Engaging residents as stakeholders of the visitor attraction

Tourism Management 33 (2012) 1159e1173

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Engaging residents as stakeholders of the visitor attraction Brian Garrod a, *, Alan Fyall b, Anna Leask c, Elaine Reid c a

School of Management and Business, Aberystwyth University, Cledwyn Building, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales SY23 3DD, UK Bournemouth University, UK c Edinburgh Napier University, UK b

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 18 April 2011 Accepted 10 November 2011

While local residents are widely recognised to play a pivotal role in the development and management of destinations, their role in the context of visitor attractions has largely been overlooked. This paper seeks to explore the purposes and processes of local-resident engagement by attractions. A web-based survey of paid-entry attractions in Scotland was used to investigate the perceived salience of local residents in managers’ decision making. In-depth interviews with managers of three Scottish attractions then sought to specify the forms in which such engagement is undertaken. Despite evidence that attraction managers increasingly recognise the salience of local residents in their decision making, evidence from the interviews suggests that they tend not to favour deep engagement with local residents. Instead, local resident engagement by attraction managers tends to be “informative” in style. Where there is evidence of more substantial participation, it tends to be partial, reactive and ad hoc. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Attractions Stakeholders Legitimacy Salience Local resident Engagement

1. Introduction Research into the management of visitor attractions remains an emergent area of academic interest (Benckendorff & Pearce, 2003; Leask & Fyall, 2006; Richards, 2002). While a number of studies have examined management issues at specific types of attractions e typically gardens, zoos, theme parks, museums and historic sites e such studies tend to be highly site-specific and generally fail to provide a sector-wide perspective (Leask, 2010). This may be due to the difficulties involved in undertaking research in a sector that is so highly fragmented and diverse, particularly with regard to patterns of ownership, scale of operation, visitor numbers and admission charges (Leask, 2008; Wilson, 2004; Wilson & Boyle, 2004). Since the end of the 1990s, however, a number of factors have contributed to increased academic interest in the attraction sector. In the UK context, these have included the failure of several costly and high-profile visitor attraction developments, a changing national government agenda that has introduced a policy of free admission to national museums, and the increased use of new management concepts such as best value and yield management (Leask, 2010). The significance of the visitor attraction sector is also increasingly being recognised in terms of the role attractions play in determining the success of the tourism destination and of the wider visitor economy, in providing recreational and educational

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ441970621638. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Garrod). 0261-5177/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2011.11.014

facilities for local residents, and in developing a greater sense of local identity and civic pride (Getz, 1994; O’Neill, 2006; Wood, 2006). There has been extensive academic debate about what constitutes a visitor attraction (see Leask, 2008, for a review). Such discussion is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. For the purpose of this study, a visitor attraction (or simply “attraction”) is defined as by Leask (2008, p.8) as: “a permanently established excursion destination, a primary purpose of which is to allow access for entertainment, interest, or education, rather than being primarily a retail outlet or a venue for sporting, theatrical, or film performances. It must be open to the public, without prior booking, for published periods of the year, and should be capable of attracting day visitors or tourists, as well as local residents”. The growing recognition of the significance of the attraction sector has been accompanied by a gradual increase in the number of studies exploring attraction visitors’ characteristics and experiences (e.g. Nowacki, 2009; Poria, Butler, & Airey, 2006). There remains, however, a paucity of studies exploring the involvement of local residents in the development and operation of attractions. This is notable given the explicit reference to local residents in many formal definitions of a visitor attraction. It is also a matter of some concern given the critical role that local residents are acknowledged to play in the development and management processes associated with tourism more generally (e.g. Getz, 1994; Gu & Ryan, 2008; Jamal & Getz, 1995; Selin & Chavez, 1995; Smith & Krannich, 1998; Timothy, 1999; Williams & Lawson, 2001; Woosnam, Norman, &

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Ying, 2009). Such studies have largely been based on social exchange theory (e.g. Ap, 1992; Jurowski & Gursoy, 2004; Lawton, 2005; McGehee & Andereck, 2004; Perdue, Long, & Allen, 1990; Wang & Pfister, 2008), which argues that resident attitudes towards tourism tend to be related directly to the impacts they experience as a result of tourism activities taking place in their local area. Residents who perceive the positive impacts of tourism to be greater than the negative impacts will tend to favour tourism development, while those who perceive the negative impacts of tourism to outweigh the positive ones are more likely to oppose it. The greater is the gap between the perceived benefits and costs, the more strongly will a resident’s support or opposition for tourism be expressed. While the approach based on social exchange theory has proven valuable in understanding how resident attitudes towards tourism are shaped, it begs the question of how the managers of an attraction can and should best engage with local people. The most consistently proposed rationale for any organisation to engage with local residents is that they comprise one of the organisation’s stakeholder groups (e.g. Clarkson, 1995; Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Freeman, 1994, 2010). A stakeholder can be thought of as any individual or group connected to an organisation; those that can affect or be affected by an organisation’s performance are considered to be its legitimate stakeholders (Freeman, 1984). Stakeholder theory proposes that the organisation can capture a range of critical benefits by engaging effectively with their legitimate stakeholders (Freeman, 1994). To date, however, there has been little discussion in the literature about the role of local residents as one of the attraction’s stakeholder groups, particularly in terms of how their legitimacy or otherwise is determined. Indeed, some authors prefer to think in terms of salience rather than legitimacy (Jawahar & McLaughlin, 2001; Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997; Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005). Salience refers to the degree of relevance of the interests of the stakeholder group to the organisation. A stakeholder group may, for example, be considered legitimate by an organisation e insofar as the interests of the stakeholders can affect and be affected by the organisation’s decision making e but not salient insofar as such concerns are not of sufficient gravity or urgency that the organisation’s decision makers feel they need to attend to them. This paper therefore seeks to examine how local residents might be considered to be legitimate or salient stakeholders of an attraction. Another important question that has not yet been adequately addressed in the literature is how attraction managers should best integrate local residents’ interests into their decision making. Stakeholder theory refers to “stakeholder management” as a means by which this integration might be achieved. However, the theory leaves open the question of how stakeholder management should best be implemented as an organisational strategy in a particular context. The paper will therefore examine a range of practical measures that attraction managers might choose to adopt in attempting to bring the interests of local residents to bear on their decision making. The discussion will be illustrated by findings from in-depth interviews undertaken with managers of three major attractions in Scotland. Before doing so, however, the following section sets out to establish the theoretical foundations for the paper by presenting a brief summary of stakeholder theory, followed by a discussion of its relevance to tourism generally and attractions specifically. 2. Stakeholder theory and tourism 2.1. Stakeholder theory While the term “stakeholder” is now well-established in common parlance, and is widely used in business as well as political discourses,

the use of the concept by academics as a theoretical construct has only quite recently became widespread. While some writers argue that stakeholder theory had its antecedents in the first half of the twentieth century (e.g. Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005), most agree that it was first fully elaborated in the 1980s. The seminal work of Freeman (1984) is particularly associated with the theoretical development of the concept. The theory was further developed in the 1990s, particularly in the work of Clarkson (1995), Freeman (1994) and others. Freeman (2010), meanwhile, brings the stakeholder debate fully up to date. Stakeholder theory was developed as a theory of organisational management and has been applied primarily in the business context. It relies on the premise that the organisation has an array of stakeholders. A stakeholder may be an individual or, more usually, a group of individuals with shared interests (Freeman, 1984). As such, the theory posits that the business organisation is more than simply a set of institutional arrangements with the purpose of generating value for its shareholders. Rather, the success of the organisation in meeting its objectives depends critically on its ability to address the requirements and aspirations of a wider array of groups that have their own particular interests, or stake, in the organisation. Local residents are often identified as one such group. Jones and Wicks (1999) argue that stakeholder theory relies fundamentally on four underpinning premises: first, that the organisation has relationships with constituent groups that affect and are affected by its decisions; secondly, that the theory is concerned with the nature of these relationships in terms of processes and outcomes for both the organisation and its stakeholders; thirdly, that the interests of all legitimate stakeholders have intrinsic value and that no set of interests is assumed to dominate the others; fourthly, that the theory focuses on managerial decision making. It is the third of these assumptions that distinguishes stakeholder theory most clearly from other organisational theories, which tend to argue for the primacy, or even exclusivity, of shareholder interests. Such theories tend to rest on the assumption that the organisation exists in order to provide financial returns to its shareholders and that it is therefore in the organisation’s best interests to maximise such returns. The interests of wider stakeholder groups are therefore only material to an organisation’s decision making to the extent that shareholder value can be increased by addressing them. This would imply that attending to wider stakeholder interests is simply a means to the end of addressing shareholder interests, rather than an end in itself (Jensen, 2002). This logical paradox is frequently employed by critics of stakeholder theory (Argenti, 1997; Sternberg, 1997). In contrast to organisational theories focused on the principle of profit maximisation, stakeholder theory argues that the organisation should treat the interests of all legitimate stakeholders as ends. In this way the organisation should shape its decisions according to the interests of all of its stakeholder groups, rather than just those of its shareholders (Sundaram & Inkpen, 2004). As such, stakeholder theory provides a clear justification for the inclusion of local residents in the organisation’s decision making. Strategies for the inclusion of stakeholder interests e known collectively as “stakeholder management” e can be implemented in a wide variety of ways. It can be argued, however, that all of them require the organisation to engage in some kind of on-going relationship with its stakeholder groups. In the case of local residents, for example, some organisations might choose merely to consult them from time to time in order to gain an improved understanding of their interests, while others might decide to assign them a more formal role by attempting to integrate them into the organisation’s decision-making structures. A continuum of local resident engagement is therefore proposed, a popular formulation of which

