Prejudice and Discrimination in Hotels, Restaurants and Bars

Conrad Lashley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032030449
• eBook ISBN: 9781000603491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Presenting expert-led discussion of a range of themes and topics, Prejudice and Discrimination in Hotels, Restaurants and Bars explores the rigidities that restrict recruitment into frontline job roles in hotels restaurants and bars.

Despite decades of legislation banning gender and racial discrimination in most service economies, selecting the 'right person for the job' in practice results in some applicants appearing to be 'more right' than others. This book makes a unique contribution to the study of hospitality management practices that define, both consciously and unconsciously, recruits' appearance and behaviours that inevitably include some, and exclude others, from being selected for the job concerned. Dealing primarily with social class, gender and race, the issues discussed in the book are of international interest and authors are drawn from both the Northern and Southern hemisphere.

This book will be of great interest to both upper-level students and researchers of hospitality management and human resource management, as well as wider social science communities, such as scholars of sociology, anthropology, industrial relations, human resource studies and personnel management.

1 The psychology of discrimination

Conrad Lashley

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186403-1

Introduction

Bias and prejudice in dealing with other people can lead to discrimination that results in unfair and unequal treatment. These negative consequences give rise to problems that hamper the effective working of hotels, restaurants, and bars. It is essential that managers have a scientifically informed understanding of the causes of prejudice and discrimination, as the basis for dealing with all people in an even-handed manner.

Prejudice and discrimination may occur in any social grouping. Managers should understand the detrimental impact that prejudice and discrimination have on the achievement of organisational objectives. Beyond these pragmatic considerations, it is important that ethical principles inform both management practice and personal conduct. Racism, sexism, and homophobic behaviour are the three most common, but anti-Semitism, political and religious discrimination as well as xenophobia can also cause hurt and distress to victims. The front-piece quotation from William Hazlitt linking prejudice to ignorance is fundamentally true, but causes are more complex than mere ignorance. The chapter explores some of the current research dealing with the tendency of some individuals to be more prejudiced in their views and actions. It also highlights the intergroup dimensions of prejudice that seem to be at the root of much human conflict.

Bias and prejudice

Whilst popular perceptions, and even formal dictionary definitions, tend to regard these terms as overlapping, it is important to differentiate bias and prejudice if we are to provide some systematic analysis of the way individuals operate as members of the workforce and in society. Gross (2021) makes the distinction, ‘… bias’ conveys a leaning towards or preference for something,’ (2021:2) … ‘whereas prejudice conveys a pre-judgement without knowledge or examination of the facts’ (p. 3).

Bias is seen by psychologists as a tendency to think about other people, social groups, the world, and personal actions in a consistent way, for example, perceiving human actions as essentially individualistic and selfish; or essentially collective and generous. Bias will tend to assess personal successes and failures in ways that favour the individual’s self-image. Successes are attributed to personal talents and skills, whilst failures are usually explained as the fault of other people, bad luck, or circumstances beyond the individual’s control. ‘Within psychology “bias” is often used to denote a tendency – usually unconscious – to think in a particular way, for example the causes of people’s behaviour’ (Gross, 2021:5).

Self-enhancing bias involves individuals justifying positive achievements as being due to their personal efforts – hard work – intelligence, etc. Kruger and Dunning (1999), two US psychologists, report a tendency amongst the lowest achievers to over-assess their performance in tests. In another piece of research, the same research team found that those with the lowest IQ scores tended to over-assess their IQ scores. In the play, As You Like It, William Shakespeare makes a similar point with the line that starts, ‘The fool thinks himself to be a wiseman…’. Going even further back in time the Greek philosopher, Socrates, concluded that ‘…. stupid people have all the answers’. The tendency to self-enhancement bias will often over-play these due to a self-serving bias that aims to address and enhance the individual’s esteem needs. Abraham Maslow created a hierarchy of human needs in his famous motivation theory, where esteem needs are classified as higher order needs that embrace the need to for esteem in relation to other people. Esteem needs include confidence, self-belief, respect from others, as well as social acceptance and respect from other people. These needs impact upon several displays and behaviours in social settings. Luxury brands, location of domestic housing, restaurants chosen, work choices, and career advancement may all demonstrate self-enhancement to meet these esteem needs by providing a public display of being ‘one-up’, ‘better than the rest’.

Accompanying this self-enhancing bias tendency to over-play personal quality explanations for successes, and environmental reasons for failures or lack of achievement is confirmation bias. These involve selectively filtering events or information that confirms these self-enhancing justifications for successes and failures. Confirmation bias includes seeking out information or events that confirm our biases, whilst rejecting or ignoring information that might challenge them (Gross, 2021).

