LEGITIMACY: “WHO WOULD BE INTERESTED IN DOING THAT STUFF?”

The entrepreneurs starting up businesses in the late seventies and early eighties offered activities that at the time were foreign to the general tourism industry, tourists and locals. The activities of rafting, swimming with dolphins, and bungy jumping are activities with no traditional grounding; they are modern activities with no other purpose than excitement and fun. Educating the market, the public and potential industry partners of what these activities are all about is therefore essential. Aldrich and Fiol (1994:650) describe how entrants to a new population “must interact with extremely sceptical customers, creditors, suppliers, and other resource holders, who are afraid of being taken for fools”.

When the Mangaweka Adventure entrepreneur started up, the idea of rafting was new and an unknown experience for most people: “… literally people said; who’s gonna..who would be interested in doing that stuff? Nobody will wanna do that. Seriously they did” (C5, 1). Neither the locals, the market or other actors in the tourism industry knew what rafting was all about. Building legitimacy is about establishing ties with an environment that does not understand or acknowledge their existence (Hannan and Carroll, 1992; Stinchcobe, 1965).

While glacier guiding as a commercial tourism product in Norway has its roots back in the early 1800s (see e.g. Horgen, 1999), Folgefonni Breførarlag met similar ignorance when they started out in 1994. Back then there was already well- established glacier guiding businesses adjacent to the Jostedals glacier further north. Still, the local community in the small community of Jondalen had little understanding of what the young entrepreneurs were up to:

“No, this was very unfamiliar to the people in Jondal. So the first few years no one really understood what we were doing” (C2: 2).

The young entrepreneurs’ answer to this was to invite locals on guided trips to improve their understanding of the glacier-guiding product.

“When you walk up the ski slope then you get up there and a different world unfolds. And not that many in Jondal knew about this world. They go skiing there during Easter, but then everything is white up there … So they don’t go down towards the edges, and don’t realize what is down there in the blue ice” (C2: 2). In addition to bringing locals on guided trips, the entrepreneurs did a lot of local marketing. They early on became members of the local tourism association, Reisemål Hardanger, talked to people and spread posters and brochures at the local tourism informations. Good interpersonal relationships with people at the Barony of Rosendal were helpful in the first phase, as they received customers from there. The importance of local networks of trust (Aldrich, 1999) and the ability to mobilize personal and interpersonal resources (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994) are important in these first efforts to legitimate the new undertaking.

How quickly commercial activity builds legitimacy depends on several factors. How well it is received by the market is crucial. Encounter Kaikoura, although only having very limited visitors in their first season, firmly believed that their activity was worth pursuing.

In addition, other, less obvious factors may help build legitimacy around a commercial activity. Encounter Kaikoura started up in 1989, and in 1990 the entrepreneurs approached the Department of Conservation for marine mammal permits. Encounter Kaikoura got the first Department of Conservation Marine mammal permit solely for swimming and watching dolphins and seals. Whale watching permits had previously been issued to the two whale watching businesses.

While the timing seemed coincidental, getting a quality stamp from such an institution at an early stage clearly brought awareness to their product.

Another more common way of making the activity known is through the use of media. An advantage of adventure activities is their photogenic nature. The action, fun and excitement of adventure tourism activities make good stories and pictures for the media. The Mangaweka Adventure entrepreneur vividly expresses the important role of media in spreading public knowledge about rafting. He highlights the role of one of his early competitors in attracting media attention in the promotion of the new and unknown activity:

“... he started a business that he called Riverrunners. NZ Riverrunners, and he was gonna boat everywhere in NZ. He sort of did for a while. But he did a lot of promotion, lot of publicity; he devoted his entire time to it and put the game on the map. Quite a lot really, it did get a lot of publicity” (C5,1).

The popularization of the activity through media was an important step in getting people’s attention. Through the media, people could get an understanding of what the activity was all about and thereby marketing was made easier for the individual business.

The phase of experimentation is about knowledge navigation and first attempts to bring attention to the activity product. Bringing a new product to the market means dealing with what Stinchcomb (1965) calls liabilities of newness.

The characteristics of being in this phase of development influences processes of knowledge development and innovation in the businesses. The strategies to develop organizational knowledge and legitimacy can be seen as innovations in their own right; the pattern of innovation is geared towards publicity and creating repositories of knowledge, as well as the wish to imitate and learn from any role models out there.