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is Arnstein’s (1969) “ladder of participation”. The logical basis of this model is that adopting different strategies for resident engagement can be expected to result in varying degrees of resident involvement in organisational decision making, with various implications for the performance of the organisation. This proposition is revisited again later in this section of the paper. Five organisational stakeholder groups are typically identified in elaborations of stakeholder theory: investors, customers, employees, suppliers and the local residents (Argenti, 1997). Early elaborations of stakeholder theory considered these stakeholder relationships to be essentially dyadic in nature. Rowley (1997), however, provides a significant extension of stakeholder theory by envisaging a network of stakeholder relationships encircling the organisation. This view recognises that the interests of any one group may not only be informed by but also related to those of other stakeholder groups related to the organisation. Fig. 1 contrasts these two elaborations of the stakeholdereorganisation relationship. 2.2. Legitimacy and salience While many writers on stakeholder theory are satisfied with there being just the five stakeholder groups shown in Fig. 1, others have developed typologies with different numbers and combinations of stakeholder groups (e.g. Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Sautter & Leisen, 1999; Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005). Mitchell et al. (1997) argue that this is due to different interpretations of what is a legitimate stakeholder of the organisation and identify “broad” and “narrow” definitions of stakeholder legitimacy. The first is consistent with Freeman’s (1984: 46) seminal definition of a stakeholder, which is “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organization’s objectives”. Mitchell et al. (1997) point out that this means that particular stakeholder groups may lack legitimacy because they cannot affect the ability of the organisation to meet is objectives (because they lack the power to do so) and they are not affected by it (because

Fig. 1. Stakeholder groups and the relationships between them. Sources: Based on Argenti (1997) and Rowley (1997)).

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they have no substantial relationship with the organisation). This implies that almost any group can be a legitimate organisational stakeholder. However, Mitchell et al. (1997) do recognise the potential for this situation to change over time and refer to stakeholder groups that presently lack legitimacy as “latent stakeholders”. They go further to identify “dangerous stakeholders” as being those that have highly salient interests but little or no legitimacy. Despite this lack of legitimacy, however, the group is a relevant stakeholder of the organisation, which may consider it in its interests to attend to the group’s concerns. The discussion returns to the concept of salience shortly. Narrow definitions, on the other hand, tend to argue that stakeholder legitimacy is based on the practical realities of the organisation having limited resources, time and attention to address all stakeholder claims. As such, organisations tend to limit the scope of their stakeholder management to just those groups that have a direct relevance to their economic interests and, indeed, are necessary for the organisation’s survival. It is therefore apparent that stakeholder theorists do not agree on how best to define legitimacy (Phillips, 2003). What they do tend to agree on, however, is that even if a group considers itself to be a legitimate stakeholder of the organisation, the organisation may not recognise it as such. Friedman and Miles (2002), for example, argue that whether or not a particular stakeholder group will be considered legitimate depends on whether the organisation has sufficient freedom to disregard its interests. When a group’s interests are not considered compatible with those of the organisation and the organisation is free to disregard those interests, then the optimal strategy for the organisation may simply be to exclude that group from its decision-making agenda. While the stakeholder group may consider its interests to be legitimate, the organisation does not. This leads on to a second closely related question, of whether the organisation needs to pay equal attention to all its legitimate stakeholder groups. This is a particularly controversial issue in stakeholder theory. Some theorists argue that there is no reason to assume that the interests of any one group should take precedence over those of any other (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). Others writers disagree, although their reasons for disagreement tend to diverge. Freeman (1984) himself distinguishes between primary and secondary stakeholders: the former having formal, official or contractual linkages to the organisation and the latter not. The implication is that the primary stakeholder groups are of more direct relevance to the organisation’s decision making than the secondary ones. Mitchell et al. (1997) refer to this concept as “salience”. However, their concept of salience is based on the degree of legitimacy the group has to have its concerns included in the organisation’s decision making, the degree of power the group has to ensure that its agenda is considered and the urgency of the issues involved from the organisation’s point of view. A stakeholder group may be lacking in any one of these attributes and, while still being an organisational stakeholder, would not receive significant attention from the organisation because it lacks salience. Jamal and Getz (1995) also identify the issue of power as being an important factor in determining the degree to which an organisation will incorporate the interests of a particular stakeholder group into its decision making. A legitimate stakeholder group will normally possess some degree of power over the decision-making process (Gray & Hay, 1986). They will also have a “right” to be involved in the decision-making process insofar as their welfare may be affected by the decisions that are made. However, the stakeholder group’s ability to wield power may be tempered by their capacity to act (Gray, 1985). This may occur when stakeholders lack the resources, skills, experience or organisational ability to participate effectively in decision making.

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Sheehan and Ritchie (2005), meanwhile, use the concept of salience to explain why organisations may treat their legitimate stakeholders in different ways. The basis of their argument is that the organisation practicing stakeholder management will typically maintain closer and more meaningful relationships with those groups it considers to have greater salience, having looser and less serious relationships with those considered to have less salience. Thus, while a given group may be legitimate stakeholders of an organisation, the organisation does not engage with it intensively because it lacks salience. Jawahar and McLaughlin (2001), meanwhile, argue that particular stakeholder groups may become more or less salient as the organisation passes through the organisational life cycle. A newly established organisation may, for example, consider the interests of customers to be more salient than those of local residents; if the organisation does not meet the needs and expectations of its customers then it will not survive in the longterm for the interests of its other stakeholder groups to be of relevance. The implication is that even if local residents are held to be legitimate stakeholders of the organisation, they may not be considered to be as salient as other groups. Local residents may therefore have a legitimate interest in the organisation yet still find their concerns low down on its decision-making agenda because the issues involved are only of limited salience to the organisation. There is, then, no widespread agreement on how best to conceptualise the notions of stakeholder identity, legitimacy and salience in stakeholder theory. For the purposes of this paper, therefore, any individual or group that can affect or be affected by the decision making of an organisation is identified as a stakeholder. Stakeholder legitimacy is then an absolute notion e in that a given stakeholder is either considered by the organisation to be legitimate or it is not e and this is determined by whether the stakeholder actually does affect or is affected by the organisation’s performance in meeting its objectives. When the concerns of a stakeholder group actually come to bear on the decision making of the organisation, then the organisation is legitimised. Meanwhile, legitimate stakeholder groups will have different degrees of salience for the organisation’s decision making. This depends on the relative power of the group to make the organisation attend to its concerns and the power of the organisation to ignore those concerns, as well as the gravity and urgency of those concerns for the organisation. Salience is thus a relative notion and may change over time as power balances shift and as the external environment changes, causing some issues to have more importance or immediacy than others. The power of a stakeholder group to force its issues onto the organisation’s decision-making agenda, or the power of the organisation to ignore these issues, may be constrained by a lack of resources, time or skills. The organisation can nevertheless be expected to devote more resources to dealing with the concerns of stakeholder groups that express more salient concerns. 2.3. Stakeholder theory applied to tourism Stakeholder theory has been developed largely in the intraorganisational domain and applied widely in the study of business strategy. The situation is quite different in the context of tourism research, however, where the theory has been applied mainly in the inter-organisational domain, particularly in the study of tourism planning (e.g. Caffyn & Jobbins, 2003; Getz & Jamal, 1994; Jamal & Getz, 1995; Sautter & Leisen, 1999; Timothy, 1999; Wray, 2011), tourism policy communities (Whitford, 2009; Wray, 2009) and various forms of collaborative action such as destination marketing (e.g. Morgan, Pritchard, & Piggott, 2003; Palmer, 1998; Palmer & Bejou, 1995; Selin & Chavez, 1995). This is perhaps not very surprising given the complex and fragmented nature of the tourism environment (Palmer & Bejou, 1995).

