the use of adjectives which frame the practice as positive. Moral evaluation can also occur through comparisons or abstractions which distil a certain positive quality in relation to the practice concerned. Moral evaluations are derived from the cultural context, which means that they cannot be identified purely through the tools of textual analysis, but require interpretative analysis which takes into account the cultural context.

Rationalization strategies provide legitimacy by pointing to the utility of the practice towards certain ends. Rationalizations are instrumental or theoretical. Instrumental rationalization refers to the means, goals and effects that a certain practice has, while theoretical rationalization points to the “state of things”, which legitimates the practice. Rationalizations are never purely “rational” in an objective sense, but rather have a moral dimension, however oblique it might be. As Leeuwen (2007) has pointed out, the rationale and morality are intertwined and cannot be separated by textual analysis. This means that while a rationale would seem at a textual level to be “objective”, there are always moral evaluations related to the rationalization. This stems from the fact that a rationale always evaluates certain practices, positionalities, or actors, and adopts a position of “good and efficient” or “bad and inefficient” towards the set goal, means or effect.

This means that while the logic of increasing regional competitiveness is an instrumental goal, it also accommodates a moral dimension which can be understood through, for example, evaluations in which actors are seen as being “efficient” towards achieving this purpose.

Finally, the mythopoesis strategy provides legitimacy though narrative forms such as cautionary tales or heroic stories, which can be used either to legitimate or de-legitimate a given practice.

The legitimation strategies described here are highly prominent antecedents of the collaborative activity. They reflect what kind of “real

world” objects such as decision-making organs or policy documents lie behind the legitimation of the place marketing practice. In a similar manner, they provide an insight as to what types of ideas, moral

assumptions, concepts and discourses are framing the discussions within the collaboration. They also provide insight to the hegemonic discourses behind the practice of place marketing, and the broader societal function of the practice of place marketing itself. This means that legitimation strategies are not situational, but rather (inter-textual) signals from

broader discursive practices prevalent in the field of regional development where the regional place marketing activity is being carried out. Lastly, the notion that discourses limit or strengthen certain actors in sense-making processes, makes legitimative discourses highly significant antecedents which influence the power dynamics of the collaboration (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999; Fairclough, 2003).