Individuals may favour the company of people perceived to be like themselves, whether it be on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religious conviction, for example. Self-enhancing bias and confirmation bias both influence a tendency to want to mix with – people like me. Many of activities outlined above such as housing areas, dining out habits, leisure activities, and club membership involve people living and socialising with people perceived to be like them, and by implication excluding those who are not. Dress codes in hotels and restaurants provide a soft form of exclusivity whereby complying with the code confirms entry entitlement and allows the excuse to exclude those who do not comply. Membership clubs represent a more formal mechanism, varying from merely paying the membership fee, to a formal mechanism of membership acceptance that is deliberately selective and restricting. All these examples ultimately engage self-enhancing bias and confirmation of the individual’s self-esteem.

Social psychologists suggest that there is a tendency for people to think positively about the groups to which they belong, whilst members of groups to which they do not belong are regarded more negatively. Ingroup and outgroup dynamics will be discussed more fully later in this chapter as they have much to say about prejudice and the ‘isms’ (race, sex, sexual orientations, etc.), but these dynamics can result in ultimate attribute error, assuming that all members of a group are the same. Ingroup members are seen as having more virtues and fewer flaws, while outgroup members are seen as having fewer virtues and more flaws. Also, this attribute error tends to regard outgroup members as ‘all the same’: stereotyping them as being all the same. Social psychologists refer to this as the outgroup homogeneity effect (Anderson, 2011:28).

Stereotypes were originally considered to be consistently negative, but stereotypes are natural to understanding the circumstance in which the individual lives. Stereotypes are a way of ordering the world and considering why people are the way they are. In some way stereotypes are about categorising experiences based upon perceptions as a way of dealing with an array of stimuli. They represent ‘pictures in the head’ that provide mental ways of coping with complexity by categorisation that reduce levels of relearning. ‘Categories in general – and stereotypes are mental shortcuts; they are universal and inevitable, and intrinsic and primitive aspect of cognition’ (Gross, 2021:9).

Gross describes dehumanisation and infrahumaniation as two strands in prejudice and discrimination. Dehumanisation embraces arguments that suggest groups under discussion are somehow not human, or more animal, than ‘normal’ humans. Football supporters making monkey noises or throwing bananas at black players in the opposing team is founded on the prejudice that players with African origins are not ‘real’ human beings. Infrahumanisation on the other hand accepts the humanity but assumes the sub-ordinate group to be some lesser form of humanity – less developed – more prone to be criminals – more religious fanatics than the dominant group. Racial discrimination and prejudice deserve a detailed look because recent history has seen this as a major aspect of prejudice and discrimination leading to conflict and aggression towards people deemed to be unworthy, or outsiders. Similarly, the unequal treatment of women is a feature of patriarchal societies leading to assumptions about domestic roles and workplace rewards, where the ill-treatment of those who do not conform to heterosexual stereotypes deserves some consideration because social condemnation has attracted strong moral and legal sanctions, until recent decades.

Race, gender, and other ‘others’

If bias is best understood as a tendency to perceive or react to people, situations, and things in a consistent manner, and prejudice adopts stereotypes to those considered to be all the same, discrimination refers to behaviour. This can be positive or negative in nature. Clearly the key concern has been with negative behaviours.

Alport (1954) identified stages in discrimination and the behaviour towards potential victims:

1. Antilocution: hostile talks, verbal degeneration, insults, and jokes about the victim’s otherness – sex – race – religion etc.
2. Avoidance: deliberately limiting contact without actively harming.
3. Discrimination: exclusion from job roles, housing locations, social meeting places like hotels, bars, and restaurants.
4. Physical: violence against persons or property.
5. Extermination: indiscriminate violence against an entire group.

These are regarded as behaviours that may encompass whole societies or substantial subsets. Recent history has demonstrated in many countries the tendency to blame sections of a community for economic ills, or a sense of injustice. Blaming the stranger, or those who are perceived to be somehow different, has had violent and even genocidal effects. That said, it is possible to perceive through stereotypes without feeling hostile. Individuals may harbour negative feelings without acting upon them. Stereotypical views are learnt behaviour in the way one social group perceives another. The impact of stereotypes on prejudice and discrimination has been one major strand in human affairs that produces negativity. Stereotypes can result in bias, prejudice, and actions that discriminate merely because the target appears to be different in some way.

The myth of race

The discourse on race is a relatively recent concept and one that was a by-product of the use of slave labour, together with European colonialism (Gross, 2021). ‘Even up to the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, many saw physical difference as a shifting thing, rooted in geography; if people in hotter climate moved somewhere cooler their skin would automatically lighten’ (Gross, 2021:21).