Delivering tourism products typically involves the interaction of a large number of suppliers from a wide range of economic sectors, including accommodation, tour operation, transport, entertainment, retail, finance and visitor attractions (Sheehan & Ritchie, 2005). Furthermore, the actors involved are commonly drawn from all three governance sectors: private, public and voluntary. Such conditions make it very difficult for any individual organisation to operate in isolation from the others (Jamal & Getz, 1995) and this must be reflected in the organisation’s decision making if the organisation is to be successful in meeting its objectives. Authors such as Andereck and Vogt (2000), Sautter and Leisen (1999) and Timothy (1999) argue that it is very difficult to bring tourism plans to fruition unless all of those implicated in them have been involved from the very beginning. This suggests that local residents are likely to represent not only a legitimate stakeholder group in the tourism planning context but also a relatively salient one. Whether this is equally true in the intra-organisational domain of tourism is by no means clear. Few studies have attempted to apply stakeholder theory in this context; fewer still have applied stakeholder theory to specific visitor attractions. A rare exception is the study by Aas, Ladkin, and Fletcher (2005) of an organisation’s efforts to promote heritage conservation and tourism through stakeholder engagement at the World Heritage Site (WHS) of Luang Prabang in Laos. The study found that stakeholder participation in decision making was “minimal”, corresponding to the “informing” rung of Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of involvement. While local residents were considered legitimate as stakeholders of the WHS, their practical involvement in decision making was limited. Two main lines of argument were put forward to explain this. First it was noted that the “stakeholder workgroup” established for the WHS did not include any local residents but was comprised entirely of government representatives. This was justified on the basis that involving local residents was still a relatively new concept in Laos. Secondly, there appeared to be an assumption among tourism industry groups that local residents lacked the knowledge or skills to participate effectively in decision making. Aas et al. (2005) argue that this is quite a common situation in developing countries. They also acknowledge that little work has been done in the area of stakeholder management by attractions in the developed-country context. 2.4. Levels of local resident involvement Few researchers have attempted to link stakeholder theory to the concept of degrees of citizen participation in organisational decision making, as proposed by Arnstein (1969) and further developed by writers such as Green and Hunton-Clarke (2003). Arguably, however, there is significant value doing so. In Arnstein’s original formulation there are eight levels or “rungs” of citizen participation (see Fig. 2). The lowest two rungs relate to engagement strategies that seek only to manipulate the stakeholder group. The organisation thus interacts with local residents only when doing so is necessary to forestall action on the part of that group, or particular individuals from it, that would have an adverse impact on the interests of the organisation. The middle three rungs of Arnstein’s ladder, meanwhile, relate to tokenistic strategies that seek to placate, consult or inform local residents. Communication tends to be one-way, with the aim of keeping local people happy and encouraging them to interact with the organisation, albeit on the organisation’s terms. The top three rungs of Arnstein’s ladder, meanwhile, relate to strategies where local residents become increasingly involved in the decision making of the organisation, the uppermost rung representing the situation where local people have full control over the organisation concerned. Arnstein’s ladder of participation has received a significant amount of discussion in the literature. A number of attempts have

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Arnstein’s Typology

Arnstein’s Ladder

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Green and HuntonClarke’s Typology

Citizen Control Degrees of citizen power

Delegated power

Decisional participation

Partnership Placation Consultative participation Degrees of tokenism

Consultation Informing Therapy

Non-participation

Informative participation

Manipulation

Fig. 2. Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation Based on Green and Hunton-Clarke (2003) and Tritter and McCallum (2006).

also been made to improve upon the model, both by providing a more descriptive explanation of the kinds of strategy that tend to be adopted on each rung of the ladder and by attempting to integrate the model with others typologies of participation that have been proposed. With regard to the former aim, it is apparent that most of the work that has been done on elaborating the organisational strategies adopted on each rung of the ladder has tended to be in the context of the participation of local people in public-sector organisations, such as policy making at various levels of government, involvement in planning and citizen mobilisation in civilsociety organisations (Green & Hunton-Clarke, 2003). No studies appear to have set out to elaborate the stakeholder engagement strategies of a mixed public-private-voluntary contexts such as the attraction sector. With regard to the latter aim, Green and Hunton-Clarke (2003) present an integrated typology of resident participation, drawing together a number of models, including Wilcox’s (1994) simplification of Arnstein’s ladder and Pretty and Shah’s (1994) “typology of participation”. The resulting synthetic model is reduced to three stages: informative, consultative and decisional (see Fig. 2). In the first of these stages, informative participation, involvement normally takes the form of one-way transmission of information from the organisation to its various stakeholder groups. An example would be advertising a product to customers or announcing a special event to local residents. The role of the stakeholder is merely to receive the information and participation is passive: the stakeholder does not actively participate. As such, the organisation has complete control over the engagement process and many attraction managers would consider this to be a benefit of this approach. A disadvantage of this approach is that local people have little opportunity to influence the decision making that will ultimately have an impact upon their interests as local residents. On the other hand, there are instances of the informative approach where the local resident does have a minor input into the process and hence some limited influence over the attraction’s decision making. For example, Green and Hunton-Clarke (2003) argue that the organisation may ask local residents to fill in a basic questionnaire. They go on to argue, however, that participation in such a task is unlikely to influence the organisation’s decision making very much, as the purpose of such questionnaires is usually to obtain a single “headline” figure or broad view, rather than to explore stakeholders’ attitudes, beliefs, experiences and so forth.

At the second level of involvement, consultative participation, stakeholders are asked for their views at a deeper level and are sometimes even invited to put proposals forward to the organisation. This does not mean, however, that the views or proposals offered are always acted upon. An example of this kind of strategy of stakeholder management would be the use of customer focus groups in order to inform new product development or the use of meetings with local residents in making decisions about site planning. Organisations may find this level of participation preferable because the organisation is at liberty to use the results of the consultation exercise if they are deemed helpful or to ignore them if they are not. The results of the consultation may, for example, provide the organisation with insights into problems of which it was not previously aware. The consultative participation approach therefore allows stakeholder interests to shape the organisation’s operational focus and strategic direction only insofar as those who manage the organisation allow it to do so. Where consultation is conducted only after a decision has been made by the organisation it is, of course, not true consultation; those consulted cannot actually influence the decision and are really just being asked to validate it. The third level of involvement, decisional participation, refers to stakeholders being involved directly in the decision-making process. Their views and knowledge may be shared and considered from the outset of any programme or plan. This means that not only can more views be fed into the decision-making process but also they are considered at an earlier stage, which actually allows them to shape the scope and trajectory of decision making. In this way, stakeholders’ interests can be integrated into both the operational focus and the strategic direction of the organisation. Generally speaking, the earlier that a stakeholder is drawn into the decision-making process, the more control they have over the outcomes of that process. Some organisations may, of course, consider this to be a disadvantage of this level of involvement because it allows the organisation to be deflected from its preferred strategic path. Proponents of stakeholder theory would, however, consider this essential if the organisation is ultimately to meet the objectives it has set itself. This does not mean that stakeholders necessarily have the capacity for decisional participation (Aas et al., 2005) and this could be seen to represent a considerable challenge to stakeholder involvement both in theory and practice (Getz & Jamal, 1994).

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Of particular note is that Green and Hunton-Clarke (2003) also distinguish between ad hoc and on-going stakeholder engagement. Their view is that organisations tend to engage with their various stakeholder groups only on an ad hoc basis: usually when there are major decisions to be made or when there is a crisis of some kind that implicates stakeholder group in some way. Stakeholder management, at any of the three levels described above, tends in practice to be used as a technique for resolving specific issues or conflicts as they arise, rather than as a permanent component of the organisation’s decision-making processes. This paper proposes that stakeholder groups with different degrees of legitimacy and salience will be treated in different ways by the organisation practicing stakeholder management. More specifically, organisations will tend to ignore stakeholders that lack legitimacy. Organisations will engage only in superficial ways with stakeholders that possess legitimacy but have limited salience. This corresponds to an “informational” engagement strategy. Those stakeholders who have legitimacy and some salience will tend to be engaged with using “consultative” strategies that are intended to stimulate compliance, rather than to integrate stakeholder’s concerns into the organisation’s decision making. Only those stakeholders that have both legitimacy and considerable salience, meanwhile, will be engaged with by drawing them deeply into the organisation’s decision-making framework, corresponding to the “decisional” level of participation. 3. Salience of local residents to the visitor attraction Evidence relating specifically to the salience of local residents is both scarce and mixed. Some studies suggest that local residents tend to be treated as a relatively low priority in the organisation’s decision making. For example, a Delphi study of UK heritage tourism attraction managers, policy makers and academics by Garrod and Fyall (2000) found that local residents were ranked in last place in terms of their importance in attraction decision making. The implication is that this group is typically considered to be of little salience by attraction managers. More recent studies, however, seem to suggest that the salience of local residents is being more fully recognised by attraction managers. These studies tend to fall into three categories, which are now discussed in turn. 3.1. Relationships between local residents and visitors Local residents may be negatively impacted by the behaviour of attraction visitors. Anecdotal evidence provides examples such as visitors trespassing on private property or parking their cars thoughtlessly (English Tourist Board, 1991). Visitors might also act in ways that meet with the disapproval of local residents, such as behaviour associated with the overconsumption of alcohol or taking photographs of them or their property without permission (Garrod, 2008). Visitors may also add to traffic congestion in the local area, for example when tourist coaches load and unload passengers (Curtis, 1998). Local people may increasingly feel besieged by visitors or that they no longer have ownership or control over their neighbourhood (English Tourist Board, 1991). The potential also exists for impacts to run in the opposite direction, i.e. for the visitor satisfaction to be affected adversely by the behaviour of local residents. This could take the form of open hostility towards visitors, for example deliberate unfriendly behaviour or rudeness, or it might simply take the form of disinterest towards visitors and neglect of their needs (Garrod, Fyall, & Leask, 2002). Any such behaviour is also likely to result in adverse media coverage, which may have further knock-on impacts in terms of the demand for visits to the attraction.

