Hospitality Management

A Brief Introduction

Roy C Wood, Roy C Wood, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781446246955
  9781446246948
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473927766
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

An innovative and cross-cutting approach to Hospitality that examines the fundamentals of the subject in a concise and commendable way. Roy Wood's academic and practitioner expertise is brought to bear on this succinct synthesis of the subject that will quickly become a must read for all students and academics in the hospitality area.
- Professor Stephen J. Page, Bournemouth University

Hospitality Management: A Brief Introduction is designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying hotel and hospitality management and hospitality studies.

The book includes coverage of the principal areas of functional management in hospitality including:

• employee relations
• accommodation management
• food and beverage management
• marketing and sales
• industry structure and strategy
• the nature of management roles
• hospitality management education
• future trends in the field.

Roy Wood uses a wide range of established and contemporary research and reflects critically on its subject, including from the perspective of the hospitality consumer, to ensure that readers gain wide awareness of the realities and challenges of the hospitality industry.

1 Where Are We Going? The Nature Of Hospitality Management

After reading this chapter, you should:

1. better understand the nature of hospitality and hospitality management and the difficulties associated with these terms;
2. have gained insight into a variety of ways in which researchers have theorized about the nature of hospitality and the hospitality industry, including ‘hospitality studies’ perspectives; and
3. have developed sensitivity to the limitations of management knowledge and its applications to the study of hospitality and the hospitality industry.

Introduction: What is Hospitality Management?

The original intention for the title of this book was Hotel Management: A Brief Introduction. A person who studies the nature and character of hotel management is pretty much prepared for managing not only hotels, but restaurants and other types of business that provide food and/or temporary accommodation for the purposes of business or pleasure. This is because the study of hotel management embraces all (or most) of the basic knowledge sets required in preparation for an operational career in the many diverse businesses that make up a fascinating industry. Furthermore, most people know what a hotel or restaurant or accommodation manager is – or at least can make an educated guess. However, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, most students in the field to which this book is addressed are (in the UK at least) likely to be studying a course in hospitality management, a term which has a nice, warm, inclusive feel to it. But what is ‘hospitality management’?

Ideally, hospitality management implies the management of hospitality but the concept of hospitality is a somewhat abstract and fluid one: it can mean different things to different people. Even if we could engineer a definition of hospitality on which most could agree, it would still leave open the question of whether it was possible to ‘manage’ so complex a phenomenon, whereas to talk of hotel management or restaurant management or food and beverage or lodging management is to ‘pin’ management practices to a specific form or function of particular kinds of organization. In reality, the term hospitality management as it is generally employed is of relatively recent origin and has few intellectual anchors. Its use began to grow in popularity among educationalists from the 1980s onwards and came to replace, though not universally, various descriptors like ‘hotel management’, ‘hotel and catering management’, ‘hotel and restaurant management’, ‘food and accommodation management’, and ‘lodging and food service management’ (the term ‘lodging management’ is principally North American and its use persists). Subsequently, the term has attracted more widespread adoption, so much so that we now refer unselfconsciously to the ‘hospitality industry’, on the use of which Lashley (2008: 69) notes: ‘It appears that the description of hotel, restaurant and bar business as “hospitality” was an early attempt at spin, that is, adapting the name of the sector to create a more favourable impression of commercial activities.’ The attraction of the term hospitality management has been explained by some in terms of the extent to which in the English-speaking world the hotel, catering, restaurant and associated industry sectors are held in low social esteem. In this view, adoption of the term has been an attempt by the academic world at creating a respectable cover to deflect these negative associations (Wood, 1997; Brotherton and Wood, 2008a).

Whatever the case, the terms ‘hospitality management’ and ‘hospitality industry’ are, in essence, flags of convenience which are at best vague and suspiciously pretentious and at worse, unnecessarily confusing in incorporating related but different industries under a single umbrella. As Lashley (2000) among others has shown, the many distinct sectors that are taken to comprise the hospitality industry all arguably share some production and service elements in common as well as having affinities with business models found in other industries – notably, but not exclusively, the retail sector. This is an important observation because before we focus on current thinking about the nature of the hospitality industry (and what this implies about the nature of hospitality more generally and the quality of hospitality management) it is necessary to recognize that there are numerous ways in which academics, business analysts and others have sought to theoretically characterize the sector. In an industry which prides itself on its practical and operational nature, the very mention of the word ‘theory’ is likely to raise blood pressure. For one writer, Hemmington (2007: 747, emphasis added):

The schizophrenia of the hospitality industry, and the ‘fragmentation’ of hospitality academia … is a potentially limiting factor in the industry’s drive for growth and development. This schizophrenia is illustrated by questions about whether the hospitality industry is a service industry, whether it is entertainment, or art, or theatre, or retailing, or whether it is no more than another form of business.

