Tom Baum

University of Strathclyde · Department of Human Resource Management

Employment at the frontline of hospitality and tourism organisations provides a paradoxical combination of opportunity and challenge. While experiencing resurgent demand, at the same time, frontline service work (FLSW) remains dominated by employment, which is precarious, low paid and exploitative, particularly of the vulnerable and marginalised. T...

Work and employment are a significant constituent part of tourism and are gaining ground as an area of research. This review paper offers a critical reflection on the field of tourism work and employment. Drawing from two historical review papers and new empirical analysis, themes within the literature are identified, providing an overview of the c...

Major crises, such as COVID-19, have had a dramatic impact on tourism work. This paper investigates changes in news media reporting of tourism work from pre-pandemic norms, employing McQuail's classification for media and mass communications. We interrogate 664 news articles across two comparative periods. Findings indicate that news media themes i...

Sustainable tourism policies in rural destinations are often complex. Governments strive to ensure that the objectives of sustainable tourism are met through various strata of agencies. As a result, institutional fragmentation has become the undesirable outcome of this approach. The policy Delphi technique was employed in this study to align decisi...

The nature of events demand uniqueness and memorability, but the specific elements of experience that produce these have not been deeply examined, particularly over the course of the event experience. Much of this relies heavily on event places and the social relations they facilitate. This research used the concept of temporary communitas and buil...

This special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism showcases research that addresses an identified gap that is the relative neglect of the sustainability concept in a workforce context. The special issue presents 10 papers, each making a unique and distinct contribution to knowledge. This extended review/editorial presents a critique of curre...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the most significant disruption to education in history (United Nations, 2020 UN. (2020). Policy Brief: Education during COVID-19 and Beyond. Retrieved January 7, 2021, from http://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2020/08/sg_policy_brief_covid-19_and_education_august_2020.pdf [Google Sch...

As a contribution to a knowledge and understanding of tourism development, this book: (i) comprises reflective essays written by internationally-ranked scholars and tourism consultants with extensive experience, particularly in developing countries; (ii) considers extant themes, issues and challenges related to tourism and development; and (iii) of...

COVID-19 has triggered a burst of international scholarship concerning the reshaping of tourism and the resetting of tourism research agendas. The aim of this paper is to tease out some implications for re-orienting the African tourism research agenda from 2020 and beyond. Arguably, an appropriate African research response to COVID-19 in the contex...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality workforce in situ between mid-April and June 2020. Design/methodology/approach This is a viewpoint paper that brings together a variety of sources and intelligence relating the impacts on hospitality work of the COVID-19 pandemic at...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to undertake a “real-time” assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the right to participate in hospitality and tourism and to illustrate where such rights are under threat. Design/methodology/approach This discussion is based on a review of current events, assessed through interpretation of a human...

The enormous potential for tourism development in Africa has long been recognized (Dieke, 1993) but the evidence remains that this is a potential substantially under-fulfilled. A tourism heat map of Africa is a patchwork of a few high-performing destinations in the north, east, south and offshore; some emergent locations in the east, west and south...

Kenya is facing irreconcilable tensions by competing interests from conservationists, tourism developers and pastoralists. Concerns arising from the well-being of flora and, in particular, fauna by conservationists; tourists and commercial tourism; and the increasingly restricted use of traditional lands and herding animals by pastoralist indigenou...

Although previous research has considered both high- and low-skilled migrant workers’ career experiences in their host countries, this paper makes a unique contribution by presenting unmet career expectations of a cohort of professional migrant hotel workers in the UK. It injects a fresh insight by demonstrating their hotel skill and professionalis...

This study investigates the notion of talent in the tourism and hospitality (TH) industry, proposing a comprehensive talent management (TM) model that is specific to this industry. This study primarily explores the notion of talent, TM, and the importance of these in the industry. A mixed method approach (qualitative and quantitative) was used to f...

This book addresses the application of sustainable HRM principles within tourism in the specific context of Africa, a neglected area of study. It draws on diverse aspects of HRM, from the micro- (individual) through the meso-level (organisational) to the macro-level (policy, governmental). It also reflects the diverse challenges facing a critical a...

Purpose This is an invited 75article for Tourism Review addressing tourism employment, past and future. Design/methodology/approach Conceptual analysis of tourism employment with a focus on paradox. Findings Inherent paradox which underpins tourism employment. Originality/value A wholly original take on tourism employment.

Building on systems theory and its applications in tourism management, we introduce the natural science evolutionary ‘endosymbiosis theory’ to interpret the inter-dependencies of youth employment and tourism. Tourism organisations are located within a tourism industry or a sub-system, which in turn is bounded within a broader socio-economic ecosyst...

