Gender Matters in Hospitality (invited paper for ‘luminaries’ special issue of International Journal of Hospitality Management)

This article is a review paper, which examines the place of gender in hospitality research and education and discusses the significance of hospitality for women's employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. The paper’s main purpose, however, is to speculate on the future of hospitality gender research and women’s employment prospects in the industry. It suggests that, despite the emergence of gender perspectives in hospitality research and the recent rise of popular feminism in response to high-profile sexual harassment cases and a well-publicised gender pay gap, gender still does not occupy mainstream territory in the field. The paper stresses the continued missed opportunities of neglecting female talent and calls on female and male leaders to shape a gender-just future in hospitality study and practice by mentoring and holding hierarchies to account. The paper identifies AI and robotics and sexual exploitation and harassment as two areas in which hospitality gender scholars could lead scholarship and policy debates on gendered human experiences.     

Zimbabwean hospitality students’ experiences of sexual harassment in the hotel industry

This study investigates the experiences of Zimbabwean hospitality management students in relation to sexual harassment. The students were asked to draw their responses from their industrial attachment year which is part of their four-year degree program. Guided interviews were conducted with 77 final year hospitality management students who had undertaken their industrial attachment in the hotel industry. Findings reveal that sexual harassment is not uncommon in Zimbabwean hotel workplaces. Coworkers, managers and customers were identified as perpetrators. The lack of sexual harassment training in the Zimbabwean hospitality, as well as the non-response of managers to some sexual harassment cases are possible indicators of the inadequacy, or complete lack of sexual harassment policies in Zimbabwe's hotel industry. The researcher suggests that human resource managers in the hotels should formulate, in consultation with Zimbabwean law and labour relations experts, sound sexual harassment policies. Continuous educational training for all employees and managers is also necessary to encourage more employees to report cases and to deter offenders.     

Commercial hospitality in destination experiences: McDonald's and tourists' consumption of space

This paper examines the multiple roles that globalised, branded spaces of hospitality can play in tourists' experiences in destinations. It is argued that previous studies have not considered adequately how such commercial hospitality services and spaces interact with and influence tourists' experiences of places. Drawing on a netnographic analysis of online discussions of McDonald's, this study explores how tourists perceive these hospitality venues, and how they use them to engage with foreign destinations and negotiate the ‘work of tourism’. The data show how tourists (re)construct their identities through reflections on consuming McDonald's. The data also demonstrate that tourists critically evaluate discourses of authenticity and the (in)authenticity of consuming McDonald's. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for the marketing and management of McDonald's and similar branded commercial hospitality venues, the marketing and management of destinations, and it outlines avenues for further research.     

Andries Sternheim and the study of leisure in the early critical theory

The issue of pornography as a form of leisure practice has received little attention from researchers. In this study, the impact of pornography consumption on women's lives was examined. A diverse group of thirty-two women was interviewed, with discussion focusing on their individual experiences, meanings, and perceptions of pornography. The women's reactions to pornography, especially to violent pornography, were consistently negative. Pornography elicited fear reactions, had a negative effect on women's identities and on their relationships with men, and was seen to reinforce sexist attitudes among men. Despite this, many of the women felt that their opinions were not ‘legitimate’, and overt resistance to pornography was often muted. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of pornography in the reproduction of gender, the ideology of individualism, and the potential for resistance among women.     

‘Thank the ladies for the plates’: The incorporation of women into sport

The extent to which women service the leisure of others can be well illustrated by an analysis of sport. It is argued that gender relations in sport are mediated by male interests and serve to incorporate women for the institution's maintenance and reproduction. Through the ideology of motherhood and wifehood, the domestic labour done by women provides space for others to participate in sport and contributes directly to their sporting effectiveness. This is particularly so concerning women's immediate family members. Some parallels are made to Finch's (1983) work on women's incorporation into men's jobs. Outside the home environment, women's contribution to sport is subscribed not only by their domestic roles, but also by the definition of women as sexual and the vicariousness through which women's lives are frequently lived. The argument presented here is predominantly illustrated by a discussion of gender relations in New Zealand and Australia.     

