"The Opportunity of Scarcity. Entrepreneurial Bricolage in the Origins and Take-Off of the Spanish Tourism Sector (1920s-1990s)"

Building on the seminal work of Levi Strauss (1967), more recently developed by Baker and Nelson (2005) and Duymedjian and Rüling (2010), this paper aims to analyse the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar and Riu. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a static and short-term perspective; however, this paper aims to adopt a dynamic perspective that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, allows us to explain its evolution over time. To this end, we use four historical and qualitative cases and introduce a long-term approach to the analysis. Our result shows that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity, as theory suggests, but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular practice of their business management. Thus, this work demonstrates that, in our case studies, time -through accumulated experience- transforms a path dependence process into a path creation one.