A Hospitable World?

Organising Work and Workers in Hotels and Tourist Resorts

David Jordhus-Lier, Anders Underthun, David Jordhus-Lier, Anders Underthun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415747790
• eBook ISBN: 9781317751755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The hospitality and tourism sector is a large and rapidly expanding industry worldwide, and can rightfully be described as a vehicle of globalisation. Hotels are among the cornerstones of the industry often drawing workers from the most vulnerable segments of multicultural labour markets, accommodating and entertaining tourists and business travelers from around the world.

This book explores the organisation of work, worker identities and worker strategies in hotel workplaces, as they are located in heterogeneous labour markets being changed by processes of globalisation. It uses an explicitly geographical approach to understand how different groups of workers experience and respond to challenges in the hospitality industry, and is based on recent theoretical debates and empirical research on hotel workplaces in cities as different as Oslo, Goa, London, Las Vegas and Toronto. A multi-scalar analysis is taken where concrete worker bodies and their physical, emotional and embodied labour are seen in relation to, among other aspects: the regulation of national and regional labour markets, city governments with global city ambitions, and global corporate actors and labour migration patterns. The book sheds light on the hotel workplace as a hierarchical and fragmented social space as well as addressing questions on worker mobility, the fragmentation of work, scales of organisation and how workers can help shape the regulation of their industry.

This timely volume brings together contributions from international academics and is valuable reading for all those interested in hospitality, tourism, human geography and globalisation.

1 Introduction

The spatialities of hotels and tourism workplaces

David Jordhus-Lier and Anders Underthun

Hospitality presupposes various kinds of economies, politics and ethics as the tourist gaze extends around the world and draws into its warm embrace countless social relations between hosts and guests. These relations typically indicate strange combinations of hospitality and hostility as the world’s largest industry has utterly industrialised, commercialized and scripted what once we might have valued as the pure act of giving unconditional hospitality to others.

(Urry and Larsen 2011:96)

A global industry

The hospitality industry is a truly global industry, connecting every corner of the world and being of great significance to the global economy. Estimates attributed travel and tourism with approximately 9 per cent of total world gross domestic product, providing about 255 million jobs in 2011 (World Travel and Tourism Council 2012). The growth of the tourism and hospitality sectors has been exponential over the last few decades (Duncan et al. 2013), and the World Travel and Tourism Council (2012) also considers the future of the industry to be bright, with prospects of 4 per cent annual growth until 2022. There are a number of reasons for this growth, including new forms of tourism and business travel (Cooper 2011), internationalisation strategies of major transnational corporations in the sector (see Tufts, Chapter 5), economic growth among new groups of consumers, notably in Asia (Ernst & Young 2013), and a deepening of economic globalisation that entails rapidly increasing mobility of capital and workers (Dicken 2007).

Hospitality studies include perspectives ranging from host and guest relations and gastronomy to education and human resource management. While the hospitality industry is widely cited as an easy entry point for low-skilled workers into the labour market, there has been little academic focus in tourism studies on the multitude of tourism work and the relationship between the industry and its workers (Ladkin 2011; Zampoukos and Ionnides 2011). This book picks up on this challenge in the context of a rapidly changing economic geography. With examples from very different contexts and locations, we attempt to approach the shifting conditions of hospitality and hotel workplaces from a worker’s point of view.

Studying hospitality

The hospitality industry has accompanied human travel for centuries. Hence it comes as no surprise that hotels have long been the subject of academic scrutiny. In American social sciences, a sociological study analysed personalities of people living the ‘hotel life’ as far back as in the 1920s (Hayner 1928). Three decades later, a labour studies journal published an article measuring the union wage effect in the hotel industry (Scherer 1956). There are other early examples, and since then, sociologists, anthropologists and others have continued to explore social dynamics in the sector. These social scientists have been accompanied by an increasingly advanced and critical literature on tourism and hospitality management, geared towards business schools and professional training.