Only a small number of empirical studies have focused on such issues but those which have tend to identify resident impacts as being relatively salient to the management of the visitor attraction. The study of managers and owners of Scottish visitor attractions conducted in 1999, for example, found that the behaviour of visitors towards local residents was reported as being very or extremely important to the management of their site by 42.1% of respondents, placing this impact sixth in a ranked list of 18 potential visitor impacts (Garrod et al., 2002). In the same study, 58.2% of Scottish attraction managers believed the behaviour of local residents towards visitors to be very or extremely important, placing the impact first in a list of 18 potential visitor impacts. 3.2. Local residents as visitors There is a tendency in the literature to assume that customers and local residents represent distinct stakeholder groups (e.g. Argenti, 1997). As such, the organisation is expected to manage the two groups in different ways. In practice, however, this assumption is unlikely to be valid. Local residents may themselves purchase the organisation’s products, thereby becoming its customers. They may also encourage others to purchase the organisation’s products, for example through recommendation. This may be especially relevant in the context of attractions, where local residents may be important not only as a visitor segment in their own right but also a generator of additional visits as they accompany friends and relatives to the attraction. Local residents may also be important providers of word-of-mouth promotion of the attraction by recommending it to their social contacts, including people who are currently visiting the area or considering doing so. The overlap between residents as visitors has rarely been explored in the tourism literature. An exception is the study by Jurowski and Gursoy (2004), which identifies the importance of the additional recreation benefits provided by tourism in determining residents’ attitudes towards its growth in their local area. This finding is supported by the work of Wang and Pfister (2008), which emphasises the role of non-economic benefits in shaping local residents’ support for tourism. Such benefits include the opportunity to visit the tourism area and make use of its resources such as shops and restaurants. While these arguments tend to be made in the context of the general development of tourism in a local area, there is no reason to assume that such effects do not operate at the level of specific visitor attractions. Indeed, the opportunity to visit the attraction itself may be considered by residents to be a benefit of it being based in their local area. The above illustrates an insight that is very important to this study. Local residents are but one constituent element of the wider local community. The local community tends to comprise a more heterogeneous set of individuals, who often hold multiple interests that extend beyond those associated with living in the vicinity of the attraction. Examples include being a visitor to the attraction, working at the attraction as an employee and, as we shall see below, working at the attraction as a volunteer. These interests are not generally identical to those of being a local resident; indeed they are sometimes in contradiction to one another. For example, an individual may dislike the extra traffic congestion caused by additional visitors to the attraction while at the same time appreciating the employment opportunities that growing visitor numbers at the attraction may bring. Individuals can therefore be allied to more than one stakeholder group. The implication of this is, of course, that stakeholder interests may overlap. This confirms the relevance of the network concept of stakeholder influences, as shown in Fig. 1. It also tends to make the task of stakeholder management more complex and difficult than earlier formulations of stakeholder theory suggest.

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Moreover, it raises the possibility that some attraction managers are underestimating the salience of local residents as one of their stakeholder groups. Recognising the potential importance of local people as a visitor group would probably serve to reinforce managers’ perception of their salience as stakeholders of the attraction. 3.3. Local residents as volunteers Many visitor attractions rely on a volunteer workforce to complement their paid staff. Holmes (2003), for example, cites a study conducted in Canada in 2001, which suggested that volunteers made up 65% of the workforce in museums. Holmes (2006) has also noted that 92% of all museums in the UK make some use of volunteer workers. While practice varies on a case-bycase basis, volunteers can be seen working in almost every conceivable role within attractions, from tour guides to publicrelations assistants. While the economic contribution made by volunteers to specific attractions has not been empirically estimated, the amount of time contributed by volunteers at attractions is clearly considerable. Indeed, as Orr (2006) points out, without their volunteers many museums would struggle even to survive. This indicates a growing salience of volunteers in the decision making of many attractions. At the same time, the distinction between volunteers and employees is becoming less distinct, with the job descriptions and day-to-day activities of paid employees and volunteers often being very similar, even within a given attraction (Holmes, 2006; Jago & Deery, 1999, 2001). Since volunteers perform such roles in an unpaid capacity, it could be argued that the growing tendency for attractions to use volunteers is motivated by a desire to enhance shareholder value. On the other hand, it could be argued that the overlap between volunteers and local residents as stakeholders of the attraction is also becoming more evident. Holmes and Smith (2009) indicate the vast majority of volunteering at attractions involves short travel distances, long-term commitments and regular contributions. This implies that attraction volunteers also tend to be local residents. It also indicates that attraction managers could perceive local residents to be increasing in salience as a stakeholder group, not directly but indirectly through their membership of another stakeholder group that is becoming more salient in its own right. As noted above, however, the tendency is for members of the local community to hold multiple and overlapping memberships of different stakeholder groups. Local community members may not just be local residents but also paid employees, volunteers, business partners of the attraction or even financial investors in it. This clearly complicates the task of incorporating local resident interests into the organisation’s decision making. 4. Study methods This study is based on two main empirical sources. The first was a web-based survey conducted in 2009 of all paid-entry visitor attractions in Scotland. The purpose of the survey was to identify the degree of salience of local residents in the decision making of the attraction, as well as to identify some of the ways in which those attractions engage with their local residents as a stakeholder group. Respondents were invited to answer a number of questions based on a four-point Likert scale with respect to the various pressures they perceive to have a bearing on their decision making, along with two open-ended questions asking them to identify and then explain the main ways in which they engage with their local residents. Further questions about the nature of the attraction were also asked. While there have been a limited number of studies relating to the

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management of Scottish visitor attractions (e.g. Fyall, Leask, & Garrod, 2001; Garrod et al., 2002; Garrod, Leask, & Fyall, 2006; Leask, Fyall, & Garrod, 2002), none so far has focused explicitly on the relationships between attractions and their local residents. The survey was undertaken through the use of a web-based questionnaire. Potential respondents were identified from various lists published by the Historic Houses Association, the National Trust for Scotland and Visit Scotland. This allowed a near census of paid-entry attractions in Scotland to be approached with a view to completing the questionnaire. Furthermore, in an effort to obtain responses from as many of those attractions as possible, a number of respondents who did not appear to have access to the Internet were sent the questionnaire by mail. The sample did not include free-admission visitor attractions due to the technical difficulties in achieving an appropriate sample of this group of attractions. The owner or manager of each visitor attraction was identified by name wherever possible and the questionnaire was directed to that person specifically. All participants were assured confidentiality of their responses. A total of 449 visitor attraction managers were contacted and asked to complete the survey: 378 by email and the remainder by mail. A reminder was sent to any respondent not completing the questionnaire by the suggested deadline, resulting in a total of 203 questionnaires being returned. The return rate for the survey was thus 45%, which is considered more than adequate for web-based surveys, where figures in the region of 10% are considered standard. “Survey Gizmo” software was used to administer the web-based questionnaire. The data from returned postal questionnaires were then added manually. All of the returned questionnaires we usable and no systematic differences were found in the responses of those returned on the web and those returned by mail. The data were therefore pooled and analysis performed on the full dataset (n ¼ 203). Table 1 provides a summary of the profile of the survey respondents by attraction category, ownership status, annual visitor numbers, annual turnover, standard admission charge and period of opening. The quantitative data were then entered into SPSS for statistical analysis. The chi-square statistic was identified as being the most suitable given the type of data collected, which were in the form of Likert scale values. Responses to the open-ended questions, meanwhile, were subjected to an iterative sorting process in which two members of the research team sorted and re-sorted the responses into thematic groupings. As the process went through various iterations, some groups were collapsed together and some new groups were identified. Responses were then reallocated between groups in order to achieve the best possible fit of responses into classification groups. A third member of the team then reviewed the process in order to confirm the robustness of the outcome. The second source of empirical evidence was three semistructured, in-depth interviews with managers of attractions who had responded to the web-based questionnaire. The attractions concerned were purposively selected in order to provide a range of contexts and approaches to local resident engagement. Interviewees were asked about how the attraction engages with local residents and were encouraged to give tangible examples. They were also asked about the mechanisms of resident engagement and the perceived outcomes of such. The question prompts are provided in the appendix to this paper. The interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed in full. The transcripts were later used as the basis of the three case study vignettes. 5. Findings on the salience of local residents as a stakeholder group The findings of the survey with regard to perceived salience are shown in Table 2. This used the same question format and

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Table 1 Profile of survey respondents.

