Competitiveness and strategic change : a longitudinal study of the interactions between tourism industry and air Seychelles 1970 to 2007

Abstract

In studying organisational change in Air Seychelles, the context, content and process of change together with the interconnections of the airline and the tourism industry in Seychelles through time is explored. The literature review shows that the substantive issues of interest to this study, contextualism as a theory of methods in management research, requires a case based research in particular with regards to the following gaps in the literature: the integration of inner and outer perspectives on sustaining competitive advantage, and conceptual insights on how strategy links firms and their environment. The study adopted a contextual and processual framework to build a theoretical perspective of competitive advantage. The study contributes to the field of strategic management and tourism development in Seychelles in the following ways: firstly, the development of a contextual and processual framework to explain the transformation of firms over time; secondly, the development of an understanding of the historical context of the tourism industry and its interactions with other sectors of the Seychelles economy; thirdly, developing an understanding of how Air Seychelles developed its resources and capabilities to sustain competitive advantage; fourthly, linking change processes and action to performance and in a sense developing an understanding on strategy implementation of strategic management practice in Air Seychelles. The study sheds some light on strategy formation and implementation at the firm level, and the dynamics between the firm and the industry. The findings suggest that firms respond opportunistically to external discontinuities in a dynamic environment - the entrepreneurial leadership of a firm prepares and support managers to operate under conditions of great uncertainty and ambiguity and allows them to behave opportunistically.