A Conceptual Characterization of Value Creation in Hospitality and Tourism Firms from a Complexity Perspective

Abstract

Hospitality and tourism firms are suffering more than others the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its recovery will require designing and implementing innovative value creation strategies that are hard to imagine with the simplifying cause-and-effect analytical frameworks so widespread today. Building on the narrative of the firm as a open complex adaptive system and the literature reviewed in economics and management, this article approaches value creation from the paradigm of complexity science and provides a conceptual bases that would allow value practitioners incorporate more realistic and holistic elements to its analysis. Several implications are outlined that could result from the adoption of this perspective and that might encourage a change in the mindset of scholars and firms’ managers. Guidelines for deeper exploration of value creation from complexity are also provided that could open new avenues for theoretical and methodological advance.

Keywords

Value creation complexity network hospitality tourism firms

Introduction

Decision-makers in hospitality and tourism firms increasingly face today a daunting class of problems stemming from a growing disruptive and complex business environment that current theories of value creation fail to address, or for which their explanatory power is seemingly limited. Despite the efforts made by the academic and practitioners’ communities to incorporate the customer into the analysis of value creation and recognize the role that users play in the co-creation of value, current thinking on value creation suffers from some weaknesses that need to be overcome.

The dramatic effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have made these shortcomings even more evident, which can be summarized as follows: (a) an oversimplification of the analysis associated with the firm’s value creation system, the components that comprise it and the rules that govern its behaviour, (b) the assumption usually made that value creation can be addressed in a linear way, hence it will be enough to focus on certain cause-and-effect relationships that occur in chain mode to comprehend it, and (c) the often biased reasoning used by value practitioners who frequently focus on a single specific value creation driver (e.g. customer, users, delivery, constraints), rather than seeking a more integrated and holistic understanding that transcends the boundaries of the firm.

This article is aimed at delving into our understanding of the value creation system of the firm, more specifically that of hospitality and tourism firms, to help overcome some of the theoretical and methodological flaws listed above. To achieve this goal, we incorporate the paradigm of complexity science, which involves incorporating the notions of open system, non-linearity, emergence, multivariate causality, network, hierarchy, feedback loops, liquid boundaries and expert-based knowledge, to name a few of the most important ones. Understanding the conceptual foundations of value creation from the perspective of complexity, and its practical implications for further research and practice, is a promising path that may well reveal new theoretical and methodological advances.

The content of the article is organized into the following sections: 1) Hospitality and Tourism Firms as Open Complex Adaptive Systems, 2) Value as the Firm’s Basic Building Block, 3) Main Characteristics of Value Creation from Complexity, 4) Discussion, 5) Suggestions for Further Research, and 6) Conclusions.

Hospitality and Tourism Firms as Open Complex Adaptive Systems

That firms are open complex system is nothing new, its philosophical roots tracing back to the debate between the defenders of the mechanistic versus the organismic models of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Johnson et al., 1964; Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972).

Scott (1961) deverly settled the matter by stating that ‘the only meaningful way to study organization is to study it as a system (…) Modern organization theory and general systems theory are similar in that they look at organization as an integrated whole’. Not long after, other authors like Cyert and March, noted that organizations were ‘complex systems’, and they even developed a model of the firm made up of a set of interdependent decision rules that respond to both external feedback and to internal reinforcement (Gavetti & Greve, 2012).

Today, the open systems approach is touted as a promising means to better understand the complexity of real-life organizations. As Simon (1962) observed ‘its popularity is more a response to a pressing need for synthesizing and analysing complexity than it is to any large development of a body of knowledge and technique for dealing with complexity’.

A metaphorical approach to the hospitality and tourism firms, paraphrasing von Bertalanffy (1950), is that they act and behave as open systems in continuous exchange of value with its internal and external environment, and in continuous building up and breaking down of its components (Figure 1).

Hospitality and tourism firms are very peculiar because they do not provide products and services in isolation, but rather combine them in “service system” to create value offerings (i.e., flights, accommodation, food, entertainment, trips) aimed at superior service delivery and customer loyalty (Kandampully & Duddy, 2001). Chkalova et al. (2019) further extend this systems-based approach to local tourist destinations, for which a management focused on a complex network context can lead to an innovative source of ideas for competitiveness and long-term success.