Table 2 Perceived severity of visitor impacts at Scottish visitor attractions (n ¼ 203). Number

%

Visitor impact

Attraction category Castle Garden Historic House Industry Museum/Gallery Visitor Centre Wildlife Other Total

44 13 18 22 35 28 11 32 203

21.7 6.4 8.9 10.8 17.2 13.8 5.4 15.8 100.0

Ownership Historic Scotland Private National Trust for Scotland Other Trust Local Authority Other Total

54 64 20 42 7 16 203

26.6 31.5 9.9 20.7 3.4 7.9 100.0

Annual visitor numbers Less than 5000 5000e20,000 20,001e50,000 50,001e200,000 More than 200,000 Total

61 62 31 38 11 203

30.1 30.5 15.3 18.7 5.4 100.0

Annual Turnover Less than £25,000 £25,000 to £100,000 £100,001 to £500,000 £500,001 to £1 million Over £1 million Not stated Total

77 36 42 11 18 19 203

37.9 17.7 20.7 5.4 8.9 9.4 100.0

Standard Admission Charge £3.50 or less Over £3.50 Total

66 137 203

32.5 67.5 100.0

Period of Opening 12 months Seasonal (up to 11 months) Total

91 102 203

46.3 53.7 100.0

categories as the 1999 survey (Garrod et al., 2002), which allows for direct comparison between these two points in time. The analysis suggests that attraction managers continue to recognise the significance of visitor impacts on local residents. While the percentage of managers reporting visitors’ behaviour towards locals to be very or extremely important was slightly lower than in the 1999 survey, this was true of all of the impacts covered in the survey. Respondents to the 2009 survey ranked visitor impacts on local residents in fourth place among the same 18 potential visitor impacts. Chi-square analysis identified a significant relationship between the importance of this impact and attraction ownership (c2 ¼ 12.886, d.f. ¼ 5, p ¼ 0.024), with managers of properties owned by Historic Scotland and privately being more likely to view this impact as important to them. A statistically significant relationship was also found with attraction turnover (c2 ¼ 12.086, d.f. ¼ 5, p ¼ 0.034), those managing attractions with a turnover between £25,000 and £500,000 tending to perceive this impact as being more important than those managing properties with either a smaller or larger turnover. The study also found the impacts of residents’ behaviour on visitor to be relatively important. Respondents placed resident behaviour towards visitors second in order of importance (with 46% of managers considering it to be important to their site). Further analysis found a significant relationship with attraction ownership,

Not/quite important (%)

Very/extremely important (%)

(a) Overcrowding Occasional, whole site Occasional, parts of site Persistent, whole site Persistent, parts of site

71.4 69.3 71.6 71.6

28.6 30.7 28.4 28.4

(a) Wear and Tear Trampling Handling Humidity Temperature Pilfering Graffiti

58.8 64.6 62.1 64.8 64.6 67.9

41.2 35.4 37.9 35.2 35.4 32.1

(c) Traffic-related problems Occasional, one-site Occasional, in locality Persistent, on-site Persistent, in locality

65.0 65.2 71.5 68.7

35.0 34.8 28.5 31.3

59.0 54.0 38.9

41.0 46.0 61.1

(d) Other problems Visitors’ behaviour towards locals Locals’ behaviour towards visitors Visitor management compromising authenticity

n.b. figures exclude don’t know and nil responses.

with managers of attractions owned by Historic Scotland or privately being more likely to view this impact as being important (c2 ¼ 13.197, d.f. ¼ 5, p ¼ 0.022). There survey therefore indicates that local residents tend to be one of an attraction’s more salient stakeholder groups. This is not to suggest that perceptions of the salience of local residents are even across all contexts. Indeed, there is empirical evidence elsewhere to suggest that it may vary according to country context (Garrod, Leask, & Fyall, 2006) and attraction ownership status. The finding does, however, highlight the importance of recognising the dyadic nature of stakeholder relationships, particularly in so far as the interests of individuals in one stakeholder group may be impacted upon positively or negatively by the actions of individuals who are part of another. It also raises the question of what attraction managers who recognise the salience of local residents to their decision making should do to turn such recognition into action. 6. Strategies for engaging local residents The foregoing discussion has outlined a number of ways in which local resident interests might be particularly salient to the decision making involved in managing attractions. Empirical analysis further suggests that managers of attractions generally recognise this to be the case. Recognising the salience of local residents as a stakeholder group is, however, only the first step to drawing them into the attraction’s decision-making processes: specific strategies are needed to engage effectively with them. When asked to give examples of how they went about engaging local residents as a stakeholder group, respondents to the web questionnaire provided a wide range of answers. These were grouped thematically and each related to the various tiers of participation depicted in Fig. 2. 6.1. Free or discounted entry for local residents Perhaps the simplest and most direct strategy for engaging with local residents is to offer them free or discounted admission. This recognises the dual role of local residents as customers of the

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attraction. The strategy might, for example, take the form of a special season ticket or ground pass. An example of this is at the New Lanark WHS, which offers free entry to around 200 people who live in and around the site. The purpose of such arrangements is simply to encourage local residents to develop an emotional bond with the attraction, rather than to embed them deeply into the attraction’s decision-making processes. Encouraging local residents to bond with the attraction may help to secure their loyalty and general support for the work of the attraction. Over time this may lead to the pass-holder deciding to volunteer with the attraction. Offering local residents a free or discounted entry pass may also make them more likely to bring their friends and family for a visit. As such, this form of resident engagement would be classified as “informative participation”. 6.2. Open days and special events Also known as “open doors days”, “gala days” and “free days”, these are days when the attraction is opened specially for the benefit of local residents. Sometimes such arrangements are extended to all visitors. Guided tours may be offered for free or at a reduced rate on these days, and these can be useful in enabling local residents to find out more about any new developments. For example, one attraction in the survey offered a limited period of free admission to local residents whenever new exhibitions or activities were opened on the site. Attractions may also hold special events, either specifically for their local residents or for the general public with local residents receiving special invitations. This is seen as a good way of securing the goodwill or local residents, as well as getting local residents and visitors to mix with one another, thereby helping to forestall or ease frictions among them. Some attractions held a special event or party for local residents once a year. Others held a series of educational talks aimed primarily at local residents. The purpose of these is usually to encourage local residents to feel an affinity with the visitor attraction and ultimately to strengthen their support for it. As such, this approach conforms to the “informative” form of participation. 6.3. “Friends”, “members”, “ambassador” and “advocate” schemes An increasing number of attractions, particularly museums and those of a heritage nature such as cathedrals, churches, theatres and industrial heritage attractions, have developed friends’ schemes. They are also known as membership schemes (especially in the USA) or they may style themselves as societies and associations of the organisation. An indication of their importance is given by Slater (2004), who in the early 2000s estimated that there were approximately 3.5 million members of such schemes in the UK alone. The majority of organisations operating friends’ schemes are of charitable status and most are small in size (Slater, 2005). The membership schemes operated by the National Trust for Scotland, Historic Scotland and the Historic Houses Association are much larger but would also fit under this category. In return for an annual (or perhaps lifetime) subscription fee, members of such schemes receive a range of benefits, such as free admission to the site, reciprocal free admission to other attractions, free day passes for their families, invitations to special events, newsletters or information mailings, priority booking facilities, discounts in the gift shop and the use of special facilities such as friends’ rooms (Hayes & Slater, 2003). Slater (2003) argues that the principal objective of such schemes has traditionally been to undertake fundraising for the organisation. Increasingly, however, friends schemes e particularly the larger ones e have a wider array of objectives, including administration, collections management, audience development and relationship marketing, as well as the recruitment of volunteers and advocates.

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Campbell (2003), meanwhile, argues that the objectives of such schemes are to generate financial support from customers, to generate spiritual or moral support, to encourage loyalty from the biggest spenders, to broaden the audience, to increase audience size, to generate new ideas, to attract new volunteers and to encourage greater involvement from supporters, especially local residents. Several respondents to the questionnaire also reported using local residents as ambassadors (or “advocates”) of the attraction. Some attractions have developed formal advocate or ambassador schemes. Often these are targeted specifically at recruiting owners of local business as ambassadors. Others have established looser and more informal relationships, in which individuals as well as local businesses are encouraged to join. The arrangement usually involves ambassadors being offered inducements such as free or reduced-price admission for guests or themselves, invitations to social events or concessions such as free training, in return for agreeing to promote and endorse the attraction in various ways (Our Place Network, 2008). A local accommodation provider might, for example, agree to place the attraction’s promotional leaflet on the side tables of their guest bedrooms or to recommend the attraction when guests ask for information about what there is to do in the area. This form of engagement with local residents is more advanced than simply “informative” participation. In particular, the arrangement gives local residents a formal or semi-formal role in the organisation, where they become partners of the organisation. As such, this method of resident engagement reinforces linkages between the interests of the attraction and those of its local residents, effectively “bringing the friends and ambassadors on board” the agenda of the attraction. However, it would be stretching a point to argue that this represents a form of “consultative participation”, in that residents are not able to influence the decision making of the organisation, only to ally with its vision and mission should they chose to do so. 6.4. Encourage local residents to use the attraction’s facilities Local residents may feel greater attachment to the visitor attraction if they are permitted to use its resources. One of the respondents to the survey noted, for example, that the local ornithological club held their meetings in their visitor centre, while another made its premises available for an event to raise funds for a local church. Other respondents indicated that local residents regularly use their site as a leisure resource and local residents are therefore also stakeholders in the sense that they are customers. Local residents are probably the most loyal repeat customers of most visitor attractions, often coming to the attraction simply to use its coffee shop, café or gift shop, or to have a picnic or walk their dog in the grounds (e.g. Packer & Ballantyne, 2002; Slater, 2007). In remote locations, the ancillary facilities available at the attraction site may be the only ones available in the local area. Local residents may also wish to hire the facilities of the visitor attraction for weddings, parties and other social functions. Thus, for example, one attraction in the survey is popular as a wedding venue, its historic features providing an unusual photographic backdrop. Such diversification ventures have become an important source of revenue for many attractions, particularly heritage-based ones such as historic houses and castles. However, they also offer an opportunity to engage with local residents and to secure their goodwill. This corresponds to the “informative” tier of participation. 6.5. Working with local residents To this point, the paper has outlined stakeholder strategies that involve bringing the local residents into the visitor attraction. The