Far from being evidence of schizophrenia, a perhaps unfortunate choice of word, the questions noted by Hemmington arise from legitimate theorizing about the nature of the hospitality industry. Theorizing about the nature of any phenomenon (even if sometimes unsuccessful) is not some abstract exercise in unreality but rather the opposite: it is crucial to understanding what we can accept as ‘real’ and plausible about a phenomenon, in this case, the hospitality industry.

Theorizing Hospitality and the Hospitality Industry

Following from the final comment in the preceding section, we shall consider here several different attempts to theoretically define and characterize the hospitality industry under the following headings: hospitality as part of the tourism industry; hospitality as a service industry; the ‘McDonaldized’ hospitality industry; the hospitality industry as an ‘experience’ industry; and hospitality as a social phenomenon.

Hospitality as part of the tourism industry

The idea that the hospitality industry is a sub-set or function of the tourism industry is so well established in academic discourse that to challenge the notion is to invite ridicule. Yet not only can the notion be challenged, there are good reasons for arguing that it should be. The fields of tourism studies and tourism management have increasingly adopted (or at least not critically challenged) ever more expansive definitions of the tourist and tourism, as have various international organizations. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines tourists as people: ‘traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes’, and the ‘tourism sector’ as:

the cluster of production units in different industries that provide consumption goods and services demanded by visitors. Such industries are called tourism industries because visitor acquisition represents such a significant share of their supply that, in the absence of visitors, their production of these would cease to exist in meaningful quantity. (http://media.unwto.org/en/content/understanding-tourism-basic-glossary, last accessed 31.03.13)

This definition is in many ways quite peculiar – what for example are we to call ‘tourism industries’ in areas where visitor acquisition does not constitute a significant element of the demand for the goods and services they supply? The UNWTO view is good enough when applied to those parts of the world where tourism is the dominant industry (or one of the dominant industries) and where hospitality business activity is substantially dependent on tourist arrivals. In harsh reality and most parts of the globe, however, parts of the hospitality industry at least are not called into existence because of tourism and travel but rather exist to serve the needs of local, regional and national communities for food, drink and shelter. The UNWTO recognizes that there are numerous different types of tourism industry although a more accurate description might be ‘industries’ involved in the servicing of tourism and travel. This approach is consistent with the analysis of Leiper (2008: 238), who argues that:

the concept of ‘the tourism industry’ as a single entity directly linked with all tourists is unrealistic, stemming from flawed perceptions and defective understanding of business and industries. Clearer vision, alongside deeper knowledge of business theories and practices, recognises multiple tourism industries.

(Bernini and Guizzardi, 2012, offer a similar take on accommodation industries.) The hospitality sector should not be viewed unequivocally as part of some agglomeration of tourism industries. Clearly, as already noted, there are many economies dependent on international tourism arrivals. Equally, there are places with a plentiful supply of certain hospitality businesses (restaurants, bars) and a restricted supply of others (e.g. hotels and other accommodation businesses) that do not see an international tourist/traveller from one end of the year to the next (in the UK, recent statistics suggest that London alone accounts for 53% of international visitors’ expenditure; see The Economist, 2013c). Of course, in terms of the UNWTO definition cited above, and in terms of academic tourism studies more generally, a tourist is a tourist. Thus a business person travelling within their own country and stopping one night away from home is a tourist. If this seems absurd it is because the definition invites incredulity. Our business person is certainly a traveller, but a tourist? This is a much more contentious point. Tourism scholars have so accustomed us to many different ‘types’ of tourism (health tourism, educational tourism, business tourism, shopping tourism) that the word has been robbed of any real meaning.

To summarize, in parts of the world the existence of hospitality businesses is heavily dependent on various forms of travel and tourism but in many, if not the majority of cases, much of the core hospitality industry – or more appropriately ‘industries’ – exists to serve local and regional populations in their daily needs for the products and services offered by the sector. In theorizing that the hospitality sector is simply part of the tourism industry we obscure this fact and draw attention away from those parts of the hospitality industry involved in the servicing of needs that are categorically not tourism dependent – as in, for example, many forms of business-to-business catering, schools, prisons and hospitals.

Hospitality as a service industry

Just as the relationship of the hospitality to the tourism industries appears at first sight to be unproblematic, then so does the question as to whether the hospitality industry is a service industry – indeed, in some American academic hospitality writing it is not unusual to refer, in error, to the hospitality industry as the service industry. Everybody knows, or thinks they know, that the hospitality industry is a service industry. A service industry is normally defined in contrast to a manufacturing industry, the latter primarily being involved in the production of physical, tangible goods, the former focused upon the provision of some service or services that are not physically tangible.

