Hospitality & Society - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012

In this article we investigate hospitality towards political refugees who were offered prolonged shelter in private homes in the Netherlands during the early 1990s. We assume that the social relationship developing between host and guest in this case will not remain a relationship between complete strangers, nor will it be based on the intimacy that often characterizes a relationship with friends or family. How does the relationship between host and guest take shape in such a dynamic? We develop a theoretical model based on some basic dimensions of hospitality. Our empirical analysis shows that the encounter between host and guest-as-stranger is manifested in four different ways: (1) hospitality as a means to control danger represented by the stranger; (2) hospitality as a selective phenomenon, in which those closer in emotional and social distance are preferred over those farther away in that respect; (3) hospitality as being regulated by the principle of reciprocity; and (4) hospitality as potentially endangered by issues of power and dependency.

Hospitality and tourism have been advocated as tools for rural development, but they have often failed to achieve what was expected. Some failures may be due to the clash between development planners' worldviews and those of rural residents. This effect is demonstrated in a five-year study of a community in Portugal. Planners focus on economic growth, seek returns from enlarged tourism scope, expect benefits to trickle down, and see hospitality and tourism development in its national and regional context. Consequently, they push policies even in the absence of local support, favour return migrants as partners and are frustrated when local support is not forthcoming. Locals are skeptical about the growth enabled by hospitality and tourism, and fear that growth could threaten social equity. Consequently, they may distrust planners, feel the need to criticize hospitality and tourism plans, act in ways that thwart those plans and fail to capitalize on opportunities. The resulting clash deflects hospitality and tourism development from reaching its goals. Community-based planning and applied ethnography could help planners circumvent the clash in worldviews, and implement rural hospitality and tourism projects more effectively.

The article by Zampoukos and Ioannides on 'The tourism labour conundrum' in the first issue of Hospitality and Society opened out important, and seldom investigated, issues in the understanding of the hospitality labour force. This applies at least as much to historical as to geographical studies, and this article opens out a largely hidden literature on the experience of labour in the hospitality trades, with particular emphasis on labour relations, social conflict, gender, 'race' and ethnicity, migration and identities. It takes a broad view of the hospitality trades, and emphasizes that hospitality and tourism are overlapping but far from identical concepts. It covers four centuries and many parts of the world, while accepting the constraints imposed by the nature and range of the existing literature, and by uneven access to work in languages other than English, Spanish and French. It aims at encouraging the opening out of this neglected field of study to new research by historians and others who are interested in using the past to further the better understanding of the present.

The aviation business has gone through a process of radical restructuring during recent decades. Deregulation and fierce competition from low-cost carriers have put traditional flag carriers under pressure, resulting in falling fares. In this cost-cutting process, service quality aboard has in many cases fallen at the same time as the glamorous image of aviation partly remains. This process has resulted in a number of contradictions. The purpose of this article is to conduct a genealogical investigation of hospitality in aviation, in order to explain how the performance and image of hospitality have developed over time, and to thereby shed some light on contemporary developments. It is argued that the service culture of passenger aviation has two historical roots, both of which developed in distinct social and institutional settings. Traditional scheduled aviation developed out of first-class rail service and marine traditions coming from the passenger steamliners of the early twentieth century. Low-cost aviation on the other hand developed out of the charter industry, which in turn goes back to tour operators using buses and coaches. These two traditions have shaped different sets of expectations and relations to service aboard an aircraft. This historic perspective builds on a combination of social, geographic, economic, institutional and technological factors influencing the development of hospitality in aviation.

This study offers a contemporary perspective on the factors affecting the emotional self-management of airline service agents within an increasingly challenging work environment. The methodological approach combined a review of the contemporary literature on 'emotion' work with exploratory primary research involving longitudinal focus groups and 'life history' interviews (Ladkin 2004) with purposively selected respondents. The findings suggested that intensifying job demands and deteriorating working conditions continue to increase the alienating psychological costs of performing emotional labour for air cabin crew. These costs appear greater where 'emotional reciprocity' is absent and emotional dissonance is evident. Some crew, however, continue to make emotional effort autonomously and spontaneously, and these incidences appear linked to personality trait characteristics and positive service orientation. This work offers a rounded contextualization of respondents' life experiences with their emotional self-management challenges at work. Future research could further explore the 'reciprocity dynamic' as an enabler of service agents' emotional self-management.

ENLIGHTENMENT HOSPITALITY. CANNIBALS, HAREMS AND ADOPTION, JUDITH STILL (2011) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 310 pp., ISBN: 978 0 7294 1010 6, p/bk, £60.00

SETTING THETABLE FOR JULIA CHILD: GOURMET DINING IN AMERICA, 1934–1961, DAVID STRAUSS (2011) Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 9780801897733, h/bk, $45

ROYAL TASTE: FOOD, POWER AND SATUS AT THE EUROPEAN COURTS AFTER 1789, DANIËLLE DE VOOGHT (ED.) (2011) Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 246 pp., e-book, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6837-4; 978-0-7546-9478-6, h/bk, £65.00