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alternative is for attraction staff to venture out into the local area to interact with its residents. Thus, for example, one attraction manager in the survey was participating in the local heritage society, while others were involved in the organising committees of local festivals, fêtes and other such events. Another strategy is to work in the local area though specific projects and initiatives, for example working with local schools on nature or history projects. By getting staff out among local people, attractions can demonstrate their commitment to good relations with local residents, as well as to identify and better understand the needs of local residents. They will then be in a stronger position to address the needs of local residents in their decision making. This is not, however, consultation in its true sense, so such an attraction might be said still to be at the lowest, “informative” level of local resident engagement. 6.6. Communication with local residents Communication with local residents tends to be a one-way process. Thus, for example, attractions may leaflet houses in the local area or use posters to inform local residents about forthcoming events. This was one of the most common stakeholder strategies noted in the survey. A step further from this is to begin to build relationships with local residents by sending out regular newsletters or magazines. These are often already used by the visitor attraction in communicating to members of their friends and ambassador schemes, or their regular volunteers, so the additional cost of circulating them in the local area are often minimal. Attractions may also seek to gain good publicity through exposure in newspapers and the broadcasting media. The manager of one attraction in the survey, for example, writes a regular column for the local newspaper. In contrast, two-way communication, for example through regular public meetings or the establishment of a designated liaison group, would appear to be much less common. Typically, the degree to which local residents participate in the decision making of the attraction could therefore most readily be described as “informative” rather than “consultative” in style. 7. Local resident engagement by visitor attractions: three cases from Scotland The findings reported above suggest that while managers of Scottish attractions do generally recognise local residents to have salience as one of their stakeholder groups, most of the strategies they employ to engage with their interests tend to be “informative” in style. The aim of such strategies is typically to earn the goodwill of local residents or to make use of them as an additional resource for the attraction. The latter might be considered to be more closely allied to the theory of profit maximisation than it is to the theory of stakeholder management. This purpose of this section of the paper is to introduce three case study vignettes, which delve deeper into how attractions actually manage local residents as a stakeholder group. 7.1. New Lanark World Heritage Site New Lanark is located in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Valley area of Scotland. The New Lanark complex was founded in 1786 and consists of a series of cotton mills along with a village housing complex to accommodate the mill workers. The mills at New Lanark closed in 1968, at which time the complex went through a period of decline and decay. A charitable trust (initially known as the New Lanark Conservation Trust and now renamed the New Lanark Trust) was formed in 1974 to prevent the mill buildings and the village from being demolished. Extensive restoration work was then begun

on many of the buildings within the former mill complex. As part of the regeneration process, and with the establishment of a visitor centre in one of the former mill buildings, New Lanark has become a major visitor attraction. The site attracted over 330,000 paying visitors in 2009 (Visit Scotland, 2010). Many more visited the outlying grounds, which are not within the charging cordon. The heritage value of New Lanark was formally recognised in 2001 when it was inscribed onto UNESCO’s WHS list (Leask, 2009). New Lanark is atypical as a visitor attraction in that it has a resident population living on-site. The village is home to a resident population of 180 people living in 60 dwellings: 20 privately owned and 40 rented from the Trust. One aim of the Trust is to preserve and conserve the New Lanark complex as a sustainable community within which there is a stable resident population, while also offering new and worthwhile employment opportunities for residents. In order to facilitate engagement with the resident population, a community liaison committee, known as the New Lanark Village Group, was formed. Membership of the Group is open to all residents and costs £1. The New Lanark management group, including the Director herself, participate in all the Group’s meetings. Over the years, the Group has played an important role in the life of local residents, adopting mainly a social remit. This has involved organising regular social events and activities for residents. The Group was also originally responsible for the organisation and running of a Victorian Fair, which began in the 1970s and takes place in the run-up to Christmas each year. The proceeds of the fair are fed directly back to the residents to use as they see fit. The Victorian Fair has proven very popular with visitors, to the extent that it has grown too big for the Group to manage. The New Lanark Trust has therefore recently taken over its management. However the Group still has a substantial input into the organisation and running of the event. The Trust is also involved with the local primary school, the Trust’s Director sitting on the school council, and the school children regularly take part in the Victorian Fair. As a charitable trust, the New Lanark Trust operates under its own constitution document, trust deed, and memorandum and articles of association, which incorporate a strong element of local resident representation. The Trust’s operations are structured according to its various subsidiary company operations, those being New Lanark Homes, New Lanark Trading and the New Lanark Hotel & Health Club. Residents are most actively involved in the running of the New Lanark Homes subsidiary company, which is the one that is of most immediate interest to them given that they are occupants of these homes. Resident representatives sit on the management committee of this subsidiary and have a direct decision-making input through this body, the Community Council. Resident engagement by the two other subsidiaries tends to be more informal, there being no set timetable of meetings. Instead, residents are consulted as and when new developments and issues arise. Written details of any issues arising or proposals being made are circulated to all residents at the earliest possible opportunity. Regular meetings of the Village Group and Community Council are also used as communication vehicles to help the Trust reach its audience. Special meetings are then arranged, to which all residents are invited and where they are encouraged to voice their concerns and opinions. A recent example is the Trust’s involvement in raising awareness and facilitating consultation with local residents on the matter of a proposed extension to a local quarry, which if it goes ahead will encroach into the buffer zone around the WHS. The Trust seeks to achieve complete transparency in the way it operates and in its plans for the future of New Lanark, and is keen to encourage everyone residing within the boundaries of the New Lanark site to speak out on matters they feel passionate about. One

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resident, who is also a member of staff in the visitor centre, commented that sometimes residents feel they receive too much information about what is going on, resulting in “consultation fatigue”. The Trust, however, prefers to err on the side of caution by making sure that regular communication is maintained, and that residents have ample opportunity to make their voices and their concerns heard. Residents’ concerns do impact on decision making. For example, the Trust has recently given consideration to the sizes and types of events taking place in the hotel in response to concerns about noise and guest behaviour voiced by local residents. As a result, the hotel no longer accepts bookings for eighteenth or twenty-first birthday parties. Local resident engagement by New Lanark tends to focus mainly on residents living on-site in the village. There are, however, a number of outside links that the Trust has established. The on-site education officer at New Lanark works with local school children on special projects, sometimes with the involvement of artists or other specialists. Recent projects have included the making of a mosaic panel designed by the pupils as a feature in the new visitor centre roof garden and a banner-making project to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of migrants to New Lanark from the Highland “clearances”. The attraction also operates a “Friends of New Lanark” scheme. While the friends group does not take an extensive part in the organisation of events and activities, it does contribute by assisting with fundraising, as well as raising awareness through its regular newsletters. Press articles and advertisements have also helped to raise the profile of New Lanark and generate wider interest in New Lanark. The Trust also recognises past residents of New Lanark, including those who left the village following the closure of the mills in the 1960s. Consequently, during the 2009 Scottish “Year of Homecoming”, the attraction held a “Millworkers Reunited” event aimed at both the older generation who have past connections to New Lanark and their descendents. Local residents are thus active participants in decision making at New Lanark. A mutually respectful relationship has developed between residents and the Trust over the years, and residents appreciate that in the interest of maintaining a sustainable community in the long-term, some level of change must be embraced and appropriate new developments accommodated. The Trust recognises that residents are ready to accept that progress is inevitable, and with progress must come some degree of change. Major change must, however, ultimately result to an increase in resident welfare and the sustainability of the attraction if it is to be acceptable. One of the most notable outcomes of the Trust’s engagement with local residents has been the relatively low turnover of residents in the village. Indeed, there is a substantial waiting list of people who would like to move into the village. Over the years, perhaps the greatest concern among residents has been persistent traffic congestion in the village due to the arrival of visitors by car and coach. The Trust responded to such concerns by developing a visitor car park outside the village centre. The Trust also insists that coach drivers waiting to pick up visitors turn off their coaches’ engines so as to minimise the impact noise and exhaust fumes. Changes to resident parking arrangements, particularly a required change from parallel parking on both sides of the street to diagonal parking on one side only, caused some concern among residents initially but these were resolved through consultation with the residents through the Residents Group. A number of meetings were held in which the views of both the Trust and residents were aired, and the Trust was able to develop a compromise plan that was acceptable to both sides. This provides an example of effective consultation with local residents, in which stakeholder concerns are drawn into the organisation’s decision making.

