Gayathri Wijesinghe

Reimagining the application of sustainability to the hospitality industry through a virtue ethics framework

There is growing recognition that achieving sustainability through current means is not making progress. This awareness has led to the development of a wide range of alternative ways of viewing and approaching sustainability. In these attempts to reconfigure how to achieve sustainability, the potential contribution of virtue ethics is not explored fully. This conceptual paper addresses the ethical dilemma of whether keeping the hospitality industry sustainable is necessarily in conflict with the worlds sustainable development agenda. This dilemma arises from the perceived tension in balancing the “good of the hospitality industry” with the “greater good of the world”. This paper discusses the tensions of the hospitality industrys domestic “virtue” tradition and commercial “vice” tradition, and addresses how the hospitality industry can be virtuous in a capitalist market ideology of vice that “greed is good”. The anti-capitalist and contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyres virtue theory is employed here to argue that commercialism is not necessarily a vice when exercised in congruence with the virtues. Macintyres “virtues-goods-practice-institution” framework provides a way of re-imaging sustainability and reconciling the competing demands of sustainability. The paper explores how to achieve virtue in organisations and concludes by drawing out implications for further research.

Can Hospitality Workers Engage in Virtuous Practice in a Commercial Context? A Study of Virtue Ethics and Virtues of Commerce

In this chapter I explore the context of commercial hospitality to discuss whether workers in a commercial context of hospitality are able to practice the virtues that Aristotle and his proponents have described. The questions explored here are: does hospitality become automatically precluded from being a virtue based practice purely on the basis of its commercialisation? Does commercialisation curtail the moral agency of workers to be virtuous?

A Display of Candy in an Open Jar: Portraying Sexualised Labour in the Hospitality Industry Using Expressive Phenomenology as Methodology

Scholars argue that there is a need for more qualitative research geared towards theory building to be employed in the study of tourism and hospitality phenomena in order for the knowledge within this field to progress further. The aim of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of this phenomenological study to advance knowledge in the field of tourism and hospitality. The paper introduces the expressive phenomenological research framework as a useful methodology to investigate real life experiences of practitioners and to gain plausible insights into their experiences. Expressive phenomenology which is a qualitative approach uses language to portray what an experience is like and to interpret its meaning in order to arrive at an in-depth understanding of the experience. This study outlines six steps that can be used to apply expressive phenomenology to a research inquiry. An illustrative example of how these steps are applied to an episode of practice from the hospitality industry is given. The example that is chosen here is a typical and significant episode relating to sexualised labour in the hospitality industry. A strong element in this experience is the way in which the hotel implicitly sexualises the receptionist-guest experience. Phenomenology is especially useful in studying this practitioner experience as there appear to be no “real-life stories” from the front desk that portray the experience of reception work in a scholarly way. The insights gained from this experience have implications for advancing research addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of phenomenological studies to advance knowledge in the field of tourism and hospitality.

Using Expressive Text in Research to Interpret and Portray Lived Experience: Lived Experience in Hospitality Receptionist Work

This chapter examines how hospitality and tourism researchers can use ‘expressive text’ (or writing) to express the lived quality of an experience in order to ‘show what an experience is really like’ rather than ‘tell what it is like’. Expressive text refers to written language forms such as narrative, poetry and metaphor that can be used as tools in research to vividly represent the meaning and feeling conveyed in an experience. The expressive text-based approach to researching lived experience provides a textual link between experience and its expression. For this reason, it is especially useful when working with lived experience accounts of phenomenological and hermeneutic research. The expressive text-based approach suggested here is still a relatively under explored arena within hospitality and tourism research. As a relatively under explored arena, the rich insightful knowledge that can be gained from understanding practitioner experience is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings about the workplace in hospitality and tourism contexts. However, in order to be fully appreciated as a discipline in its own right and to advance knowledge of the field, understanding the typical and significant attributes of hospitality and tourism work will be decidedly helpful. One of the difficulties of working with lived experience accounts is finding a suitable research approach that helps to both retain the lived elements of the experience and ensure the rigour of the inquiry. An expressive text-based methodological framework that has a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical underpinning is argued to be suitable for this purpose. Therefore, the focus of this study is to discuss such a methodology and explain the reasons for its content, style and structure in researching lived experience. The approach that is proposed here consists of a five-tiered textually expressive methodology that is employed to contextualise, portray and interpret the lived experience meanings in order to understand the significance of the experience in relation to relevant discourses in hospitality and tourism studies, and to consider implications for policy and professional practice. The guiding questions of the five-tiered framework cover the following issues: (1) What is the context of the lived experience? (2) What is the lived experience of this practice like? (3) What is the meaning of this experience for the practitioner? (4) What is the significance of the experience in contributing to the advancement of knowledge within the field? (5) What are the implications for practice and professional development? To illustrate uses of this methodology in research, the study here includes an example showing portrayals and interpretations of the typical and significant lived nature of hospitality reception work. This shows and communicates the full meaning of the episode, circumstances or situation. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on benefits as well as tensions in working within an expressive text-based phenomenological and hermeneutic framework.

How sustainable is sustainable hospitality research? A review of sustainable restaurant literature from 1991 to 2015

This research was designed to evaluate our current state of knowledge by systematically reviewing tourism and hospitality academic literature concerning sustainability in the restaurant sector by undertaking a systematic review and content analysis. The characteristics of 76 articles are listed in a comprehensive table, presenting research design and research variables, and the articles are examined for their approach to the sustainability concept as applied to the restaurant industry (i.e. the range of responsible practices addressed in each work). The findings indicate that the majority of the literature only engages with parts of sustainability, particularly ecological, rather than holistic sustainability. This matters because it may mean we fail in our attempts to achieve more sustainable restaurant operations. This research suggests that tourism and hospitality studies need to re-engage with the evolving conceptualisation of sustainability to ensure that best practice responses to changing requirements are undertaken. The narrow focus on ecological aspects of sustainability featuring in restaurants does not acknowledge the full meaning of sustainability and therefore may constrain efforts to secure more sustainable futures. Illuminating such gaps in knowledge is important in order to strengthen our conceptual understandings, refine our practices and thereby secure more sustainable futures through tourism and hospitality.