The concept of race developed during the eighteenth century as an unexpected consequence of the Enlightenment. Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, identified four main ‘flavours’ of humans according to their skin colour – red, white, yellow, and black – linked to the geographical areas of America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. ‘The “races” quickly became slotted into a hierarchy, based on the politics of the time, character became confused with appearance, and political circumstances became fact’ (Gross, 2021:21).

The trade in slaves, largely from West Africa to the Americas and Caribbean Islands, was enormously profitable for the traders and resulted in cut-price labour for the slave owners (Walvin, 2007). As the slave trade and the use of slaves on plantations grew, there was an associated dehumanisation of the victims. Slaves were treated as goods and chattels, property to be bought and sold. The growth of colonialism whereby the European imperial powers captured large swathes of the globe added further to these assumptions of racial superiority. For Britain, global colonialism created an empire on which the sun never sets but the narrative included the notion of the white man’s burden, and civilising the uncivilised. A justifying ideology for theft and plunder of many societies was that the colonialists were superior and more developed than their subjects, merely helping them develop – spreading democracy across the globe. Boris Johnson (UK Prime Minister) reflects this sentiment when commenting about India, ‘…the world’s largest democracy – a stark contrast, of course, with other less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule’ (Akala, 2019:123). No mention here of the plunder of India’s riches or the atrocities created by the British during the Indian Mutiny.

Alongside this imperial expansion a pseudo-science began to develop, in part influenced by Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species and the theories of evolution. Whilst Darwin’s work largely focuses on the evolution of plants, birds, and animals, the theory of evolution was quickly employed to argue for a ‘Social Darwinism’ in which Europeans were at a higher stage of evolution than others. Those with black skins were deemed to be at a lower, more animal-like stage. One influential writer maintained that skin colour reflected internal factors such as intelligence and capacity for cultural interests, and that those dark-skinned were inferior to those with white skins (Gross, 2021). Akala (2019:123) quotes Winston Churchill as saying, ‘I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion’. Churchill’s comment reflects the ‘they are all the same’ mindset because Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism are all religions practiced on the Indian sub-continent. Presumably Churchill would not have considered Christianity to be a ‘beastly religion’?

One American doctor who studied craniums from across the globe claimed that people could be divided into five races: Caucasians (most intelligent), then East Asians (Mongolians), South Asians, Native Americans, and lastly blacks (Ethiopians). Each had its place in the divinely created hierarchy. The assumption that the ‘divine creator’ was responsible for the hierarchy was used as conformation that racial ranking was all intended by the ‘creator’. The pseudo-science of racial hierarchy mapped conveniently with imperial domination and the exploitative realities of slavery. For many apologists of slavery and colonialism, the divine plan eliminated the need for moral concerns because this was all ‘god’s plan’ and Europeans were merely the deity’s instrument acting for the greater good of humankind.

Given the outrages that were carried out during the ‘Holocaust’, there was a post-1945 consensus that ‘race’ needed to be redefined. Anthropologists were particularly critical of the ‘scientific racism’ that had deemed many Nazi victims as Untermenschen, lesser human beings who were in danger of polluting the Aryan race. The pseudo-scientific justifications laid bare the irrationality of race as the undesirables included groups such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavonic people; none of whom could be defined as a race, even by the skin colour interpretations of the past. They were deemed to be a threat to Aryans, the assumed master race. Montagu was a prominent critic of scientific racism claiming that ‘the word race, is itself racist’ (Gross, 2021:26). In 1950, the UNESCO published a paper that stressed that all humans belong to just one species – Homo sapiens.

Research by geneticists is now able to look at genetic similarities within and between populations. The greatest genetic diversity occurs within geographical communities, rather than between those on different continents. The greatest genetic diversity within Homo sapiens occurs on the continent of Africa, the original location of the evolution of Homo sapiens. ‘When some began to migrate between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, these were genetically less diverse, than the remainers – the former was composed of fewer people’ (Gross, 2021:27). There is greater genetic diversity within African populations, than between non-African populations across the globe.

Genetic mapping between different ethnic groups may demonstrate fewer variations than wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• 1 The psychology of discrimination
• 2 Hidden in plain sight? Covert prejudice and subtle discrimination
• 3 Aesthetic labour and discrimination
• 4 Fat boys don’t fly: the tyranny of the thin frontline
• 5 Five-star racism
• 6 Why women don’t become chefs
• 7 The boys’ club: gender bias in hospitality hierarchies
• 8 Gender profiles in Chinese organisations
• 9 The poverty of luxury: bias in hospitality management education
• 10 Inequality in the Brazil labour market
• 11 The bolthole of self-employment: migrant workers avoiding prejudice and discrimination
• 12 Looking at THEM and seeing US
• Author biographies
• Index