The implications of the open systems approach for the analysis of value creation are broad and far-reaching. Particularly important is the need to transform our traditional chain-view of the firm to include complexity-related elements, such as holism, synergy, hierarchy, boundaries, network, dynamic equilibrium, emergence, homeostasis or multiple goal-seeking, to name just a few. This more up-to-date and realistic view of hospitality and tourism firms can also be a relevant source of quantitative and qualitative insights that helps us better understand value creation in the future.

Figure 1.

Source: The author.

Value as the Firm’s Basic Building Block

The conceptualization of the idea of ‘value’ is at the very heart of economics and management. No other idea has attracted the interest of as many scholars as the theories surrounding the concept of ‘value’, to the point of becoming a pervasive theme in the main currents of economic thought for centuries (Schumpeter, 1954).

From our perspective of complexity, the notion of ‘value’ and, more specifically its creation and exchange, constitutes the basic element that gives life and determines the behaviour of the firm. In other words, ‘value’ is the brick and mortar that configures the firm’s architecture and from which its basic systemic components originate, differentiate and interact.

This makes ‘value’ play a central role in the decision-making process of the firm, as well as in the creation of competitive advantages (Day, 2002; Della Corte & Del Gaudio, 2014; Mahajan, 2017). For many value practitioners, maximizing ‘value’ even goes beyond the mission or strategy of the firm, rather it becomes the sole purpose that the firm should pursue (Jensen, 2012). Furthermore, the ‘forces’ behind value creation (e.g. technologies, customer experience, innovation, profits) are fundamental factors that explain the distribution of income and economic growth in firms and in society.

Recent research provides even more evidence on the primacy of ‘value’ as the basic building block of the firm, especially if we put the customer at the forefront of the analysis. Customer perceived value has been shown to be a cornerstone of relationship marketing and customer loyalty (Day, 2002; Desarbo et al., 2001; Dohmen, 2003; Kotler, 2017; Priem, 2007), and the delivery of superior quality of service to customers as a ‘weapon’ to transform them into the first and foremost advocates of the business (Kandampully & Duddy, 2001). Other authors compare value creation with customer use value or customer utility (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000), and some find that whenever we talk about creating value we are implicitly assuming that it is co-created (Fan & Luo, 2020; Grönroos, 2017; Hamidi et al., 2020; Parolini, 1996; Ramirez, 1999).

Consequently, any approach to the idea of value creation should be made considering ‘value’ as the centrepiece of an open complex system with the customer as its starting and ending point. Having a good understanding of the customer value problem (Woodall, 2003) is therefore paramount if our goal is to unravel the structure and dynamics of the value creation system that ties ‘the surface phenomena of economic life to some inner structure or order’ (Heilbroner, 1983).

Main Characteristics of Value Creation From Complexity

In this section, we describe some of the main characteristics of value creation in hospitality and tourism firms from a complexity perspective. The characteristics featured below, which are not intended to be exhaustive, are the result of the author’s own thinking and an extensive bibliographic review carried out on the topics of complexity, the theory of the firm, and value creation in economics and management.

Non-linearity and Emergence

Non-linearity and emergence are two of the main characteristics revealed by hospitality and tourism firms that help us differentiate value creation from a complexity perspective versus conventional linear methods.

A non-linear behaviour occurs whenever a response is neither directly, nor inversely proportional to its cause. An idea related to non-linearity is that of emergence, which is also closely linked to the notions of process and ongoing and perpetual novelty (Meyer et al., 2005), as well as self-organization and evolution.

Emergence refers to the new properties of a system that were not present in, or predictable from, some initial conditions (Holland, 2000; Stace & Goldstein, 2006). Emerging processes arise from the interaction between components of a system, which make it impossible to predict future states. Emergent conditions allow a system to self-organize and acquire a new order, thus making self-organization a driving mechanism for the evolution of systems (Bohórquez Arévalo & Espinosa, 2015).

The very nature and dynamics of hospitality and tourism firms are direct evidence supporting the idea that value creation occurs in a non-linear manner and that, as a result, emergent behaviour arises that cannot be explained as the aggregate behaviour of its basic system components.

