Hospitality & Society - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

This conceptual article is a piece of advocacy scholarship. Its objective is to draw the academy’s attention to the hospitality (and tourism) industries’ relationship with present-day slavery and human trafficking. While present-day slavery has been examined in the context of dark tourism, and also via the sex tourism industry, this article appropriates C. Lashley and A. Morrison’s three domain conceptualization of hospitality to argue that the labour requirements of hospitality services account for an alarming proportion of the world’s estimated human bondage population. Moreover, after J. Derrida, this article considers how the delivery of hospitality by slaves implodes a ‘knowing of hospitality’. These insights provide context for future humanistic and theoretical hospitality research agendas.

The idea that workers embody the brand is placing increasing emphasis on the personal attributes of employees. The drive towards aesthetic labour, which focuses on ‘particular embodied capacities and attributes that appeal to the senses of customers’, has the potential for a form of discrimination based on appearance, ‘lookism’. This article sought to examine the ‘face of’ 28 major hotels in Sydney through their online promotional videos, with particular reference to the perceived body size of employees. In total, there were 112 images of hotel staff, primarily in front-of-house roles. The images were overwhelmingly of slim to average sized workers. The few who were judged as slightly larger than the norm were older men in the role of doorman, exemplifying the portly, British gentleman in top hat and tails at a four to five star hotel. The question arises: are Sydney hotels employing only slim/average sized staff or are they presenting only these staff as the ‘face of’ the hotel? Whatever the answer, the message portrayed to guests and labour markets remains the same: the brand values slimness. Such practice could be interpreted as a form of weight prejudice and discrimination.

Are today’s socially defined limits to function, behaviour and action, historically contested in places where locals and visitors meet and socialize, such as hotels and boarding houses? In this article, critical realism is used to frame an archival search for the antecedents of contested issues of image and identity in the hospitality industry. Findings from the accommodation sector in two spa towns in colonial New Zealand (1880–1920) identify the presence of issues that are still contested today, for example: behaviours such as social display; ambiguous roles for women and indigenous Maori; actions such as the consumption and regulation of alcohol; and the functions of accommodation, food and beverage, entertainment and commercial services. This article fills a gap in the academic literature regarding the use of historical analysis in hospitality and the identification of long running contestations of image and identity in the industry that should be addressed in the contemporary world.

In two seminars published under the title De l’hospitalité/Of Hospitality (J. Derrida [1997] 2000) and in other writings too, Jacques Derrida invites his readers to consider some differences between ‘conditional hospitality’, that is ‘the right to or pact of hospitality’ on the one hand and ‘the absolute or unconditional hospitality’ on the other. By emphasizing the incommensurability between the two in antinomic terms, Derrida has indeed questioned established practices of welcoming foreigners while insisting on a sense of hospitality that is not bound by and to its immediate legalisation. The following article will attempt to trace the limits of Derrida’s deconstruction of the conditions of welcome by arguing that for those estimated millions of people who are commonly dismissed as illegal aliens in liberal democratic states, such as in Europe, to ‘break with hospitality in the ordinary sense’ is not just a hyperbolic ethical imperative – it also feels like a bleak verdict. Otherwise said, what is the potential use value of Derrida’s thinking of a transgressive hospitality given the evidence that far too many are actually living in extremely inhospitable situations in European liberal democratic states without being able to rely on a bare minimum of legal standards?

Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism, 2nd ed., George Gmelch (2012) Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, xvi + 256 pp., ISBN: 9780253001238, p/bk, £15.99/$24.00

Children’s and Families’ Holiday Experiences, Neil Carr (2011) Abingdon: Routledge, 216 pp., ISBN: 9780415545433, h/bk, £90

Family Tourism: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Heike Schanzel, Ian Yeoman and Elisa Backer (eds) (2012) Bristol: Channel View Publications, 199 pp., ISBN: 9781845413262, p/bk, £29.95