It is now regarded as a simple truth that we live in a ‘post-industrial’ or ‘service’ society. Daniel Bell (1973) and subsequently many others predicted the coming of ‘post-industrial society’, the three most important features of which were: (a) a change from a goods producing to a service economy; (b) the growth in pre-eminence of white collar workers within the occupational structure, and within this category the growth in importance of what would today be called ‘knowledge workers’; and (c) increasing mastery and use of technology, and the incorporation of technology into increasing aspects of life. Bell’s views have been hotly disputed. Kumar (1978, 2004) argues that so-called post-industrial society characteristics can be traced back to the nineteenth century with service employment being a normal feature of early industrialization in most economies. In this respect, the UK was anomalous in having, albeit only for a short period in its history, the majority of its workforce engaged in manufacturing.

Gershuny (1978, 1979) maintains that Bell (1973) confuses definitions of services based on service ‘products’ and those based on service employment. For Gershuny, services are consumable at the instant of production, being always consumed ‘once and for all’. Goods in contrast are material things that maintain an existence after the production process. Gershuny found no increase in the percentage of household expenditure on services between 1954 and 1974 but did find evidence of patterns of substitution where needs previously met externally to the household were now met by the purchase of capital goods. Entertainment needs previously met by cinemas or theatres were replaced by television; domestic help in the form of human labour by domestic appliances; public transport by private transport – in each case a good substituting for a service. Gershuny suggests that definitions of service employment should be constrained to describing employment in industries whose final product is a service in the ‘once and for all’ sense. The apparent growth in services employment noted by proponents of post-industrial society theories is, Gershuny suggests, a problem of misclassification. He notes that a large proportion of service workers are closely connected with the production of goods in the widest sense, thus workers employed in financial services are associated with the production or purchase of goods. Therefore, though service workers may constitute a majority of the workforce this does not imply that the production of services predominates over that of goods. This view accords with those of a number of economists, for example Greenfield (2002: 21), who pursue the somewhat purist notion that demand for services is always subordinate to demand for goods – that is ‘no services can be produced without a prior investment in capital goods having been made’.

Gershuny’s contribution to our understanding of services is paralleled in one strand of largely unrelated academic Marxism. At a time when service industries were still largely ignored by academic social scientists, not least by those of a leftist persuasion, Harry Braverman (1974: 360) argued that much service work is similar to manufacturing work. He instances chefs and cooks preparing a meal to illustrate his point, reinforcing this by considering chambermaids, who, though classed as service employees, produce in their work, a tangible good (a clean room for sale). It is fairly straightforward to accept the chef as a producer of manufactured goods rather than a service worker but do we regard the outcome of a chambermaid’s efforts – a clean room – as a product or a service? In Gershuny’s terms, a service is consumed once and for all: a hotel bedroom is not consumed once and for all, it endures. Gershuny and Braverman (and many others besides – see Miles, 2001, for a useful review) indirectly highlight the reductionism entailed in simply classifying hospitality as a service industry. The co-presence of goods and services within the hospitality sector is self-evident. Advances in science and technology have allowed development of food production and service systems that permit the separation of production from service/consumption thus furnishing operators with a wider range of choices as to the models of hospitality and hospitality management that can be developed in contrast to the traditional model of same-site production, service and consumption. This has implications for the type, cost of production and service, and the nature of the consumer experience, and for the quantity and skill levels of the employees required to operate particular production and service configurations.

A similar point is made in more general terms by Unvala and Donaldson (1988: 468), who distinguish between emerging ‘economic’ and ‘marketing’ traditions in discussions of the nature of services, maintaining that: ‘new employment and continued employment in services cannot be safely predicted without a detailed analysis of (a) criteria for characterising services …. This needs (c) detailed research on the similarities and differences between services at company, industry and unit level.’ In point of fact, the ‘marketing tradition’ has in many ways come to dominate contemporary discourse on services with the development of a whole field devoted to services marketing (e.g. Gronroos, 2007; Palmer, 2007). One consequence of this has been that relative to services in general and hospitality in particular, the wider economic and social issues raised by Gershuny, Braverman and other, similar, writers remain largely unresolved, indeed they have been marginalized, letting matters rest with the view that the sector combines both production and service elements or, as has become somewhat ironically commonp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Preface
• 1 Where Are We Going? The Nature Of Hospitality Management
• 2 What Kind Of Industry? Structure, Strategy And The Nature Of The Hospitality Industry
• 3 A People Business? Human Resources In The Hospitality Sector
• 4 Is Your Room Alright? Accommodation Management In Hospitality
• 5 Are You Enjoying Your Meal? Food And Beverage Management In Hospitality
• 6 Would You Like To Join Our Customer Loyalty Programme? Marketing And Consumption In Hospitality
• 7 Can I Speak To Whoever’S In Charge? The Role Of Management In Hospitality
• 8 So You Give Degrees To Waiters? Hospitality Management Education
• 9 Conclusion – The Proof Of The Pudding?
• Web Resources And Applications
• References
• Index