Factors such as the increasing use of advanced smart information technologies, the organization of resources in networks, the central role played by customers of different types, their wide geographic distribution, or the continuous development of disruptive innovations that affect productivity and transaction costs in tourism form, provide strong, relevant evidence (Baggio, 2008, 2020).

Large Number of Interacting Components

‘Many more than a handful of individual elements need to interact in order to generate complex systems’ (Ladyman et al., 2013). This statement highlights how complexity may arise when a large number of components are present in a system and are involved in many interactions.

This is particularly evident in hospitality and tourism firms, which operate in highly interconnected ecosystems where a large number of consumers, service providers, local communities and public administrations interact (Chkalova et al., 2019).

Upon accepting the premise above, we can next ask ourselves: what do we consider a ‘component’ of the firm’s value creation system? Or, why do we suggest that tourism firms have many components?

Most definitions of complexity in science establish ‘a large number of components’ as a key property of complex systems. However, when authors try to grasp the idea of ‘component’, they often end up with too vague or ambiguous definitions. This problem is not only typical of the analysis of value creation in firms, but it also appears in other respected scientific disciplines, such as systems biology or quantum mechanics.

In the jargon of complexity, a ‘component’ is generally assimilated to the fundamental functional unit of a system and, as such, it can be built up and broken down. Relations or ‘forces’ among components make them interact either in a static or dynamic manner and, as a result, they can adopt heterogeneous configurations.

According to our complexity perspective of value creation, firms’ components can be metaphorically represented as ‘value repositories’ (VRs). VRs group together those activities, processes and resources from within and outside a firm aimed at creating unique exchangeable value. Note how this creation-exchange duality is a key feature of VRs.

VRs are not natural (empirical) constructs that can be universally defined by an observer from inside or outside a firm, but rather are synthetic cells that symbolize the unique and mutually differentiated units of value that makes up a by a firm’s value creation system.

Therefore, the uniqueness and differentiation of VRs are key attributes that should guide value practitioners in elucidating a real firm value system. This means that no two VRs should create and exchange the same value, but rather each must reflect the intrinsic division and specialization that exist within the firm’s value creation system. As long as we make sure that no two VRs create-exchange the same value, we avoid component redundancy and a misleading or overly too complex picture of the firm’s value creation system that is difficult to manage.

Hierarchical and Multi-level Network Dependency

VRs take the form of nodes that continuously interact with each other, both within and outside the boundaries of the firm. Thus, a good way to graphically represent the value creation system of a hospitality and tourism firm is with a network made up of VRs (nodes), and their interconnections (edges) depicting the exchanges that take place between VRs.

Furthermore, VRs are organized at different levels of hierarchy, some located at lower levels and others at higher levels, thus giving rise to a ‘network of networks’ that hosts a multilevel structure and dynamics of the value creation system of the firm (Figure 2). This perspective builds on top of that presented by other authors, who argue that value is created at different levels in networks (Lusch et al., 2010), or captured from complex relationships between the firms and its resources (Della Corte & Del Gaudio, 2014).

The above conceptualization of the firm transcends conventional theories of the firm, which for the most part do not offer a network-based view. Instead our approach resembles Thorelli’s (1986) idea of the firm (economy) as a network of organizations with a vast hierarchy of subordinate and intersecting networks.

Figure 2.

Source: The author.

The multi level network representation implies that any time a structural o dynamical change in a VR takes place, this will be accompanied by changes in the entire network structure and in all the superordinate and subordinate levels of the value network (Mella, 2009). This property is known as multi level dependency.

This idea of dependency in turn invokes the principle of ‘co-evolution’, as the individual parts of the system (the VRs) and the whole (the firm) exist by unfolding one another (Karsten, 1990; Nelson & Sampat, 2001; North, 1990). Co-evolution ultimately entails that the development of the value network will mirror the own evolution of the firm as a whole, and vice versa. In order words, that the VRs and the firm will evolve together, with the VRs prompting changes in the firm, and vice versa, as a function of time.