Exploring intersections of physicality and female‐only canoeing experiences1

The benefits of single‐gender experiences for females have been discussed in a variety of contexts, including education, sport and outdoor recreation. In both the discourses of female‐run outdoor adventure travel programs providing such experiences, and the leisure studies and outdoor education literatures, claims are made about the distinct social environment created on such trips and the positive outcomes for females undertaking them. Absent from these discourses is reference to empirical research exploring women's perceptions of such experiences, thereby allowing one to evaluate the merit of such claims. In what would initially appear to be an observation in a completely different vein, there is also a relative dearth of scholarly examinations within leisure and recreational studies of women's lived‐body experiences of their physicalities through active outdoor recreation, and the potentially empowering effects of them. This paper seeks to draw out the connections between these seemingly disparate observations through a qualitative examination of women's experiences of female‐only wilderness canoeing. While the reasons articulated by the women for undertaking such an experience did not explicitly identify issues related to their physicalities, clearly these issues resonated with and held implications for their experiences of them. This, in turn, provides substantiation for claims regarding the importance of the provision of all‐female outdoor experiences.     

Asymmetric effects of tourist arrivals on the hospitality industry

This study makes a unique contribution to the hospitality literature by examining the asymmetric effects of total tourist arrivals in six segments of tourist arrivals (pleasure, business, visiting relatives, conference, study, and others) on Taiwan’s hospitality industry. Regression test results confirm that the contribution of the overall tourist arrivals and both pleasure and visiting relatives segments to hospitality industry growth is not asymmetric, as it is found in periods of expansion and contraction. The beneficial effect of the business segment on hospitality industry growth is asymmetric, existing only in periods of business cycle expansion. However, the conference, study, and other segments make no significant contribution to hospitality industry growth. The study’s valuable policy implications offer guidance to Taiwan’s tourism authorities, hospitality business owners, and managers.     

Narratives of Negotiation and Transformation: Women's Experiences within a Mixed-Gendered Gym

ABSTRACT

Those within the fitness industry claim that gyms provide accessible space for women (of certain economic status) to engage in activities that will increase their health. As such, gyms are marketed as safe, inclusive, and empowering spaces. Yet when viewing gym spaces through a feminist-informed lens, it becomes clear that gyms are not always innocuous spaces. They often reflect and perpetuate gendered power relations and highly prescribed cultural expectations for femininity around women's bodies, appearances, strength, and abilities. This narrative inquiry sought to illuminate women's gendered experiences within a for-profit mixed-gendered gym space. Through the use of unstructured life story interviews, this research highlights the dominant gendered expectations that women perceived within the gym and how these expectations influence women's gym use. The narratives also exposed several ways that gyms can be changed in order to facilitate more positive gym experiences for women.     

Holidays with aging parents: pleasures,duties and constraints

I explore filial duty in the holidays from a feminist perspective through the lens of the experiences that Norwegian midlife single women have of how this duty shapes intergenerational holidays and singlehood. Data was collected through interviews, diaries and autoethnograpical reflections. Filial duty is embedded with the simultaneity of love and respect, and the women's needs and desire for agency and ‘me-time’. It is also shaped by parental age, health, personalities and roles, as well as siblings' involvement, which not only direct the family's expectations towards the women, but in turn can affect the women's sense of agency. The women's filial duty during the holidays is imbued with singlism and heteronormativity, yet is also a demonstration of love and care.     

The role of public space in constructing experience capital: A longitudinal analysis in the hotel context

Public space plays a primary role in shaping customers' hospitality experiences. Yet how public space conditions customers' experiential outcomes in accumulating capital for hospitality organizations remains underexplored. Inspired by the theory of psychological ownership, this research presents an in-depth analysis of the impacts of customers' public space experiences on their experiential outcomes using a longitudinal hotel industry dataset merging information from customer surveys, property performance, and surrounding accessibility insights. Findings revealed the positive effects of customers’ public space experiences on their overall service experiences, the perceived value of the experience, revisit intentions, and recommendation intentions. Moreover, hotel class, other customers, and surrounding accessibility were empirically verified as moderators conditioning the positive impact of public space. These findings offer valuable implications for theory and practice that are worthy of further exploration.     