For instance, Baum (2007, 2008) has highlighted the context-dependent skills of hospitality workers through notions of ‘experiential skills’. Baum suggests that it is important to be aware of how different experiences among hospitality workers reduce or increase their social distance to guest experiences. While social distance in the western world decrease as workers themselves acquire hospitality experiences, it is important to recognise that hospitality workers in less developed countries do not enjoy these ‘experience benefits’ to the same extent. Adding to this is the ‘low-skill stigma’ of much hospitality work (Solnet and Hood 2008; Richardson 2009; Duncan et al. 2013). Due to such social constructions, the industry is often not seen as a long-term career option despite requiring a broad range of skills.

While we are not arguing that workers are invisible in studies of hotels and the hospitality industry, we suggest that the manner in which they have been incorporated suffer from some biases and shortcomings which this volume will attempt to address. In general, it is fair to say that the study of hospitality historically has focused on the interaction between the consumers and the product offered, in other words on how tourists experience and respond to practices and innovations in the hospitality business (Cooper 2011). The issue of work has not been absent, but workers have often been presented as a cost rather than a resource (Lai et al. 2008). The study of ‘union impact’ above provides an early and telling illustration of this tendency. Arguably, this is typical of sectors characterised by low wages and demand fluctuations where human resources tend to be reduced to an exercise in increasing flexibility (Ioannides and Debbage 1998).

Geography has evolved from a hard science into a many-faceted discipline which includes the study of human interactions as inherently spatial phenomena. Interestingly, human geography has since its beginning harboured a fascination for tourism, of which the early geographers’ explorations represented the most adventurous kind. Decades later, tourism geography is a well-established sub-discipline with its own journals and book series and has generated some of the discipline’s key texts on mobility, place-making and sustainable development (e.g. Butler 1980; Hall 1994; Urry and Larsen 2011). In this book, tourism geography is brought in contact with, and challenged by, other currents in the discipline. With the radicalisation of the discipline in the 1970s, human geographers started focusing more on socio-spatial inequality. From a structural critique of capitalism’s space-making in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey 1982; Massey 1984), the lived experience of workers under capitalism rose to the fore in the 1990s. Following from this, workers in the low-wage sector run as a dominant theme through the last 20 years of economic geography (Peck 1996; McDowell 1997; Herod 1998). Increasingly, this evolution of a ‘labour geography proper’ (Peck 2013) has brought our understanding of workers’ experiences together with explorations of human mobility (Mitchell 1996; McDowell 2008; Rogaly 2009). It can be argued that the studies of hotel workplaces presented in this book bring together many of geography’s fascinations. By so doing, it can also contribute to a more committed exchange between the conceptual work of tourism geographers and labour geographers, as called for by Zampoukos and Ioannides (2011). Before we go on to present the contributions of this volume, we will take the opportunity to dwell on where exactly this exchange of ideas stands today.

Workers and the geographies of tourism

When gazing at tourism geography from a distance, one can be tempted to argue that tourist geographers have fallen for the same trick as other hotel guests – of being seduced by the glossy facades to the point where the hard work put down by those who serve them is neglected. In fact, Gibson (2008:418) points out that tourism geography until recently has been left out of the good company of Anglo-American geography because it has been viewed as the study of “the frivolous or fun”. Building this stereotype, tourism geography becomes the study of leisure, in other words the opposite of work. As will become evident in the chapters that follow, this assumption could not be further from the truth. But the relative silence on workers’ perspectives does not mean that there are no useful lessons to be learnt from tourism geography. After all, several key perspectives and concepts that help us understand work in the industry have been aptly elaborated. Most notable is Urry and Larsen’s (2011:75) elaboration of the tourist gaze and what it entails to be “working under the gaze”, in terms of the performative labour and emotional work it involves. How the tourist gaze affects management techniques and worker behaviour is discussed in Zampoukos and Ioannides (Chapter 2; see also McDowell et al. 2007). In addition to the notion of the gaze, tourism geography has gradually become an arena for the study of, and theorisation of, mobility. Hall has been among those arguing that tourism geography as an academic endeavour should revolve around the mobility concept (Hall 2005). Agarwal et al. (2000) state that employment in tourism shares two distinct features. First, tourist labour markets are characterised by simultaneously being relatively fixed in space while their demand tends to be fluctuating over time, fuelling processes of place-making through competition, where a key quest becomes “attracting the mobile” (Hall 2005:134). Here, the mobile includes capital and people, and people’s mobility is not restricted to tourism but includes students, commuters and labour migrants. His attempt to dimensionalise mobility through its space and time coordinates creates a conceptual scheme where typically tourist-associated practices such as day-tripping and second homes are juxtaposed with work-related categories such as commuting, migration and business travel (Hall 2005). On a related note, Bianchi’s (2000) exploration of the so-called ‘tourist-worker’ identity helps us understand how several of these categories can be collapsed into the same subject positions, and how worker identities therefore are challenged by competing identities in the tourism industry.

