Hospitality & Society - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2022

Since the 1990s, the hospitality industry has been increasingly characterized by temporary and insecure forms of employment, a development, which has coincided with rising numbers of students seeking part-time employment. This provides increased job competition for non-students and would appear to be of primary benefit to the employer in terms of an enhanced labour pool. This study reports the findings from seven semi-structured interviews with hospitality employers and six student focus groups (31 participants) in South-West England and Wales. It suggests that hospitality employers manage students and non-students to complement each other, particularly with reference to working time preferences. There is evidence that employers pay more attention to the welfare and needs of non-student workers in order to protect their core of full-time and permanent part-time staff. However, when employing students, employers and students take a pragmatic commercial view of their symbiotic relationship and both parties report satisfaction with this arrangement. Employers also consider both student and non-students as potential leaders. Finally, the study shows that student-employees can, and frequently do, provide long-term commitment to employers, contradicting the usual view of student work as transitory within the hospitality industry.

The increasing popularity of walking pilgrimage has created new forms of interaction and exchange between pilgrims and residents along pilgrimage routes. As a result, religious hospitality along these pilgrimage routes is also under transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted along the Koyasan Choishi-michi pilgrimage route in Wakayama, Japan, this article examines how the meanings and experiences of osettai (‘religious hospitality’) change over time and space. Focusing specifically on the role tourism plays in the current transformation of religious hospitality, the article begins with a historical analysis of osettai and its meanings in pre-modern Japan. Next, we examine how osettai was interrupted due to the decline in walking pilgrims, but also sustained through the maintenance of indirectly related religious practices. The discussion then outlines the transforming meanings of osettai from a practice of giving offerings in return for spiritual reward, to a commodified economic service and finally to a form of cultural exchange. We conclude that placing religious faith as a central theme of analyses, not tourism, can offer new insights and deepen our understandings of how religious hospitality is both transformed and maintained through tourism.

The article, situated at the crossroads of hospitality studies, human–animal studies and writing studies, offers a more-than-human perspective on hospitality by exploring the book The Language of Bugs (2018) by Chinese book designer and artist Zhu Yingchun and its crafting process. In existing scholarship, hospitality has been mainly considered in anthropocentric terms. The article suggests that the multispecies relations that unfolded between the artist, his garden and bugs not only unsettle and disrupt this anthropocentric bias but also complicate the predominant dyadic understanding of hospitality: their hospitable entanglement needs to be analysed as a triadic configuration, where there are no fixed positions, but each member may in its turn be placed in the position of the host/guest/third. Ultimately, the paradox of the hospitality offered by the artist to the bugs is that he was only possible to welcome their visitation by endangering the life or well-being of his other guests, the plants. The article also highlights the non-phonemic, material and performative ‘asemic’ aspects of writing by considering writing in terms of traces and lines and argues that bug-writing has great theoretical potential for liberating the notion of writing from its anthropo-, phono- and logocentric subordination.