Multi level network dependency also relates to Simon’s ‘near-decomposability’ property of complex systems. According to Simon (2000) ‘a much higher frequency and intensity of interaction takes place between components belonging to a single sub-system than between components belonging to different sub-systems’. From Simon’s proposition we can infer that if a system is disturbed, then the subsystems at the lowest level will come to a steady state before the subsystems at the levels above. Consequently, the whole system could be described in terms of the average behaviour of the subsystems, and more particularly by their eigenvalues.

Furthermore, Simon’s idea of ‘nearly decomposable system’ helps us understand why is not necessary to deal with all the complexity of the value system (VRs) at once. As Simon notes, ‘having determined the behaviour of subunits at one level, we can replace the details of these subunits by a small number of aggregate parameters and use these to represent the system at the next level above’.

In this context, our approach to value creation from a complexity perspective requires a shift in focus away from how the firm allocates and organizes its internal resources to another in which the firm is concerned about how to differentiate and interconnect its VRs in the most efficient and productive way.

Descriptive–Predictive Uncertainty

Delving deeper into the hierarchical and multi level network nature of value creation involves value practitioners in a substantial way. In fact, value practitioners are the final link in the firm’s value creation elucidation process, and key actors realizing the firm’s own dynamics.

This premise, inferred from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (Heisenberg & Northrop, 1958), comes to metaphorically realize the impossibility of describing and, therefore, of predicting with certainty how a particular VR network will behave at a given moment of time and how a specific dynamic of value creation will take place. All we can do is describe the conditions under which a particular behaviour (or value creation dynamics) is likely to occur in the firm.

This so-called property of descriptive-predictive uncertainty would also help explain why we cannot know exactly all the factors that will intervene in the creation-exchange of value, since as long as we precisely determine one cause, the others might become uncertain. In other words, the uncertainty property acts as a limit on the exact and whole knowledge that we can gather on the value creation process of a firm (Karsten, 1990).

Another consequence that we can derive from the above is that firms’ value systems should no longer be viewed as a deterministic whole system, but instead as a system built on complex, more probable and sometimes paradoxical value creation-exchange hypothesis.

Structural Homeostasis

Homeostasis has been a much debated question for years in the field of complex systems and in a broad variety of scientific disciplines. Hou-Shun (1956) considered homeostasis as the constant act of balancing two opposing forces to maintain stability in the most developed organism, be it biological, social, or economic. However, although homeostasis is an inherent (an inherited) property of complex natural systems, this is not always the case in the firm.

Simon (2000) defines homeostasis as the property according to which ‘by means of feedback mechanisms or by other methods (…), a system may be able to hold the values of some of its important properties within narrow limits, and thereby greatly simplify internal processes that are sensitive to these properties’. Homeostasis therefore transcends the idea of equilibrium of closed systems and involves the activation of self-adjustments within an open system (Bailey, 2006).

In our characterization of value creation in hospitality and tourism firms, we use the term homeostasis to mean the process by which the firm can avoid substantial changes in its value network, despite significant changes in its environment.

For a value creation system to be resistant to the competitive and economic forces that act in its ecosystem, homeostasis by design is required. Furthermore, it becomes clear the need to embed homeostatic mechanisms in the design of the firm’s own value system, otherwise the firm will not have the necessary capabilities to face the threats that put its operational continuity at risk and will be doomed to disappear every time it suffers a serious threat, crisis or drastic change in its environment.

The above generally involves developing some type of VRs ‘layer’ that greatly attenuates the transmission of environmental threats into the firm’s value network, thus reducing the impacts on its structure and connectivity. These mechanisms should include the development of self-learning and auto-adaptive value creation processes within the network, as well as the transformation of the rigid boundaries of the firm into more specialized and permeable interfaces.

Differentiation by Specialization

As shown before, VRs essentially form specialized subnets within the firm’s whole value network. While this setup may initially seem to simplify our understanding of value creation within the firm, it really adds new complexities in the form of specialized mechanisms, coordination mechanisms (Kandampully & Duddy, 2001) and exchange interfaces.

Specialization responds to the need of the firm to perform highly specific value creation tasks to operate successfully and with greater productivity. In fact, if we metaphorically assimilate the VRs behaviour to agents of a social system, we could realize how they become more specialized as the size of the group (value network) increases and there are too many options of tasks available (Cockburn & Kobti, 2009).