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The interests of local residents are clearly perceived as being legitimate by decision makers in the Trust. As mentioned previously, this may be an atypical situation for attractions in that New Lanark actually has a resident population living on-site as well as in the surrounding area. The case study tends to suggest that these interests are considered sufficiently salient for the Trust to practice a “consultative” approach to engaging local residents. An example of how this approach has been effective is the consultation with residents to resolve concerns over the new resident parking system within the village. The consultative approach employed by New Lanark is, however, limited in three main ways. Firstly, local residents have formal representation on only one of the three subsidiaries of the Trust, which serves to limit their ability to influence decision making to issues related directly to housing. Local resident participation in other forms of decision making tends to be restricted to the lower “informative” level. Secondly, local residents living on-site are engaged with more intensively than those living in the surrounding area, suggesting that the interests of the latter group have less salience in the Trust’s decision making. Thirdly, consultation tends to take place in an ad hoc manner, as particular issues and concerns become pertinent. It is also notable that the agenda seems to be determined mainly by the Trust, which may limit the degree to which consultation may actually have a tangible impact on decision making. 7.2. The National Mining Museum Scotland The National Mining Museum Scotland is located in the Edinburgh and Lothians area of Scotland. It is based within the site of the former Lady Victoria Colliery in the town of Newtongrange. The colliery, sunk by the Lothian Coal Board in 1890, operated from 1894 through to 1981 and has been assigned “Listed Category A” status by Historic Scotland as it is deemed to be one of the most complete colliery complexes still in existence (in that the miners’ housing complex still exists nearby). After the colliery closed, the town went into a sharp decline. The colliery buildings also fell into a poor state of repair but were saved from demolition in 1984 when the Scottish Mining Museum Trust was established as a charitable trust. The Trust’s aim is to preserve and conserve what are widely considered to be the last tangible representations of the Scottish coal-mining industry, which played a significant role in the economic and social history of the country. Initially, the museum’s visitor centre and its collections were housed in the former colliery offices, but after securing Heritage Lottery funding in the mid-/late 1990s, a new visitor centre was established within some of the main colliery buildings. The colliery offices that previously housed the centre were then redeployed as administrative offices for the museum. Unlike New Lanark, there are no local residents living onsite and as such the National Mining Museum Scotland is more typical of Scottish attractions. Although the National Mining Museum Scotland is classed as a national museum, it is does not receive the same level of financial support as is afforded by the Scottish government to several of the other national museums such as, for example, the National Museum of Scotland or the National Museum of Flight. As such, it needs to find alternative sources of grant aid and funding to facilitate its day-to-day operation and any special projects it wishes to undertake. The museum received 45,186 paying visitors in 2009 (Visit Scotland, 2010). Engagement with local residents tends to be restricted to involvement with the schools in the surrounding area and trying to encourage local residents to contribute to special projects such as the museum’s oral history archive. These kinds of special project have tended to be initiated by the museum rather than by local people. The museum offers a programme of activities and events

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throughout the year. In view of the relatively disadvantaged economic status of the local community, these events and activities tend to focus on affordable, family-fun activities. The annual “gala day” is popular among local residents, with family tickets priced at £10. Aimed mainly at income generation, such activities offer only limited opportunities to for the museum to engage with local residents, although they undoubtedly generate much goodwill for the museum among local people. The museum is also keen to involve local people in helping to develop exhibitions, for example by contributing artefacts. The Education Officer is currently working in partnership with a theatre workshop and Fife Museums with a view to making a film about the 1926 miners’ strike. This will involve encouraging former mineworkers to contribute their stories and to participate in the filming. She is also currently working in partnership with Newbattle Abbey College on a project about the Midlothian gala days, which have long been, and still are, an important event in former mining communities such as Newtongrange. Funding constraints tend, however, to shape the museum’s approach to resident engagement. Thus, for example, while the museum does offer a small number of volunteering opportunities for local people, a lack of suitable resources available to manage them has recently forced the museum to scale back on the number it recruits. Similarly, while the museum has secured accreditation status with the Museums, Library and Archives Council, under which they are obliged to engage with and consult with their audiences to develop and improve services and operating practices, resource limitations have led to the museum being unable to fulfil these obligations. The result is that even when major issues arise, the museum does not have the resources to engage with the local residents about them. Presently, for example, there is an urgent need to secure funding to undertake conservation work necessary to stabilise the decaying colliery buildings. Yet the museum does not have the funds available to inform or consult with local residents; not even, it would appear, to gather signatures for a petition. Local residents are therefore not given much opportunity to interact, participate and influence the museum’s decision making. Much of what they hear about the museum comes from press articles published when crises arise, or through advertising for events and activities intended to generate additional income for the museum. Thus, for example, the museum has just completed a rebranding exercise. However, only museum staff and trustees were consulted about the exercise and given a chance to influence the final outcome. This was particularly unfortunate since a previous re-branding exercise carried out in the late 1990s proved controversial both with local residents and with visitors. While the staff may well have learnt from this experience, resource limitations imply that there is little they can do to put such lessons to use. It remains to be seen whether the latest re-branding will be considered appropriate and meaningful to local residents, who clearly have a major stake in its success. The root of the problem is that, as a small attraction with only very limited direct government funding, the museum relies heavily on external funding. Grant-awarding bodies do not usually fund resident engagement and consultation activities; indeed they often insist that such activities are undertaken prior to funding application being submitted. The museum thus finds itself in a vicious circle: unable to attract funding because it is not well-funded enough to undertake the consultation exercises needed to apply for most grants. As a result, the museum tends to rely on information based on simple, low-cost exercises such as comments left by visitors in the visitor book and casual conversations with visitors and local residents. Such techniques cannot realistically reveal much about how stakeholders really feel or allow them to shape what the museum should do differently in order to address their interests.

This case study suggests that local residents are acknowledged as having legitimate interests in the museum and that those interests are perceived by decision makers to have a considerable degree of salience. However, the museum is presently unable to engage with local residents regularly and intensively because it lacks both the financial and staff resources required. In such difficult financial circumstances, local resident engagement tends to be perceived as a luxury that the museum cannot afford. As such, the museum tends to restrict itself to employing an “informational” approach to resident participation. This represents the lowest level of participation as shown in Fig. 2. Even then, resident engagement is only partial at best, tending to be ad hoc and reactive to circumstances rather than proactive. While there have been some attempts to engage with the interests of residents as a stakeholder group, these have tended to be limited to the commercial concerns of the museum, for example the development of collections or raising additional income for the museum. Presumably these are the issues that are considered to be most salient by the organisation to its performance and hence are indispensible. At present, however, museum decision makers consider it impossible to engage with local residents more fully. 7.3. Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) operates as a charitable trust and was established in 1935. One of its most important properties is the historic battlefield of Culloden, which it acquired in the mid-1930s. The property, located in the Highlands of Scotland, is the site of the last battle ever to be fought on British soil (in 1746). Given the bloody nature of the events occurring both during and after the battle, the site has been designated as a war grave. The area of the battlefield site has been extended a number of times as various areas of land, which were adjacent to the core site and known to be part of the original battlefield, became available for acquisition. The site presently extends to approximately 180 acres. The NTS opened a visitor centre on the site to tell the story of the battle in 1970s. It was extended in the early 1980. However, it soon became apparent that the centre was inappropriately sited, being located at least partly on the actual battlefield. The NTS initiated a major redevelopment project for the property to relocate the visitor centre and thereby restore, conserve and present the battlefield site more appropriately. In 2007, the Trust opened a state-of-the-art visitor centre that offers an interpretation of the battle and its aftermath. The new visitor centre registered 112,178 paying visitors in 2009 (Visit Scotland, 2010). However it is likely that the true number of visitors to the site was much higher because access to the battlefield site is free and possible at any time. Furthermore, the NTS operates a membership scheme, with members receiving free admission to all NTS properties. Currently there are more than 310,000 members of the NTS (BBC News, 2009). As an organisation, the NTS makes various commitments to engaging and consulting with stakeholders. These are stated in the Trust’s Conservation Principles (NTS, 2003: 3e4) and reiterated in its “Access, Education & Enjoyment Principles” (NTS, 2005: 3) to the effect that: “the Trust aims to benefit, in the present generation, a wide range of stakeholders and communities of interest, including members, visitors (from the UK and abroad), tenants, donors, local communities and people of Scottish ancestry worldwide. It also aims to benefit those people who are currently not involved in the Trust’s work, but whose interest could be awakened in the future”. The Culloden Battlefield property also has its own set of property statements in which it accepts an obligation to apply this commitment at a local level. However, the Property Manager considers that there has been little need to consult actively with

