In Search of Hospitality. Theoretical perspectives and debates

310 Pages·2001·7.504 MB·English

by  Conrad Lashley and Alison Morrison (Eds.)

Butterworth-Heinemann
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First published 2000
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
In search of hospitality: theoretical perspectives and debates
1. Hospitality - Philosophy 2. Hospitality industry -
Philosophy 3. Philosophy and civilization
I. Lashley, Conrad 11. Morrison, Alison J.
177.1
ISBN-10 0 7506 5431 7
ISBN-13 978 0 7506 5431 9
Transferred to digital print 2007
Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne
c I
I began reading this volume in a somewhat anxious state of mind.
I'd accepted the invitation to write a foreword without having
any very clear idea in my mind about the meaning of 'hospitality'
or about how the subject might engender the 'theoretical
perspectives and debates' which were promised in the sub-title. I
need not have worried. As soon as I began to read I realized that
this was not only an area of study which connected with many of
my own sociological interests in the 'escape attempts' provided
by holidays and tourism but also provided me with a nice
justification for further pursuing the amateur obsession I've had
over the years with hotels and guesthouses.
This interest was initially prompted by my friendship with the
first editor of The Good HofeI Guide. I remember spending hours
talking with Hilary about the possibility of such a guide and
about whether it would be possible to persuade a sufficient
number of people to write in with highly personal accounts of the
places where they'd stayed. As it turned out, Hilary's optimism
about the venture was entirely justified and now, like so many
others, I find myself not only racing out to buy the latest edition
but positively longing for the moment when I can settle back and
savour the thousands of lovingly written independent reports on
hotels, inns, guesthouses and B&Bs which make up its content.
What makes the guide so fascinating is the insight it provides
into the distinctive idea of hospitality held by the British middle
classes. Every year, for example, the 'note for new readers'
announces that most of the entries are for small establishments
run by resident owners. Even though the bulk of hotel rooms in
Foreword
the country are to be found in large hotels run by managers, the
guide knows its audience well enough to confidently dismiss
their claims in a single sentence: 'We don't object in principle to
large hotels . . .b ut in our experience they often fail to provide the
welcome and care for guests' comfort that can be found in the
best of the small individually-owned hotels'.
Now, it would be difficult to argue with the idea that any self-
respecting hotel or guesthouse should provide a reasonable
welcome and show a concern for its guests' comfort, but even the
briefest glance at any of the entries in the guide shows that these
words are being used in an exclusive and specialized sense. No
matter how enthusiastic the welcome provided by the reception-
ist at a Hyatt or a Hilton, no matter how much concern for a
guest's comfort is evidenced by the furniture and fittings within
a Marriott or Moat House, there is no way in which such
establishments can meet the distinctive welcome and comfort
requirements of the typical guide reader.
What exactly are these requirements? I can't pretend to have
done a systematic content analysis of the 750 essays that make up
the guide but there are several descriptions which regularly recur
whether the facility under inspection is a five-bedroom B&B or a
grand thirty-bedroom mansion. Guide readers almost always
relish any establishment with a 'homely feel'. They like to feel 'at
home', enjoy the sense of being in a 'private house', and relish a
degree of 'informality'. Great emphasis is also placed upon the
personality of the owners. They should above all be 'enthusiastic'
(even 'exuberant'), 'friendly', 'unfussy', 'generous', 'kind, 'infor-
mal', free of snobbery and pretension, and as proud of their
establishment as they are knowledgeable about its history and
setting. There's no need to go on. What we have here is a simple
exercise in projection. Guide readers expect their hosts and
hostesses to correspond as closely as possible in an imperfect
world to their own idealized self-conceptions.T hey must provide
a refreshing and reassuring reminder of the core middle class
values which are so difficult to live up to in today's frenzied
material world as well as preside over a 'traditional home' free
from the disunity and fragmentation of contemporary domestic
life. Above all they must contrive to give the impression, even on
the morning when the final bill is presented, that they are not so
much motivated by a desire for personal gain as living out a
vocation.
At this point I must draw a line under my own speculations
and trust that the academics who have contributed to this
collection of essays on the nature of hospitality will forgive my
intrusion into their specialist area. My intention was solely to
demonstrate a personal fascination with the subject matter of
Foreword
their research, to reinforce the view so often articulated in this
volume, that hospitality is a concept which has not only been
much neglected in the literature of social science, but also one
which is well capable of taking its place alongside such other
more familiar intellectual areas of enquiry as 'stratification',
'deviance', 'social mobility' and 'leisure'.
All these now familiar areas of enquiry were preoccupied in
their infancy with defining the exact nature of their subject area.
