GLOBAL HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

Critiquing current issues, movements and recent developments in the global hospitality industry



Critiquing current issues, movements and recent developments in the global hospitality industry

Introduction

The last decade has seen a renewed interest in the concept of hospitality, in ways of researching and understanding hospitality, and in the intersections of hospitality, tourism and leisure. This renewal sits at the confluence of two intellectual trajectories: (1) a “critical turn” in hospitality studies, away from the solely functional, vocational emphasis of hospitality management or “hotel and catering” education and training, and towards a diverse, social science analysis; and (2) the take-up of the concept and practices of hospitality across a range of social science disciplines, where it is being used to critically explore key contemporary debates, such as those centred on immigration, asylum and refugees, and more broadly to understand diverse forms of “hospitable” interaction. The increasing commingling of these twin tracks means that hospitality is enjoying significant theoretical and empirical attention, and a blossoming in publication and discussion (Broadbent 2002). The aim of this chapter is to trace some contours of this commingling, and to connect it outwards to work on tourism by highlighting how debates about hospitality also shed light on some of the cornerstones of tourism studies—to trace, if you like, yet another commingling.

Hospitality studies and tourism studies share a significant number of key concerns and key concepts, especially in regard to ways of relating between “hosts” and “guests” and the problems brought about by the commodification of those ways of relating (Buhalis 2002). As bodies of knowledge, tourism studies and hospitality studies share that uneasy location between functional, vocational training for particular industries, and social science inquiry that draws on the conceptual and methodological resources of cognate disciplines (and the emerging traditions of hospitality and tourism studies themselves). Hospitality studies has been enriched by the wider take-up of the concept across the social sciences and humanities—in history, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, geography and history, to name but a few. Certainly, in my own adopted discipline of human geography, the concept has attracted significant attention as a lens for looking closely at key issues such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, urban regeneration, relations between social groups, and feelings, experiences and spaces of inclusion and exclusion (Connell 2006). This disciplinary location also inevitably shapes the version of the “hospitality story” that I present in this chapter—though a wider concern with the sites and spaces of hospitality has been one of the key characteristics of the “critical turn.”

Discussion

A central theme shared between tourism studies and hospitality studies explores encounters between people who are “strangers” to each other (Cooper et. al. 2004). This encounter involves the movement of a mobile actor (the guest) into the home territory of a static host. The host-guest encounter is also, of course, a power relation, though the dynamics of this relationship and the locus of power are complex issues, as we shall see. Moreover, the idea of hospitality has, like tourism, been used metaphorically as a symbol of ...