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Abstract

In addition to being viewed as a provider of sleeping accommodations, a lodging organization could also be viewed as a provider of tourists' experiences or even tourist destinations. For example, to some potential guests, a lodging organization may simply symbolize a supplier of overnight sleeping accommodations. To others it may symbolize facilities for. meetings, for recreational experiences, or both. Still other members of the lodging organization's task environment (the actors, organizations, and institutions with whom the business interacts) may view the business differently based on the impact the business has on their organizations. For example, to the cruise. industry the lodging organizations may symbolize a substitute service and therefore, competition.

This paper offers a paradigm for defining lodging organizations based on their relative degree of institutionalization within the tourism environment. Zucker (1980) proposed that the degree of institutionalization was a function of: 1) the degree to which subjective understandings are seen as part of the external world; and 2) the degree to which the acts are repeatable by other actors without changing the meaning. It is therefore proposed that as a lodging organization begins to be viewed by the actors, organizations, and institutions within the tourism phenomenon, as not only a provider of sleeping accommodations, but of tourism experiences and even, of tourists' destinations in themselves, the lodging organization begins to take on its own institutional status apart from other tourism phenomena in the environment in which it is located. It is further proposed that, as a lodging organization begins to develop facilities, services and technologies whose meanings are replicated outside of the context of a specific socio-geographic environment, the organization enhances its institutional status.

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