The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies

Conrad Lashley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317395669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of hospitality as a social phenomenon. This interest has tended to arrive from two communities. The first comprises hospitality academics interested in exploring the wider meanings of hospitality as a way of better understanding guest and host relations and its implications for commercial settings. The second comprises social scientists using hosts and guests as a metaphor for understanding the relationship between host communities and guests as people from outside the community – migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies encourages both the study of hospitality as a human phenomenon and the study for hospitality as an industrial activity embracing the service of food, drink and accommodation. Developed from specifically commissioned original contributions from recognised authors in the field, it is the most up-to-date and definitive resource on the subject. The volume is divided into four parts: the first looks at ways of seeing hospitality from an array of social science disciplines; the second highlights the experiences of hospitality from different guest perspectives; the third explores the need to be hospitable through various time periods and social structures, and across the globe; while the final section deals with the notions of sustainability and hospitality. This handbook is interdisciplinary in coverage and is also international in scope through authorship and content. The 'state-of-the-art' orientation of the book is achieved through a critical view of current debates and controversies in the field as well as future research issues and trends. It is designed to be a benchmark for any future assessment of the field and its development.

This handbook offers the reader a comprehensive synthesis of this discipline, conveying the latest thinking, issues and research. It will be an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in hospitality, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.

Chapters: Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

1
Introduction

Research on hospitality: the story so far/ways of knowing hospitality

Conrad Lashley

Key themes

Studying the domains of hospitality

The continuum of hospitality

Hospitableness

Themes

Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even though you wish they were.

(Anon)

The study of hospitality has been stimulated by academics engaged in hospitality research and hospitality management education, and by academics from an array of social science fields interested in the study of relationships between guests and hosts. Although I have been primarily involved in hospitality management education, I recognised the need to explore social sciences insights into the study of host and guest relations. This interest resulted in a text co-edited with Alison Morrison, In Search of Hospitality: Theoretical Perspectives and Debates (Lashley and Morrison, 2000), followed by a second book, Hospitality: A Social Lens (Lashley et al., 2007). Around the same time, Jennie Germann Molz and Sarah Gibson edited Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World (2007). The last-mentioned book emerged as the result of an interest in increasing global mobility from social science perspectives. Subsequently, researchers came together from both fields to launch the refereed research journal Hospitality & Society. This current edited volume is, therefore, the latest stage in the emerging academic field of ‘hospitality studies’. It encourages both the study of hospitality as a human phenomenon and the study for hospitality as an industrial activity embracing the service of food, drink and accommodation in commercial and non-commercial settings.

Studying the domains of hospitality

Before going on to discuss the outline of this text, it is perhaps useful to go back over some of the ground that the study of hospitality encourages. Figure 1.1 reproduces a Venn diagram that was included in Lashley and Morrison’s book (2000). While this might be accused of being somewhat simplistic and crude, it does suggest that studying hospitality as a commercial activity is just one domain, and that study of hospitality through the cultural/social domain and in the private/domestic domain can be interesting fields of academic enquiry in their own right, but can also better inform the development of managers destined to manage hospitality operations. Interestingly, the host–guest relationship has emerged as a metaphor for any setting where one person (guest) enters the space of another (host). Hospital services, banking and transport are examples of sectors where there is interest in hospitableness as a means of delivering customer experiences that enhance satisfaction and loyalty.

Figure 1.1 The domains of hospitality

The cultural/social domain of hospitality activities suggests the need to study the social context in which particular hospitality activities take place. Current notions about hospitality are a relatively recent development (Lashley and Morrison, 2000; Germann Molz and Gibson, 2007; Lashley et al., 2007). In pre-industrial societies, hospitality occupies a much more central position in the value-system (O’Gorman, 2007). Indeed in contemporary pre-industrial societies, hospitality and the duty to entertain both neighbours and strangers represent a fundamental moral imperative (Heal, 1990; Cole, 2007; Meehan, 2012; Melwani, 2009). Frequently, the requirement to provide hospitality, to act with generosity as a host and to protect visitors is more than a matter left to the preferences of individuals. Beliefs about hospitality, and obligations to others, are located in views and visions about the nature of society and the natural order of things. Thus any failure to act appropriately is treated with social condemnation. The centrality of hospitality activities has been noted in a wide range of studies of Homeric Greece, early Rome, medieval Provence, the Maori, Indian tribes of Canada, early modern England and in Mediterranean societies, for example. While modern industrial economies no longer have the same intensive moral obligations to be hospitable, and much hospitality experience takes place in commercial settings, the study of the cultural domain provides a valuable set of insights with which to critically evaluate and inform commercial provision. Part I of this book, entitled ‘Disciplinary perspectives’, includes chapters by authors that explore some of the more social and cultural dimensions to the study of hospitality.