This volume shows 'hospitality' going through a similar process
and it was refreshing to find Elizabeth Telfer asking the question
which at least implicitly preoccupies the editors of The Good Hotel
Guide: 'Can a commercial host be hospitable?'. As she observes,
'On a superficial view this seems to be ruled out on the grounds
that he or she always has an ulterior motive, namely the profit
motive'. The Guide's resolution of this dilemma is to reserve the
word 'hospitable' for those institutions where the profit motive is
better concealed than others but as I have already indicated, in so
doing, it is forced to ignore those larger hotels which may
provide their guests with exactly what they require in terms of
service, comfort and efficiency. Telfer avoids this trap by arguing
that 'if a commercial host looks after his guests well out of a
genuine concern for their happiness and charges them reasonably
rather than extortionately for what he does, his activities can be
called hospitable. . . To say that a commercial host cannot be said
to behave hospitably simply on the ground that he is paid for his
work is like saying that doctors cannot be said to behave
compassionately because they are paid for what they do'.
It's a neat point but I'm unhappy about that weasel word
'genuine'. How on earth are we to measure such 'genuine
concern'? All we have to go on is the behaviour of the particular
host and if this behaviour seems genuine enough to visiting
guests, should the news that it was entirely learned during a six-
week course on hospitality lead us to withdraw the epithet? What
is important to hotel guests is surely a successful 'show of
hospitality' in much the same way that patients visiting their
local GP are delighted to find an appropriate display of
compassion.
This perspective is fruitfully adopted by Jane Darke and Craig
Gurney in their analysis of hospitality as performance. By
drawing upon Goffman's theory of presentation they avoid the
need to question the 'genuineness' or otherwise of the hospitality
that is being offered. As far as Goffman is concerned all self-
presentation is accomplished by recourse to a variety of tech-
niques which have affinities with the way an actor successfully
brings off a role on stage. There is no more point in asking
whether the motive behind the hotelier's successful performance
Foreword
~ ~ ~ ~
of hospitality is genuine than in seeking to discover whether or
not John Gielgud really was Hamlet.
This perspective has two other advantages which are well
exploited by Darke and Gurney. It allows for a very fruitful
comparison between domestic and commercial hospitality in
terms of what is required for successful accomplishment in both
spheres as well as highlighting the dangers of the hospitality
industry drawing too freely upon domestic metaphors. More
importantly, it provides a basis for understanding the range of
embarrassments and anxieties which lie around the practice of
hospitality. As they write: 'The performance of hospitality is
fragile and precarious'.
There's one other critical way in which Goffman helps us in the
characterization of hospitality. At the centre of all his work on
presentation and performance lies the notion of reciprocity and
exchange. Visitors to a hotel are not merely passive observers of
the staffs attempts to provide them with hospitality, they
provide the conditions for that performance by colluding with
the presentation. They have, in other words, a vested interest in
the performance being successful in that its breakdown creates an
embarrassment which denies them their chance to carry off their
own role of hotel guest. The running joke in Fawlty Towers is not
John Cleese's incapacity to perform successfully the role of hotel
manager but the manner in which this failure creates havoc
among guests who persist even in the face of the most appalling
insults and provocation in continuing to cling to their own
circumscribed role of hotel guest.
Although Brotherton and Wood do not draw upon Goffman in
their conceptual chapter on hospitality and hospitality manage-
ment, they are commendably insistent upon placing the idea of
exchange (economic, social and psychological) at the heart of
their synthesis. As they suggest, this emphasis promotes an
'exploration of trans-historical and cross-national studies of
cvri hospitality as well as immediately raising questions about the
La- relationships between 'private/domestic and public/commercial
L9. hospitality'.
I hope I've said enough to indicate that I find much of the
discussion in this text to be important and timely. There have
been occasions in my regular column in the Times Higher
Education Supplement when I've rather lazily used 'Hospitality
Studies' as shorthand for all those new-found university cour-
ses which seem to be prompted rather more by student
fashion and the requirements of the job market than any deep
seated intellectual curiosity. I will take more care in future.
This book amply demonstrates that the study of hospitality is
as intellectually valid as any other area of human relations. It
Foreword
is also of the moment. The massive expansion of the tourist
industry and the dramatic increase in the use of private homes
as sites for dinner parties and weekend stopovers means that
most of us are now regular consumers as well as purveyors of
hospitality. Anyone who is curious about the implications of
these developments for our notions of interpersonal reciprocity,
gender relations, hyperreality, and public and private space
now has a valuable work of reference. As essential hotel
reading it sure as hell knocks spots off the Gideon Bible.
Laurie Taylor
a *
Introduction
This book aims to both reflect and open up a number of debates
between academics working in the field of ‘hospitality manage-
ment’ and academics from the wider social sciences. As Airey and
Tribe show in Chapter 15, hospitality management is a relatively
new academic discipline that has been largely concerned with the
hospitality industry. In many ways ’hospitality’ has been used as
a term to describe activities that were called ‘hotel and catering’
in earlier times. The study of ’hospitality’ presents avenues of
enquiry that the more prosaic title of hotel and catering tends to
discourage yet which are essential for understanding host and
guest relationships. When the possibilities are explored, hospital-
ity and hospitableness can be studies in private and in wider
social settings.
