Institutionalization of Informal Practices in Hospitality: Couchsurfing Community Case

This master thesis deeply evaluates characteristics of informal practices in hospitality. The functional weakness of formal tourism and hospitality institutions creates favorable conditions for the development of informal institutions. The emergence of hospitality networks became a significant factor in the development of informal practices in socio-cultural exchange. Couchsurfing is the largest guest network in the world. In contrast to number of papers discussing family, friends or corporate social networks, there is little academic research on Couchsurfing phenomenon in Russian social science. Community institutionalization mechanism identification and examination is the main interest of this study as well as factors of institution formation in hospitality sphere. This paper uses Berger and Luckman social constructionism theories as well as Portes theory who has drawn a special attention to trust-based relations of actors with each other under a particular system functioning conditions. The master thesis is based on qualitative methods because of little academic research of the Couchsurfing phenomena in Russia and, as a consequence, lack of quantitative tools. Series of semi-structured interviews with Couchsurfing network members were taken for deep qualitative investigation. To gather additional information about Couchsurfing and for clarification of information gathered from interviews this master thesis uses content analysis of relevant information with the help of "Medialogia" system. The main result of our study is that we have confirmed the hypothesis that trust and mutual control in Couchsurfing hospitality network facilitates institutionalization of informal practices of this tourism institution, which developed as an alternative to the traditional tourism industry. This research provides a basis for drawing up recommendations to the network members and administrators about expanding policy of cooperation frameworks.