A Hospitable World?

The hospitality and tourism sector is a large and rapidly expanding industry worldwide, and can rightfully be described as a vehicle of globalisation. Hotels are among the cornerstones of the industry often drawing workers from the most vulnerable segments of multicultural labour markets, accommodating and entertaining tourists and business travelers from around the world.

This book explores the organisation of work, worker identities and worker strategies in hotel workplaces, as they are located in heterogeneous labour markets being changed by processes of globalisation. It uses an explicitly geographical approach to understand how different groups of workers experience and respond to challenges in the hospitality industry, and is based on recent theoretical debates and empirical research on hotel workplaces in cities as different as Oslo, Goa, London, Las Vegas and Toronto. A multi-scalar analysis is taken where concrete worker bodies and their physical, emotional and embodied labour are seen in relation to, among other aspects: the regulation of national and regional labour markets, city governments with global city ambitions, and global corporate actors and labour migration patterns. The book sheds light on the hotel workplace as a hierarchical and fragmented social space as well as addressing questions on worker mobility, the fragmentation of work, scales of organisation and how workers can help shape the regulation of their industry.

This timely volume brings together contributions from international academics and is valuable reading for all those interested in hospitality, tourism, human geography and globalisation.

Author Biography

David Jordhus-Lier is an Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Oslo and a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, and his specialisation is within labour geography and urban social movements. He was the project manager of the “Industrial relations under global stress” project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, which has generated parts of the material for this book. Jordhus-Lier has published a series of articles focusing on geographies of labour, neoliberalism and social movements.

Anders Underthun is a Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute in Oslo. He holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His interests include the politics of regional economic development, industrial relations in the hospitality and aviation industries, and the impact of Temporary Work Agencies on the politics of work.