The private/domestic domain helps with the consideration of some of the issues related to the meaning of hospitality, hosting and ‘hospitableness’. Hospitality involves supplying food, drink and accommodation to people who are not members of the household. While much current research and published material focuses exclusively on the commercial market exchange between the recipient and supplier of hospitality, the domestic setting is revealing because the parties concerned are performing roles that extend beyond the narrow market relationships of a service interaction. The provision of food, drink and accommodation represents an act of friendship; it creates symbolic ties between people that establish bonds among those involved in sharing hospitality. In most pre-industrial societies, the receipt and kindly treatment of strangers was highly valued, though as Heal (1990) shows the motives were not always solely altruistic. Receiving strangers into the household helped to monitor the behaviour of outsiders. Visser (1991) links the relationship between the host and the guest through the common linguistic root of the two words. Both originate from a common Indo-European word that means ‘stranger’ and thereby ‘enemy’ (hospitality and hostile have a similar root), but the link to this single term ‘refers not so much to the individual people, the guest and the host, as to the relationship between them’ (Visser, 1991: 91). It is a relationship frequently based on mutual obligations and ultimately on reciprocity. The guest may become the host on another occasion. Importantly, however, most individuals have their first experiences of both consuming and supplying food, drink and accommodation in domestic settings. Indeed, few employees, or would-be entrepreneurs, enter the commercial sectors of hospitality as workers without having some experiences of hospitality in domestic settings.

One of the key issues relating to hospitality provision in the commercial/industrial domain relates to the authenticity of the hospitality provided. Are commercial hospitality products and services merely another service? Can commercial hospitality ever be genuinely hospitable? Are models of cultural and private hospitality of any value? Slattery (2002) argues that restaurant, bar and hotel services are essentially economic and involve a management activity. The study of hospitality from wider social science perspectives has, therefore, limited utility. In this view, the guest–host transaction is essential a monetary transaction.

Ritzer (2007) agrees by suggesting that there are powerful drivers in commercial hospitality organisations that will lead hospitality provision to become ‘inhospitable’. Ritzer’s comments on ‘McDonaldisation’ (2004) state that corporate drivers to increase efficiency, calculability, predictability and control lead ultimately to the creation of systems that act as a barrier to the frontline delivery of hospitableness. These McDonaldising processes inhibit performances that are hospitable, and at the same time they generate customer feelings of being undervalued as individuals. Standardising and systemising processes, therefore, are a fundamental aspect of the approach to managing hospitality services in bars, restaurants and hotels, and, in effect, remove the ‘hospitableness’ from the transaction. In Telfer’s terms (2000), the commercial transaction provides an ulterior motive for offering hospitality and therefore prevents ‘genuine’ hospitality. Warde and Martens (2000) found that interviewees regarded eating out in restaurants as less than authentic. In contrast to the somewhat pessimistic views of Warde and Martens (2000) and Ritzer (2007), Telfer (2000) does suggest that it is not inevitable that commercial hospitality will invariably be a less than authentic version of hospitality in the home. She suggests that it is possible that those who have an interest in, and who value, hospitality will be drawn to work in the commercial hospitality sector. They may run their own hospitality businesses or choose to work in roles that enable them to be hospitable.