Simon (2000) contends that ‘specialization should be carried out in such a way as to keep the interactions between the specialized components at as low a level as possible’. This provides a guide that helps us think about how we should keep the complexity of the firm’s value network within a manageable level. To do this, we should identify what types of specialization are key and which VRs should preferably be linked together.

Other elements that affect the specialization of VRs have to do with its own boundaries. Understanding VRs boundaries has significant implications for the proper design of the value network and its future performance. Note that we refer to boundaries in plural, on the understanding that the firm’s value system does not feature a single, uniform, all-purpose, high-level boundary, but as many boundaries as specialized VRs exist in the firm.

Recognition of the VRs boundaries is key because they are the network’s specialized points of contact and exchange of value and, as such, largely determine the behaviour and performance of the firm. Boundaries differentiation and specialization are thus essential for an efficient and effective value creation dynamic. Specialized boundaries also simplify the interaction process between VRs, as the need for constant tuning of the interaction interfaces is significantly reduced.

Discussion

The growing interest in studying the complexity of (living and non-living) systems has proven useful in many disciplines, allowing for outstanding advances in the scientific knowledge in recent years and further encouraging our taste for cross-disciplinarity.

In this section, we discuss some additional arguments according to which a complexity-based approach to value creation seems inevitable and may lay the foundations for new theoretical and methodological inroads.

Why a Complexity Perspective is Necessary?

A complexity perspective is necessary because conventional theories of value creation are still largely dominated by cause-and-effect linear thinking and the pre-eminence of the idea of general equilibrium, both of which deviate greatly from the way in which real firms operate and create-exchange value. On the other hand, there are authors who have long pointed out other alternative approaches, such as that of Wieland et al. (2012), according to which different socio-economic actors in firms are connected in ‘complex service systems’ aimed at creating value.

In this article, we submit that there are strong arguments to question the validity of some theoretical assumption made by conventional theories of value creation, in particular those related to the profit-maximizing rational agent. These assumptions raise serious concerns about the possibility of using current theories of value creation at an operational level and call upon the need for an upgrade that brings them closer to reality. Using a complexity perspective of value creation can be of great help to improve our understanding of the phenomenon and also to open the doors to future methodological frameworks and tools that support managers’ decision-making on value creation.

Transdisciplinarity

There is a growing perception in the academic and value practitioners’ communities about the urgent need to approach value creation from a more transdisciplinary mindset, leaving aside the theoretical and methodological silos that hinder our ability to transcend traditional discipline borderlines.

When pursuing transdisciplinarity, one of the most important tasks to do is to transform our own vision of value creation into a truly hybrid discipline. This involves starting with the recognition that conventional theories of management and economics alone are not sufficient to address the behaviour of the firm, and that we need to incorporate the advances made by other fields of knowledge (e.g. biology, physics, computer science, sociology, psychology, anthropology) to achieve a greater degree of understanding.

The opportunities to deeper comprehend value creation if we apply a more transdisciplinary approach would be substantial. Not surprisingly, some authors specifically identified management science long ago as a field of opportunity to break away from old mechanistic methods and foster more powerful and fruitful approaches (Boulding, 1956), and these opportunities are still there waiting to be seized in the twenty-first century.

Value Elucidation Tools

Most research studies conducted to date on value creation have been sample studies using secondary data from public business databases. Standard multiple regression models have been the most frequently used statistical technique, together with correlations and analyses of variance (ANOVAs) (Hitt et al., 1998).

The above shows that the methods used to elucidate value creation provide a limited perspective of the big picture. As Kast and Rosenzweig (1972) observed ‘we are hampered because each of the academic disciplines has taken a narrow “partial systems view” and find comfort in the relative certainty which this creates’.

However, as research continues to develop in the field of value creation, more powerful and sophisticated analytical methods have entered the scene, together with new and better sources of data. Some of these methods and tools are being borrowed from other scientific disciplines (e.g. computer science, systems biology, neuroscience, eco-modelling, structural sociology, marketing, psychology). However, the challenge of integrating qualitative and quantitative research into these tools remains.

