The performativity of the tourism specialism knowledge network: sporting event economic impact assessment

ABSTRACT

This study examines the performativity of contemporary knowledge in a tourism specialism – sporting event economic impact research – through a relational bibliometric analysis of articles within tourism journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) from 2000 until 2018. The paper aims to propose a novel methodological approach using social network analysis (SNA) to evaluate and visualize a performativity citation network of the most influential papers in the specialism with a reference to a ‘tribes and territories’ framework. The findings suggest that performativity – based on funding comments within the acknowledgements and the main text – is an insightful input that has a novel quality in the interpretation of tourism academic citation networks. Therefore, the common interpretation of citation-based knowledge networks on quantitative academic outputs, such as papers citations, has been supplemented with a performativity perspective focused on practical solutions to industry-related problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometric analysis
• social network analysis
• tribes and territories
• citation networks
• sporting events economic impacts
• performativity

Acknowledgement

We appreciate comments by the editor and reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.