The problem is that many hospitality and tourism operators give priority to tangible aspects of the customer offer – the quality of the food, facilities and comfort of the room, the range and quality of the drinks on offer and so on – but fail to see that it is the quality of the employee performance which creates guests’ emotional experiences that impact upon long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. Herzberg’s concept of motivation theory (1966) provides a useful metaphor. The physical aspects of the resort, the decor, physical facilities, the meals and drinks supplied are potentially ‘dissatisfiers’. If standards do not meet expectations, customers will be dissatisfied. However, exceeding their expectations in these tangible aspects will not produce satisfaction (Balmer and Baum, 1993). Customer satisfaction will be created by the quality of the emotions generated from their experiences. Staff performance, the qualities of hospitableness delivered, their fellow diners and the behaviour of line management are the key elements to producing customer satisfaction, through their emotional experiences as guests. Long-term customer loyalty and repeat custom to the venue are dependent on the emotions generated by these elements. Highly satisfied hospitality and tourism visitors are more likely to return or to recommend the establishment to family and friends.

Hospitality and hospitableness

This text embraces the study of hospitality from wider social science perspectives that enable an understanding of guest and host transactions that can inform much management practice and prerogatives. Traditional understandings of hospitality require hosts to be primarily concerned with ensuring guest well-being. Using some of these traditional models of hospitality offers the opportunity to convert strangers into friends. In a commercial context, this could be translated to converting customers into friends (Lashley and Morrison, 2000), thereby providing the basis for competitive advantage by building a loyal customer base. At root, operators can be trained to recognise and engage with the provision of hospitality experiences that rely heavily on the emotional dimensions of these experiences.

Combining the work of Heal (1984), Nouwen (1998), Telfer (2000) and O’Gorman (2007) it is possible to detect a number of motives for hosts offering hospitality to guests. Figure 1.2 provides a graphical representation of this array of motives. These can be mapped along a continuum showing the more calculative reasons for providing hospitality through to the most generous. In other words, where hospitality is offered with the hope of ensuing gain, to situations whereby hospitality is offered merely for the joy and pleasure of hosting.

Ulterior	Containing	Commercial	Reciprocal	Redistributive	Altruistic
motives	hospitality	hospitality	hospitality	hospitality	hospitality
hospitality

Figure 1.2 A continuum of hospitality

Telfer (2000) identified the offering of food, drink and accommodation with some expectation of subsequent gain as ‘ulterior motives hospitality’. It is assumed that the guest is able to benefit the host, and hospitality is offered as a means of gaining that benefit. Here, the business lunch or dinner for the boss, or the client, can be examples of hospitality being offered with the intention of creating a favourable impression that will ultimately benefit the host. Writing in the early 1500s, Niccolò Machiavelli advised, ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’. In this sense ‘containing hospitality’ is motivated by a fear of the stranger, but one that advocates close monitoring by including the stranger in the household. Wagner’s opera Die Walküre involves Hunding offering Seigmund hospitality even though Hunding knows Seigmund to be an enemy. This provides an insight into the obligation to offer hospitality to all, irrespective of who they are, but also suggests that the motive is to monitor and contain the enemy (Wagner, 1870).

On one level, ‘Treat the customers as though they were guests in your own home’ is attempting to tap into restaurant workers’ hosting experience in domestic settings (Ashness and Lashley, 1995). Hopefully, the service worker will engage on an emotional level, as hosts serving their customers, as personal guests. Yet the provision of commercial hospitality involves a financial transaction whereby hospitality is offered to guests at a price, and would be withdrawn if the payment could not be made. Hence, ‘commercial hospitality’ can be said to represent a contradiction and cannot deliver true hospitableness (Ward and Martens, 2000; Ritzer, 2004, 2007). Telfer (2000), however, reminds us that this is a somewhat simplistic view because it may be that hospitable people are drawn to work in bars, hotels and restaurants, and offer hospitableness beyond, and in spite of, the commercial transaction and materialistic instructions from owners. Also, it may be that hospitable people are drawn to set up hospitality businesses in guesthouses, pubs and restaurants because it allows them to be both entrepreneurial and hospitable at the same time.

A number of writers suggest that hospitality involves reciprocity whereby hospitality is offered on the understanding that it will be reciprocated at some later date (O’Gorman, 2007). Hospitality practised by elite families in Augustinian Rome was founded on the principle of reciprocity as an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction Research on hospitality: the story so far/ways of knowing hospitality
• Part I Disciplinary perspectives
• Part II Experiencing hospitality
• Part III Hospitality through time and space
• Part IV Sustainable hospitality
• Index