‘Classy and Never Trashy’: Young Women's Experiences of Nightclubs and the Construction of Gender and Sexuality

This article presents findings from an interpretive study that sought to understand the meanings and experiences of the mainstream nightclub culture from the perspective of young women. Specifically, how the young women's leisure experiences contested, negotiated, constructed and reconstructed feminine ideals and public displays of sexuality were examined as well as the gendered risks that they mitigate throughout this process. Seven young women, between the ages of 19 and 25, participated in the study. The findings call attention to the ways in which the young women created an alternate and desirable self through their appearance and the consumption of alcohol, how they sought male attention and the repercussions of double standards, and how they kept safe through the use of the buddy system and cautionary tales. Emphasis is placed on the highly contradictory nature of the young women's experiences as well as the significance of leisure, friendships, and gender relations.     

Shopping experiences: International tourists in Beijing's Silk Market

This study examines international tourists' experiences in Beijing's Silk Market, one of the China's most well-known tourist markets. Tourists' spontaneous reviews on TripAdvisor were analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. The study confirms that markets can be major tourism attractions and can provide important experiences for international tourists. Most international tourists were impressed with their Silk Market trip. The dominant narratives of their experiences were the “price” of the items they “bought”, the “fun” of “bargaining”, and the “fake” quality of the products. Further analyses show that different satisfaction groups used somewhat different narratives to represent their shopping experiences and that male international tourists enjoyed the Silk Market experiences more than their female counterparts.     

WOMEN’S SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN TOURISM: LOOSENING THE BRIDLE

This study explored the meanings, perceptions, and feelings assigned by women to their sexual behavior in tourism. The findings from 21 in-depth semi-structured interviews reveal that the tourist experiences were perceived as a liminoid and ‘chora’ time-space where women could explore sexual behavior either with steady or casual sexual partners, and recreate their selves through alternative sexual behavior. The changes in women’s sexual behavior were interpreted as resistance to gendered expectations of appropriate sexual behavior. Resistance gave rise to feelings of adventurousness, challenge, control, and empowerment. Post-structuralist lens of power relations, as well as the concepts of front and back regions, performativity, and existential authenticity were adopted to conceptualize the findings.     

Customer responses to intercultural communication accommodation strategies in hospitality service encounters

With the increasing pace of globalization, hospitality firms are serving more and more international customers from distinctively different cultural backgrounds. In order to enhance intercultural consumption experiences, some hospitality firms have implemented two types of communication accommodation strategies: (a) match the cultural background of the service provider and the customer and/or (b) use the customer's native language to facilitate communications. This study aims to examine how such intercultural communication accommodations influence customers’ service encounter experiences. A 4 (communication accommodation: language congruence, ethnic congruence, language and ethnic congruence, and no accommodation) × 2 (focus of communication accommodation: intercultural vs. interpersonal) factorial between-subject experimental design was employed using videotaped hotel check-in scenarios as experimental stimuli. The findings suggest that consumers respond to communication accommodation strategies with increased felt pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Furthermore, accommodation strategies contributed to the perceived symbolic value of the service encounter, especially when employees expressed the intercultural focus of communication accommodation practices. The study results provide insights for hospitality practitioners in managing service encounters in today's highly global world.     

Community (Dis)connection Through Leisure for Women in Prison

This article examines incarcerated women's leisure and re-entry into community. Framed in creative analytic practice, two poems reflect two major themes: (1) women's experiences of disconnection from community prior to and deepened by experiences in prison and (2) leisure and community re-entry, which describes complex meanings of leisure for women in prison and implications for return to community. These poems elucidate six often incongruous facets of leisure experience. Structures embedded in leisure service provision stigmatize and limit rather than encourage opportunities for incarcerated women to make personal choices regarding leisure. Leisure also provides contexts of relationship and humanity for women as they re-enter community.     

