Recently, I was invited to speak at a tourism and hospitality conference about the state of hospitality research. The topic was partially driven by concern that there is a lack of hospitality research, with a broad dominance of tourism research, and in the background I could see there was a worry at the quality of hospitality research.

It did not require much reflection to realise that the suggestion possibly revealed most about the people who had generated this topic for debate. By this I mean that the self-appointed judges of perceptions of hospitality research appear to have a traditional and dated conception of hospitality and thereby hospitality research—as food, accommodation and beverage management only. Nevertheless, the topic is a valuable reminder of the need for hospitality research to be proactively promoted within the academic world, and for hospitality researchers and their representative organisations to assume a collective responsibility.

There is an argument to be made that the tourism subject is claiming hospitality research for itself. Indeed, one definition of tourism locates hospitality as a sub-component and by extension the subject itself. And yet, there is more than enough evidence in the form of hospitality subject associations, subject journals, conferences, benchmark statements etc to indicate that, whilst related, they are nevertheless very different. A counterargument is that tourism is merely a sub-component of hospitality. [1]

Personally, I find this kind of debate somewhat sterile. Previous research has identified that hospitality and tourism academics’ perceptions of the quality of journals differs. Put simply, hospitality academics rank hospitality journals more highly and tourism journals less highly than their tourism counterparts and vice versa.[2] It is unsurprising therefore that that the incidence of cross-citations between the hospitality and tourism research communities is low.[3] Indeed, both academic communities are much more likely to draw on sources outside either area, roughly 80 percent of citations. The evidence therefore points to the distinctiveness of each academic field and therefore the need for their own subject judges.[4]

Nevertheless, the hospitality subject may be at a key stage in its development. In the United Kingdom, a significant consequence of the Research Assessment Exercise is that, for tactical reasons associated with institutions’ research strategies, hospitality researchers are increasingly shifting their articles to non-hospitality subject journals because generic journal-quality grading lists rate them as of higher quality. Of course, this publications’ strategy does not raise the quality of hospitality research journals or indeed hospitality research itself, as non-hospitality journal reviewers are unfamiliar with the hospitality-subject literature and authors have to incorporate references from other subject areas in order to achieve publication.

Taken to an extreme, it is not difficult to envisage hospitality researchers seeing their career opportunities as better served in other disciplines, leaving the subject in danger of being peopled by teaching-only staff. Such an exodus could call into question the viability of the subject at higher-education level. Some might argue that this scenario is already happening although my own, albeit casual, investigation does not find much substantive evidence to support this view. Leading hospitality researchers tend to take multidisciplinary perspectives and often would not see themselves as hospitality researchers but as engaging with concepts of hospitality in order to explore chosen topics.[5]

The point here is that the hospitality subject has broken its management bounds and is truly multidisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary: the definition of hospitality researchers needs to be redrawn. If they are to be truly inclusive of the range of hospitality research, calls for contributions to hospitality research conferences must apply Habermas’s typology of the three research quests.[6] Calls need not only to embrace themes associated with the technical (positivism) but also with understanding (interpretist) and emancipation (critical theory). Only thus will we see the embracing of hospitality studies, critical management and critical studies, as well as multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives.

One problem is that hospitality researchers frequently do not hold key positions in the academic publishing world and are obliged to rebrand their work as tourism. For example, I am co-editing a book arising from my hospitality research on the commercial home. Intended as a multidisciplinary book, it is entitled The Commercial Home in Tourism: International Perspectives and will be published by Routledge. I have wonderful tourism-researcher co-editors, and am delighted with the publisher’s representatives, including the subject editors, but the word ‘tourism’ has entered into the title. Personally, I would opt for neither tourism nor hospitality in the title, preferring to emphasise the multidisciplinary appeal of the text. But one can envisage a perception problem whereby this concept originating in hospitality research has become a tourism event even before it is published!

I have a problem with the gatekeepers for my research being increasingly ‘tourism people’. I am sorry but there is a difference and I would prefer to see more hospitality-subject researcher-gatekeepers who embrace interpretive and emancipatory as well as management-research quests.

In a similar vein of the hospitality subject being more proactive, I would like to see hospitality representatives, subject associations and hospitality-journal editorial boards further raising the profile of hospitality research. For instance, they need to lobby journal-quality grading-list manufacturers to promote the quality and rigour of hospitality research journals and influence a rise in their quality ratings.

Paul Lynch

Department of Hospitality & Tourism Management

University of Strathclyde

Glasgow

References

1. See C Lashley ‘Studying hospitality for commercial success’ The Hospitality Review 10 (1) 2008 pp 3–4
2. B McKercher ‘A case for ranking tourism journals’ Tourism Management 26 (5) 2005 pp 649–651
3. As found by R Howey K Savage M Verbeeten and H Van Hoof ‘Tourism and Hospitality Research Journals: Cross-citations Among Research Communities’ Tourism Management 20 (1) 1999 pp 133–139
4. In keeping with T Jamal B Smith and E Watson ‘Ranking, Rating and Scoring of Tourism Journals: Interdisciplinary Challenges and Innovations’ Tourism Management 29 (1) 2007 pp 66–78
5. See J G Molz and S Gibson (eds) Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World (Aldershot, Ashgate 2007)
6. J Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests (London, Heinemann Educational 1978)