Work in hospitality remain a persistent blemish with respect to one of the world’s fast growing economic sectors. Issues are represented across a wide spectrum of indicators and have not changed, in substance, since George Orwell’s challenging musings about the social value of such work in 1933. In this paper, we assess the extent to which change c...

This paper argues that issues of employment in tourism raise fundamental concerns in the context of basic human rights. Such rights lie at the heart of intentions within the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which advocates ‘full and productive employment and decent work for all’. This paper contends that concerns relating to tourism emp...

This chapter addresses the value of academic research in food, tourism, hospitality and events to stakeholders, in particular the private sector. This is a well-travelled road in debate between these industry sectors and academia, with frequently cite concerns that academic research is too theoretical and lacks application to the everyday challenge...

Do workplace artefacts have utility for their custodians beyond the workplace context? A new materiality perspective allowed the conversation to move beyond the parameters of the organisation and into the private spheres of both practicing and retired para-professionals. In this study of chefs, we discover the deliberate acquisition of occupational...

There is consensus that both the social, or people, dimension of sustainability and the workforce are neglected in the tourism literature and policy. Premised on the understanding that sustainability is inherently set in neo-liberal discourses of progress, development and growth we set about to investigate tourism’s performance principally relative...

Work in hospitality remain a persistent blemish with respect to one of the world’s fast growing economic sectors. Issues are represented across a wide spectrum of indicators and have not changed, in substance, since George Orwell’s challenging musings about the social value of such work in 1933. In this paper, we assess the extent to which change c...

Emotional dimensions of hospitality and tourism service providers constitute an essential research topic, as the provision of high-quality services has clear effects on a destination’s competitive advantage. Past studies on gender and emotions have been limited. Currently, little is known about the extent of gender differences in Chinese tour leade...

The study examines relational norms in outsourcing relationships. The study analyzes some factors that determine the use of relational norms, such as outsourcing benefits and the competitive strategy (cost leadership and differentiation). In addition, it analyzes the influence of the use of relational norms on the outsourcing success. Based on a sa...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the influence of compagnies product market strategies, in-company and external structural factors on skill levels, work organisation, job design and people management systems. This project was funded by the Economic and Social Science research Council

This article is about creative cities and their largely invisible and largely neglected workforce, the ‘ordinary people’ who provide the work- and life-place services upon which creative workers depend. The article considers the nature of creative cities, their labour markets and the precarious nature of much employment within them. The ambiguous r...

This paper focuses on the neglect of an employment or workforce focus in policy engagement and planning for sustainable tourism. Tourism is of interest here because there is an established role for government and the private sector in policy engagement and strategic planning with respect to product development, infrastructure, marketing and human r...

Purpose This study aims to identify recent trends in the strategic repositioning of the human resources (HR) function within the hotel industry, and to explore challenges facing HR professionals as they engage in strategies to develop talent and organisational capability, while adjusting to the shifting boundaries of the HR function. Design/method...

In 1992, Michael Gottlieb, at the time the proprietor of a well-known London restaurant, wrote in a letter to the Caterer and Hotelkeeper that

Sustainable tourism emphasises responsible utilisation of economic, socio-cultural and environmental resources for tourism development. Extant literature in sustainable tourism leans towards subjective and qualitative description in explaining the dynamic nature of the trans-disciplinary indicators of sustainability. However, few mechanisms have be...

Sexual harassment is a prominent issue in the workplace; it presents a particular challenge with regard to this sensitive area in the Asian context due to the Asian cultural value. Tour leaders are one of the main components of the tourism industry workforce and are expensive to train in terms of both time/experience accumulation and financial inve...

The purpose of this article is to present a study which explores the origin of applied creativity in the culinary industry, in Taiwan. A total of 36 Chinese and Western cuisine chefs from five-star hotels and top restaurants were interviewed to provide the data from this study. The findings indicate that the role of applied creativity in the culina...

This paper offers a critical review, purview and future view of ‘workforce’ research. We argue that the tourism (and hospitality) workforce research domain, beyond being neglected relative to its importance, suffers from piecemeal approaches at topic, analytical, theoretical and methods levels. We adopt a three-tiered macro, meso and micro level fr...

This article is one of the articles in the special issue "Sustainable Tourism: Issues, Debates and Challenges" in open access journal Sustainability. If you wish to cite it please use the journal details above. This paper is about the position of workforce and employment considerations within the sustainable tourism narrative. The paper aims to ad...

Many countries in Africa are currently investing in tourism with the aim of increasing annual tourist flows but majority of them are negatively symbolised at source markets as countries with ‘difficult heritage’. Previous research has indicated that tourism in Africa is perceived as riskier than any comparable region on Earth except the Middle East...

