Tourism’s job creation potential is unequivocal. According to World Travel and Tourism Council (2017) estimates, no fewer than one in ten jobs is now generated by tourism (directly and indirectly). As tourism continues its inexorable rise, international tourist arrivals growing from 278 million in 1950 to 1235 million in 2016 (UNWTO 2017) with a forecast of further growth to 1.8 billion by 2030 (UNWTO 2011), so will it continue to offer employment opportunities to increasing numbers of people globally.
A case can quite easily be made then why policymakers might be interested in tourism and its development with regard specifically to the generation of jobs: despite recent rapid advances associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and artificial intelligence (Bort 2017; Ford 2015; Frey and Osborne 2017; World Economic Forum 2016), it is and will in the foreseeable future remain a labour-intensive industry. It is commonly regarded as a low skills sector, and therefore one that can provide work to those who have not entered the so-called knowledge economy (frequently it is looked down upon because of this low skills status). Tourism also frequently takes place in remote, often peripheral (not just geographically, socially and economically) regions and as such one of few sectors that may offer work, and work that it is difficult, if not impossible, to outsource (Denmark’s Tourism Strategy makes specific reference to ‘jobs that cannot be relocated to other countries’ The Danish Government 2014, p. 11).
But, employment in tourism is not one-dimensional, its features may be interpreted in different ways (which makes it such an interesting topic of study). We have already alluded to the purported low skills nature of many jobs in tourism. Based on wages as a measure of skills then undoubtedly this is true; tourism is a low wage sector. The extent to which it is truly low skilled or whether this reflects bias towards soft skills is another matter (Burns 1997). As is typically the case, the devil is in the detail, for example Åberg and Müller (2018) describe how in Sweden the characteristics of the workforce in tourism differ between urban and rural locations with low-skilled, young tourism workers predominantly found in the urban regions, whereas in more rural and peripheral regions it employs the relatively higher educated. Or we could highlight Underthun and Jordhus-Lier’s (2018) study of hotel workers in Oslo where ‘working tourists’ mix with less privileged expatriate workers, often undertaking the same functional roles.
Extending the discussion beyond wages and skills, more broadly there continues to be an ongoing debate around the nature of work and working conditions in tourism (Winchenback et al. 2019; Baum 2018; Walmsley et al. 2018; Robinson et al. 2019) with some emphasis being placed on the International Labour Office’s Decent Work agenda with the notion of Decent Work featuring prominently in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth). More generally, there has been a shift in policymaking circles from a focus solely on quantity to a focus also on quality of jobs. The question is no longer solely ‘how many?’ but ‘what kind?’ (e.g. Taylor 2017). In a changing world of work, it is instructive to inspect the extent to which policy prerogatives filter their way down to practice, and to explore in some detail the nature, characteristics and meaning of work in tourism, here from a Nordic perspective.
The Nordic Context
Commenting on the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama famously suggested we had reached the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989) with the ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’ (Fukuyama 1989, p. 1). Today, his words ring a little hollow in an era of increased political division. That there still exists a dominant politico-economic paradigm is no longer a given; in Coen and Roberts’ (2012, p. 5) words: ‘The easy consensus on policy which typified the last years of the age of liberalization…has collapsed’ (Coen and Roberts 2012, p. 5). Within Europe, but also further afield (e.g. in the United States) recent history has seen a move from centrist politics. Voices that question the dominant Anglo-American (frequently referred to as neo-liberal) form of capitalism are now regularly heard (e.g. Manolescu 2011; Chang 2011; Küng 2010; Mason 2015; Collier 2018; Picketty 2014). The point is, rather than a sure-footed, steady march towards homogenisation of politico-economic systems in the Anglo-Saxon mould, we are today witnessing a renewed interest in variations of the capitalist model.
Upon this backdrop Tourism Employment in Nordic Countries seeks to explore and make sense of facets of employment as they relate specifically to what are commonly regarded as Nordic Countries (generally said to comprise Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and associated territories; The Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland islands). Viewed through a politico-economic lens, Nordic countries share what is often referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’ comprising features such as:
- a comprehensive welfare state financed by taxes on labour (Kolm and Tonin 2015)
- more equitable income distribution (OECD 2017)
- high spending on childcare (Kolm and Tonin 2015)
- emphasis on a social democratic element, or the element of coordinated market economy, as different from a pure, or liberalist one (Gustavsen 2007)
- lifelong learning policies (Jochem 2011)
- the value of equality (Kvist and Greve 2011).
While Nordic countries share similarities in terms of the structure of their politico-economic systems, especially their welfare...