Facial attractiveness and stereotypes of hotel guests: An experimental research

The purpose of this research was to determine social interaction between hospitality employees and their guests, and consequently assess how front-line employees categorize and stereotype hotel guests based on their facial attractiveness with reference to three main characteristics. Social stereotypes represent a means of information transmission in the communication process and can enable a more rapid transfer of information during the service delivery in the hospitality industry. The experimental research was conducted with 113 hospitality employees at seven hospitality organizations on the Slovenian coast. The results showed a correlation between the perception of hotel guests' facial attractiveness with their assumed characteristics that can lead to stereotyping. Hotel employees often link the guest's facial attractiveness with three common perceived characteristics – guests' propensity to spend, guests' predisposition to being demanding and guests' ‘kindness’, and tend to stereotype them on the same basis. These research findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex interactions that occur during a service encounter and show how facial attractiveness of guests plays an important role in the construction of stereotypes by the hospitality employees.     

The Hens are Clucking: Women Performing Gossip in Their Leisure Lives

Using a feminist poststructural lens, this conceptual article aims to trouble patriarchal understandings of gossip as a devalued dimension of women's talk. To accomplish this aim, I focus on decentering three dominant discourses tied to women's gossip that position gossip as idle talk, based on the personal lives of others, and trivial. In particular, I consider the ways power is part of women's performances of gossip and how women can use gossip to construct, maintain, and resist gendered subjectivities as part of their leisure. This article also aims to illustrate the need for leisure researchers, and in particular feminist leisure researchers, to pay closer attention to the topic of women's gossip and the complex and messy connections between gossip, women's talk, and women's leisure lives.     

Keep it real: Assessing destination image congruence and its impact on tourist experience evaluations

Inaccurate promotional information about tourist destinations may result in tourists' negative evaluations. This study proposes a new approach to measure the congruence between projected and received images of a destination's attractions. Based on online textual data, this study investigates how image congruence influences tourists' evaluations of their destination experiences. Using promotional messages and reviews of attractions in Hainan, China obtained from a leading Chinese online travel agency (Ctrip) and a three-way fixed-effects regression model, this study demonstrates that image congruence positively affects tourists' appraisal of their destination experiences. External crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), the readability of promotional messages, and tourists' expertise moderate this relationship, reducing the positive impact of image congruence on tourist experience evaluation. This study bridges theoretical and empirical gaps in destination image (in)congruence research, informing tourism marketing agencies of effective promotional strategies in different contexts.     

Tourists and troglodytes: Negotiating for Sustainability

This paper contributes to the continuing discussion concerning the paradox that tourism destroys the object of its desire. An analysis is made of tourism relations and hospitality in a Turkish village, and it is argued that in their close interactions with tourists traveling independently of organized tour groups, local people are in a position to negotiate both their own “traditional” identity in the presence of tourists and the latter's quests and experiences in themselves. A dynamic notion of sustainability in cultural tourism is developed, by challenging the assumptions that tourist localities must remain authentically “traditional” to meet with the expectations of tourists.     

Revisiting hospitality's marginal worker thesis: A mono-occupational perspective

This article re-examines the literature on workplace deviance in the context of employment relations in the hospitality industry and presents data from a qualitative study. Intertwining various manifestations of deviance apparent in business management research, sociological literature and that reported in hospitality industry studies, this paper further applies these contexts to investigate the professional experiences of a sample of chefs from Australia. In summary, the findings suggest that while deviance, in its various forms, is an intrinsic occupational idiosyncrasy, and that deviant practices indeed are commonplace in the hospitality industry, workers within the industry are conscious of the negative effects these images have on occupational image. Structural shortcomings including organisational, occupational and industry regulation appear, at least partially, responsible for a cycle of deviance. These findings might assist researchers and practitioners in their endeavours given the efforts of industry leaders and hospitality educators to enhance and professionalise the industry's image.