Posed as a question that an event organizer might contemplate in terms of how best to attract and retain event volunteers, this study adds to the event volunteering literature by cluster analyzing volunteers sampled at four sports events using items from the Special Event Volunteer Motivation Scale (SEVMS). The 28 items were first subjected to Expl...

Hotels are diverse and constantly evolving, changing over time, inter alia, in their shape and appearance, their size, purpose, location and, perhaps above all, their representation of luxury and comfort. These changes have been and, intuitively, will continue to be driven by a complex amalgam of drivers. Representations that depict hotels of the f...

The Tourism and Cricket Travels to the Boundary is a book that could be useful to sport tourism studies. It could be an excellent student’s handbook at universities with one condition to be added questions to the end of each chapter for personal study and homework. The cricket’s link to tourism could also be added with calls for case studies with d...

This conceptual paper notes the re-casting of marketing from a focus on products and transactions to a focus on services and relationships - strongly implying that people are core to the delivery of promises. In so doing, it highlights that the recruitment, training, development, retention, rewarding and management of people are therefore central i...

This paper addresses the contribution of tourism's workforce to destination image and branding and considers the role that employees play in visitors' interpretation of their experience of place. The focus of this paper is on the contribution of working people to the image of place and the potential for contradiction in imagery as the people who in...

This article addresses the contribution of the policy formulation process in driving agendas relating to workforce development in the tourism sectors of Australia and Scotland. This discussion represents an exploratory study that seeks to fill a clear conceptual and empirical gap in the extant literature. The discussion is located within wider cons...

This book is the first to focus on the relationship between tourism and cricket. The pattern of cricket as a sport and as a tourist attraction is highly dynamic. This volume examines how cricket as a participant and spectator sport generates diverse tourism to both major and peripheral locations. It looks at the ways in which cricket's extended dur...

Purpose – The aim of this opinion piece is to seek to cast a critical eye over the event studies field to chart its progress as an emerging area of study, relative to its close relations tourism, hospitality and leisure. Design/methodology/approach – Viewpoint approach. Findings – The paper highlights various challenges that event educators and r...

Envisaging the future of tourism anywhere is difficult but is amplified when making predictions for the dynamic and rapidly changing Asia-Pacific region. The purpose of this conceptual article is to problematize a 2030 Asia-Pacific tourism future by modeling one polarized and probable scenario, theoretically framed within the mobilities paradigm an...

This article addresses the challenges of long-term planning for a tourism workforce at a regional level, a significant yet underconceptualized area in the literature. We draw on Yeoman’s future thinking techniques to generate a four-quadrant matrix designed to facilitate the development of scenarios that identify workforce challenges the tourism se...

This study explores and compares academic perspectives of quality assurance and its procedures to evaluate undergraduate hospitality, tourism and leisure programmes (HTLPs) in both the UK and Taiwanese higher education systems. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted to identify academic key concerns and issues about HTLP quality. Add...

International students have, for many years, sought higher education in the United Kingdom and other major English speaking destinations. Recently a combination of government initiatives, development of the higher education sector and the changes in funding of higher education in the UK have encouraged universities to give greater focus to attracti...

At the entry level we often hear, “We can teach people skills; but we cannot teach them the right attitudes.” Employee attitudes are an indicative factor as to whether an organization will succeed in the future. In the workplace then, attitudes towards work and the job at hand are of obvious importance. However, the literature has placed greater em...

Many hospitality companies highlight the importance of their employees, and this features strongly in their consumer marketing. However, the capacity of organizations to deliver “people first” practices is seemingly subject to increasing pressure within the international hospitality sector, both internally and from the external environment. Nowhere...

In this paper we highlight the contribution which an understanding of mobilities brings to an analysis of hospitality work. The complex mobilities of hospitality employees are playing an increasing role within global tourism and hospitality sectors. Our discussion explores notions of voluntary mobility as motivated by work and lifestyle factors. We...

Souvenirs are part of global and local travel and tourism in all corners of the world. This book portrays souvenirs as expressions of culture and as triggers of cultural change. The volume provides critique and theorisation of souvenirs of places, people and experiences in the context of lives lived at the margins of society, politics, tourism flow...

The influence of the media, whether print, celluloid or contemporary electronic, on life and career choices, particularly from a gender perspective is well documented. Indeed, the power of today’s e-media imagery has, arguably, a more ubiquitous influence on such decisions than was in the case for previous generations. However, both traditional pri...

Purpose Conceptually, this paper aims to consider the nexus created when the characteristics of the tourism sector workplace environment intersect with the contextual influences of the economic, social and labor market attributes of small islands. Design/methodology/approach Several studies relating to the employment and skills environment of huma...

This paper examines the use of outsourcing in the activities comprising hotel operations in Scotland and Taiwan. Outsourcing is a key process integrated into the design of the supply chain management. The research also focuses on empirically identifying the role of the outsourcing strategy in hotels. To this end, the authors propose two hypotheses...