There have been a number of recent books dealing with food
and social aspects of eating. For example, the work of Visser 4
(19911, Mennel, et al. (1992), Wood, (19951, Beardsworth and Keil 3
(1997) all address aspects of eating and meals. With few ’-i
exceptions, these texts rarely touch on or mention hospitality and 5,
g1-G
relationships between guests and host through a study of mutual
obligations and the practice of hospitableness. Telfer’s work ol:
(1996) and Heal’s (1990)e xploration of hospitality in early middle 2
England are notable in providing analysis that can inform future ?
study. -*->
Current interest in defining hospitality as an academic subject -:
outlined in this book stems from a meeting held in Nottingham in -t.
9
April 1997. The meeting aimed to explore subjects of common
interest amongst some of the leading researchers and writers in
-h
Introduction
hospitality subjects within the UK. This text draws together some
of the ideas both presented in discussion papers written by
colleagues, and in some of the other texts mentioned earlier. The
book is therefore exploratory, intended as a medium for
dissemination, debate and future directions of work in the
discipline.
By the very nature of the project, the contents are eclectic.
Chapters have been commissioned, in some cases because
authors were already working in a discipline that had a
contribution to make about the nature of hospitality. In other
cases, chapters have been volunteered by those involved in
research activities that shed insights into the topic. In some cases,
authors write from different philosophical and epistemological
perspectives, and the book deliberately aims to reflect a plurality
of views in which some individuals do not agree with others.
Our aim in selecting chapters has, therefore, been concerned
with reflecting insights into the study of hospitality that
encompass the commercial provision of hospitality and the
hospitality industry, yet at the same time recognize that hospital-
ity needs to be explored in a private domestic setting and studies
hospitality as a social phenomenon involving relationships
between people. It is our hope that these chapters will each in
their own way encourage further research and study. The book is,
therefore, not intended as the final word, but more a beginning
from which the subject will develop and grow.
Conrad Lashley
School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Leeds Metropolitan University
Alison Morrison
The Scottish Hotel School, University of Strathclyde
References
Beardsworth, A. and Keil, T. (1997) Sociology on the Menu.
London, Routledge.
Heal, F. (1990) Hospitality in Early Modern England. Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
Mennel, S., Murcott, A. and van Otterloo, A.H. (1992) The
Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture. London, Sage.
Telfer, E. (1996) Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food. London,
Routledge.
Visser, M. (1991) The Rituals of Dinner. Toronto, HarperCollins.
Wood, R.C. (1995) The Sociology of the Meal. Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press.
About the authors
Amel Adib is a research student in the South Bank Business
School at the University of the South Bank
David Airey is Professor of Tourism Management in the School
of Management Studies for the Service Sector at the University of
Surrey
Hazel Andrews is a research student in the Centre for Leisure
and Tourism Studies at the University of North London
Stephen Ball is Principal Lecturer in Hospitality Management in
the School of Leisure and Food Management at Sheffield Hallam
University
David Botterill is Director of Research and Enterprise in the
School of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure at the University of
Wales Institute, Cardiff
I
Bob Brotherton is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Hotel, -
I --
Catering and Tourism Management at Manchester Metropolitan
University .>
.::
Jane Darke is Lecturer in Housing in the School of Planning at
Oxford Brookes University
-
Craig Gurney is Lecturer in Housing at the Centre for Housing -'
-
Management and Development at the University of Wales
Yvonne Guerrier is Professor and Head of the Division of Leisure
and Tourism in the South Bank Business School at the University
of the South Bank
About the authors
Peter Jones is Forte Professor of Hotel Management in the School
of Management Studies for the Service Sector at the University of
Surrey
Keith Johnson is Professor of Human Resource Management in
the Business School at the College of Ripon and St John
Conrad Lashley is British Institute of Innkeeping Professor in
Licensed Retail Management in the School of Tourism and
Hospitality Management at Leeds Metropolitan University
Andrew Lockwood is Professor of Hospitality Management in
the School of Management Studies for the Service Sector at the
University of Surrey
Paul Lynch is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hospitality
and Tourism Management at Queen Margaret’s University
College
Doreen MacWhannell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Sociology at Queen Margaret‘s University College
Alison Morrison is Director of Research in the Scottish Hotel
School at the University of Strathclyde
Sandie Randall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hospital-
ity and Tourism Management at Queen Margaret‘s University
College
Tom Selwyn is Professor of the Anthropology of Tourism, Centre
for Leisure and Tourism Studies at the University of North
London
Elizabeth Telfer is Reader in Philosophy in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Glasgow
John Tribe is Principal Lecturer in Tourism in the Faculty of
Leisure and Tourism at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University
College
John K. Walton is Principal Lecturer in Urban History in the
Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University
of Central Lancashire
Alistair Williams is Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the Division
of Hospitality Studies at the University of Huddersfield
Roy C. Wood is Professor in Hospitality Management in the
Scottish Hotel School at the University of Strathclyde