A third relevance for our worker-centred perspective is how tourism geographers have conceptualised place and place-making. On the one hand, this can refer to how the tourism industry has remade nature and the built landscape in ways which appeal to the tourist gaze, not the least in so-called resorts (see also Henningsen et al., Chapter 9). But it is also worth noting how segments of the tourist and hospitality industry make use of social spaces such as global cities to exploit cheap labour (Church and Frost 2004:224; see also May et al. 2007):

London’s distinctiveness as a tourism labour market stems, to a considerable degree, from its positioning as a global city, which results in more residents in ethnic minority groups, more students and foreign visitors and, partially by virtue of its size, more young unemployed people than any other British city.

Fourth, and as an addition to these spatial concepts, tourism geography has conceptualised the complex temporalities of seasons, cycles and peaks and lows which characterise this industry (e.g. Butler 1980; Ball 1989). These unstable and sometimes fast-changing temporalities are in fact a crucial factor in shaping the politics of work in tourism and hospitality, as they constitute a fluctuating demand for labour (or source of employment, depending on your viewpoint). In turn, this has served to bring the flexibility discourse at the centre of attention, both for managers in the business and for those studying hotel workers from an academic angle.

Labour geographies in hotels and tourist resorts

While the references above prove that tourism geography is not without an understanding of the work that goes into the hospitality and tourism industries, our position is that it still has many lessons to draw from economic, cultural and feminist geographers – in particular from the strand of the discipline known as labour geography. The way in which previous work in geography can fertilise the study of hotel workers will be explicated during the course of this anthology, and will therefore not be exhaustively reviewed in this introduction. Our starting point is what Zampoukos and Ioannides (2011) identify as the ‘tourism-labour conundrum’ in the geography discipline. The authors state that the high levels of low-paid women, immigrants and youth working in tourism warrants investigation into how divisions of labour is interwoven with r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and mobility
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the spatialities of hotels and tourism workplaces
• 2 Making difference within the hotel: labour mobility and the internationalisation of reproductive work
• 3 Stretching liminal spaces of work? Temporality, displacement and precariousness among transient hotel workers
• 4 Fragmentation revisited: flexibility, differentiation and solidarity in hotels
• 5 The hotel sector in an age of uncertainty: a labour perspective
• 6 Labour geographies in India's hotel industry
• 7 Outsourcing with a human face? Variegated workplace regimes in the Norwegian hotel industry
• 8 Diverging work experiences and time horizons: mapping hotel workers in the Oslo metropolitan area
• 9 The resort as a workplace: seasonal workers in a Norwegian mountain municipality
• 10 Extinguishing fires: coping with outsourcing in Norwegian hotel workplaces
• 11 Multi-scalar organising in London's hotels: the challenges of engaging transient workers through labour and community alliances
• 12 Altering the landscape: reassessing the role of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas's hospitality industry
• 13 Examining the opportunities and challenges of union organisation within the hospitality industry: the Fair Hotels Ireland strategy
• 14 Conclusion: five challenges for solidarity and representation in hospitality workplaces
• Index