Management theories, especially those in the area of human resource management, are predominantly Western-centric in origin and in the empirical testing that underpins them. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of one such theory, employee empowerment, in an Asian context. Information gathered from an open ended questionnaire and foc...

Leisure has been widely examined within the context of social science theory. This article adopts a broad approach, examining a range of social science disciplines and applying them to specific phenomena located within the leisure field, namely, volunteers and volunteering in leisure settings. In a disciplinary sense, the sociological view focuses...

The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published, doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2010.05.010 . The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn.

Volunteers within tourism settings are of growing interest. Research to date has been fragmented either focusing on individuals volunteering in their community (i.e., hosts) or tourists volunteering at a destination (i.e., guests). In this paper, the tourism and leisure literature on volunteering is synthesized and the host and guest streams of vol...

Volunteers play a pivotal role in the tourism sector, contributing invaluable human resources to museums, visitor attractions, visitor information services and small and large-scale events. Recognition is being increasingly afforded to the role flexibility can play in efforts to attract and retain volunteers, given that volunteers appear to be more...

The Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model (Butler, 1980) is one of the most robust and widely used conceptual and managerial frameworks to be employed in the tourism area. It has been subject to extensive scrutiny, application and criticism and this debate shows little sign of decreasing. In most respects, the model has stood up well to application...

The part of the tourism industry which covers events, conventions and meetings is a substantial part of the global economy and provides employment for a very large number of people worldwide. The breakdown of employees in this sector is complex - employees can be full-time, casual labour or part of a volunteer workforce, and events can be as divers...

This article aims to develop a profile of the educational attainments, skills and attitudes, career needs, and plans of tour guides in China based on a study of both permanent and freelance guides. The findings indicate that tour guides are ill‐prepared for the booming tourism industry. The workforce in China's tour guide sector is currently domina...

Volunteers play a major role in mega and major events, both cultural and sporting, contributing invaluable human resources. Frequently described (and, maybe, over-emphasised) as the ‘unsung heroes’ of such events, relatively little is known about this group of workers when compared with volunteers who give regular and long-term commitment to their...

Using student workers can be seen as a flexible option for many organizations. Drawing data from interviews with hotel managers, this study aims to explore flexible options as a response to labour shortages in the Taiwan hotel industry, specifically to explore the potential of employing full time college/university students as part time workers in...

This paper uses the context of the Commonwealth in order to focus on a specific dimension of tourism that is located within it, that of the mega all-Commonwealth event, the Commonwealth Games, and its impact in tourism terms. Sports events and tourism are closely linked and it is abundantly clear that the tourism potential of mega sporting events s...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the managerial and developmental concept of talent management in the context of the specific characteristics of the weak labour market attributes of the hospitality and tourism sector in developed countries. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores these characteristics and analyses talent man...

Students currently in college are predominantly from “Generation Y” (GEN Y), born between 1975 and 1995. As GEN Y members enter the work force in large numbers, it is imperative that employers gain deeper insights into their mindset, particularly their attitudes towards work. This study addresses the issue by studying the attitudes to work of colle...

Um dos maiores desafios enfrentados pelo setor no pais relaciona-se, sem duvida, ao suprimento de mao-de-obra especializada visando melhorar a qualidade dos servicos. O principal objetivo deste trabalho e analisar a demanda de mao-de-obra e as necessidades de qualificacao no setor em Aracaju, estado de Sergipe, Brasil. Foi utilizado o levantamento...

Government's engagement with tourism and in the development of the sector is widely accepted but academic debate about the form and level of such involvement is limited. This is particularly the case when specific facets of state engagement, relating for example to support for human resource development (HRD) in tourism, are concerned. The purpose...

Purpose This work analyses make or buy decisions from the transaction cost economics perspective and the resource‐based view of the firm. The aim is to analyse the extent to which the presumptions of the two theories are valid in the service sector in terms of specific assets. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted on a representative...

Academics are facing significant challenges in preparing indigenous students for employment in the multicultural working environment of hospitality and tourism organisations. In dealing with the impact of the new skills and flexibilities demanded by increasing globalisation, the indigenous workforce needs to possess a multicultural perspective and...

This paper addresses destination brand image in tourism marketing and assesses the contribution of tourism's workforce to such image and branding, considering the role that employees play in visitors’ interpretation of their experience of destination and place. The focus of this paper, therefore, is on the role of people in the image of place and t...

Two interrelated aspects of the debate on the nature of labour supply chain in the hotel industry form the focus of this research article. First, the notion of a shift to some forms of human resources recruitment strategies which seeks to use agency staff as a means of generating economical benefits – as opposed to conventional permanent staffing;...