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local people since the new visitor centre opened in late 2007, as the issues and matters arising have not been sufficiently important. One issue that the Property Manager has identified as potentially requiring consultation, however, is the proposal to build a new housing development within the area surrounding the battlefield site. The NTS feels that this will compromise the integrity of the site, as well as impacting negatively on the visitor experience. When more detail is known about the proposals, the Property Manager, in conjunction with colleagues in the NTS regional and head offices, expects to play a prominent role in raising awareness of the proposed threat to the battlefield site. She hopes that any related consultation meetings will be held at the new visitor centre in order to emphasise the NTS’s own concerns and its commitment to protecting what is perceived amongst Highland communities to be a treasured heritage resource, particularly by those with close associations to the battle itself. Engagement with local residents is therefore presently limited mainly to involvement with local schools. This particular focus of engagement prevails because the property has recently acquired its own learning team as a result of the opening of its new visitor centre. However, the Property Manager would now like to try to increase the degree of engagement the property has with the local communities that surround it. Plans are being explored to set up a newsletter for local residents (similar to one recently introduced for property staff), although it is presently unclear how it could be most effectively distributed. Local people make regular use of the café facilities at the centre, as well as the battlefield site itself for dog walking. The NTS-wide “Contribute and Conserve” policy of applying car-parking charges at all of its properties continues to be contentious, particularly for local residents who feel aggrieved at having to pay to park at the centre. The policy of levying parking charges is, however, determined centrally at NTS head office in Edinburgh, and as such is outside the Property Manager’s direct control. She is therefore presently looking at whether it would be possible to provide some sort of pass to local residents, which could offer a range of benefits such as reduced admission charges or preferential rates on purchases made in the café and shop. The centre offers a limited programme of activities and events throughout the year. However, these tend to focus more on the need to generate income than on resident engagement per se. The property does offer some volunteering opportunities in the visitor centre, both within the learning team and around the grounds. The Property Manager feels that, compared to the old visitor centre, the new centre is widely perceived as offering more interesting volunteering opportunities. She would like to increase the number of volunteers at the property further, which is possible now that the resources required to do so have become available. Management at the Centre clearly recognises local residents to have legitimate interests in the site and that some of these interests are of considerable salience. In terms of the levels of local resident participation show in Fig. 2, however, the evidence suggests that Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre would best be placed on the lowest, “informative participation” tier. Deciding which issues to address and how to address them is kept almost completely inhouse and decisions are made by various members of the centre’s management team. However, it is clear that the Property Manager wishes to develop a more consultative approach to resident engagement. This does not appear to be out of the question. Resource availability does not seem to be an insurmountable problem and, with current plans to build a new housing development within sight of the battlefield, an opportunity seems to be presenting itself. As issues such as this become more salient, the Centre may be able to devote resources to climbing the ladder of participation and engage with local residents on a more consultative basis.

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8. Conclusion Given the critical role that local residents are recognised to play in the development and management of tourism generally, this paper has sought to address the lack of studies that explore the involvement of local residents in the development and management of visitor attractions. Such a paucity of studies to date is difficult to reconcile with the significance attributed to attractions in the development of tourism or with the many important questions that currently remain to be answered in respect of how attraction managers can and should best engage with local residents. In particular, it is surprising that more authors have not attempted to make the connection between stakeholder theory and the notion of degrees of participation in decision making. This paper argues that legitimate stakeholder groups with issues that have different levels of perceived salience will tend to be treated in different ways by the organisation practicing stakeholder management. More specifically, organisations will tend to ignore stakeholder groups that lack legitimacy, while their decision making will attend most closely to the interests of those groups that currently have greatest salience to the organisation. The paper therefore set out firstly to examine how salient attractions generally consider the interests of local residents to be in their decision making. Secondly, the paper set out to identify the kinds of strategies that attraction managers tend to adopt in bringing the interests of local residents to bear on their decision making. These strategies are then illustrated though three case studies of Scottish attractions. Evidence from the web-based survey suggests that attraction managers generally consider local residents to have a legitimate stake in the attraction and to be of at least some salience to their organisation’s decision making. This is demonstrated by the various engagement strategies that are reported, which have been grouped thematically and discussed in this paper. Most respondents stated that they used at least one of these strategies as a means of engaging local residents and some reported that they used more than one method. At the same time, evidence from the web-based survey suggests that the kinds of stakeholder strategy that are being adopted tend to fall under the “informative participation” category of local resident engagement. These include free or discounted entry for local residents, open days and special events, ambassador and advocate schemes. The overarching objective of such strategies tends to be to pacify local residents rather than to engage with them in such a way that their interests and concerns have a real impact on the outcomes of the attraction’s decision making processes. This is not to suggest that attractions do not consider local residents to be a legitimate stakeholder group; on the contrary, they recognise that local residents’ interests do impinge on and are affected by the attraction’s decision making. However, attraction decision makers tend to perceive such interests as lacking sufficient salience for more than an “informative” approach to engaging with the stakeholder group to be justified. The case study vignettes allow these ideas to be expanded upon. One important finding is that where there is evidence of “consultative participation”, such as in the case of New Lanark, it tends to be partial or ad hoc in practice and not, it would appear, instigated or controlled by the residents themselves. This having been said, New Lanark represents a good example of an attraction that practices different levels of engagement at different times and for different purposes, so that they fit within the broader remit and culture of the strategic and day-to-day management of the attraction. Resource constraints are highlighted as the major impediment to the engagement with local residents by the National Scottish Mining Scotland beyond the level of “informational participation”.

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Evidence from the Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre, meanwhile, suggests that despite the NTS placing considerable emphasis on engaging and consulting with stakeholders, decisions as to which issues will be consider and how they will be addressed are driven largely by the attraction management rather than the local residents. Again “informative participation” is the modus operandi. This is not to suggest, however, that “decisional participation” does not or cannot exist as the means by which attractions engage with their local residents as organisational stakeholders. This study has important implications both for attraction managers and policy makers. Indeed, the current cuts in publicsector budgets worldwide, the onus on “bottom-up” engagement being advocated by central Government in the UK, as well as greater interest among residents to spend their holidays at home in response to the rising costs of foreign travel, will put further pressure on attraction managers to develop their relationships with all of their legitimate stakeholder groups, and with local residents in particular. This is because attraction managers will increasingly find the interests of local residents becoming more salient in their decision making. Local residents will require particular attention because they play multiple roles in the attraction’s network of stakeholder interests. They serve as visitors to attractions, are critical in delivering positive word-of-mouth (especially to visiting friends and relatives), are integral to the broader attraction experience and, more often than not, represent a major part of the paid or volunteer workforce on which attractions critically depend. This, in turn, will justify the use of more “consultative” and even “decisional” approaches to stakeholder engagement. As attractions increasingly come to see the value of stakeholder management, they will view such methods of engagement as necessary precursors to the attraction meeting its organisational objectives, rather than add-ons that have to be dispensed with if resources do not permit. One constraining factor is that many attraction managers and stakeholders lack the capacity to participate in collaborative decision making of this kind. This capacity can, however, be enhanced if it is invested in using techniques such as training courses. Attraction managers also need to provide appropriate institutional spaces for stakeholder participation, such as the formation of stakeholder working groups within the organisation. One limitation of this study is that it is specific to the management of Scottish attractions. Organisations in different countries and in different economic sectors are likely to face different circumstances that may encourage them to engage with local residents in different ways. This study does, however, have important implications for policy makers insofar as it highlights local residents as a stakeholder group of considerable salience to the wider development of tourism in general and destinations specifically. The current economic challenges being faced by many countries in the developed and developing world highlight the need for new and more inclusive strategies to engage with all salient stakeholders in decision making. Stakeholder management serves not only as a strategy for keeping the composite tourism product intact but also as a means of engendering a culture in which the development of tourism becomes everybody’s concern. This is crucially important at a time when it is far too easy for individual organisations to look inwards and try to protect themselves from the forces at play in the wider environment. It is hoped that this study serves as a catalyst to other researchers to advance further the issues discussed. Of particular interest is the process of legitimacy of stakeholder interests, what determines the salience of particular stakeholder interests in specific contexts and how strategies are developed to address these. A particularly interesting area for future research would be to examine the decision-making process through which organisations

engage and disengage over time. This will doubtless require a mix of quantitative and qualitative, single and comparative case studies, very much of the kind that has been presented here. It will also require more longitudinal studies to examine how the legitimacy and salience of stakeholder concerns change over time and how the organisation practicing stakeholder management adapts its strategy in order to accommodate these changes. Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the co-operation of Lorna Davidson, Director of New Lanark, Ellie Swinbank and Alison Shepherd, Curator and Education Officer respectively of the Scottish Mining Museum, and Deidre Smyth, Property Manager of the Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre, in participating in interviews. We would also like to thank all those who completed our survey. Appendix. Question prompts used in the semi-structured, indepth interviews  How does the attraction engage with local residents? Please give specific examples  What strategies are in place to encourage and ensure that local resident engagement happens?  Are there any relevant governance structures in place in the organisation that involve local resident participation?  What aspects of this participation are emphasised in the organisation?  What are the perceived outcomes of the local resident engagement?  How do local residents interact, participate and influence decision making?  What strategies are suggested for future to enhance local resident involvement in decision making?

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