As part of the research work carried out by the author for this article, new value elucidation tools and methods have been evaluated that could provide practical inroads within the complexity perspective, among them are system dynamics, self-organizing maps, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, agent-based modelling and fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). The ability to choose between them, or even to hybridize them, will require that strong constraints be placed on the model’s so as not to make them more complex than the data can support. At this point, value practitioners will have to learn the trade-offs between knowing a lot about a little, or a little about a lot (Jorgensen & Bendoricchio, 2001).

Figure 3 shows the preliminary results obtained by the author after applying the ideas contained in this article and elucidating the value creation network in the case of airlines using FCMs and expert-based knowledge. Such value creation network is made up of 26 VRs (nodes) and 77 links (edges) connecting the VRs between them. The square designated as ‘OM’ in the centre of the network, and the edges flowing into it, represent the interactions between the VRs and the operating margin.

Figure 3.

Source: The author.

Information Management

Information management becomes a critical asset when a firm addresses value creation from a complexity perspective. Not by accident hospitality and tourism firms are immersed in an environment of considerable complexity, where information affects their behaviour at a greater rate and to a greater extent than ever before.

Effective information management is not only key to fine-tune internal decision-making procedures that affect value creation, but it is also fundamental to consolidate a robust value network architecture. No firm can thrive today unless it is able to manage relevant information and turn it into useful knowledge.

Upcoming developments in the theory and practice of value creation will necessarily have to prioritize the processes by which the firm collects, operates, and makes information actionable, from the point where it is captured, to where it is turned into usable knowledge and disseminated inside and outside the firm.

Suggestion for Further Research

The conceptual characterization of value creation from a complexity perspective presented in this article, together with the practical considerations pointed out, are in an early stage of development and deserve further investigation and elaboration.

Although this article has provided a first characterization based on VRs within a hierarchical multi level network organization, a research programme dedicated to this subject area should continue to shed light on the firm as a complex system and the nature and dynamics of hospitality and tourism value networks.

Further research should therefore focus on the nature of VRs, its evolution, and its inner dynamics. This will necessarily involve building a robust empirical basis for analysis, which would help answer questions such as: how do firms decide on the number of VRs? How and why are connections set between VRs? Or, how do these decisions affect the strength of the interactions between VRs and its creation/destruction?

The ideas discussed in this article have many foreseeable implications for the management of hospitality and tourism firms, the elaboration of strategies, the setting up of operational processes, the organizational design and the finances themselves. Understanding the implications associated with different value network configurations is an area that could also provide new theoretical and methodological insights.

Ultimately, more research is needed to develop a solid methodological framework that, supported by hybrid computational tools, allows us to delve into how modelling and simulation of the value network can support decision-making at the managerial level. FCM modelling seems well-suited to help scholars and practitioners bridge the gap between the reality of firms, the qualitative knowledge from experts and scenario simulation. This should provide us with new opportunities for greater collaboration between value practitioners and computational scientists.

Conclusions

This article offers a conceptual characterization of value creation from the perspective of complexity. The objective is to foster a more open debate among scholars and practitioners about the need to integrate increased awareness of complexity into the analysis of value creation in hospitality and tourism firms.

According to the arguments presented in this article, firms are open complex adaptive systems embedded in an environment from which it receives and to which it transfers value. Value is the basic building block of the firm and, as such, it provides the brick-and-mortar that shapes the firm’s elementary functional components (VRs). VRs interact dynamically with each other within the firm’s multi level network, according to dependency relationships and a hierarchical organization.

Deciphering the nature and context of the firm’s value network and the relationships and interactions between its VRs involves a different analytical mindset that can be successfully accomplished using expert-based knowledge and soft-computing modelling and simulation tools. Furthermore, the conceptual characterization presented in this article, and the subsequent experimentation already initiated by the author with real firms, allow us to be optimistic about the new paths that are opening up to answer some of the key questions posed by authors time ago (e.g. Luschet al (2010)): What are the relationships between different parts of the value creation network? What is the role of the customer in the network? What is the best way to organize the network? What role does innovation and information play?

This article contributes to developing a greater theoretical and methodological awareness about the applicability of complexity to the analysis of value creation, not only in hospitality and tourism firms but also in service firms no matter the indusrty. By doing so, we are also contributing to abstract the notion of complexity from ambiguity and highlighting the promising opportunities that this approach offers to increase our understanding of value creation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Francisco J Navarro-Meneses

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