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.