Overview

For a couple of decades now, both higher education providers and industrial organizations in English speaking countries have used hospitality to describe a cluster of service sector activities associated with the provision of food, drink and accommodation. Reflecting changes in the industrial descriptor used by practitioners, both academic and industry journals have adopted the notion that hospitality was a term which better described activities which had previously been known as hotel and catering. The academic community have increasingly used hospitality in degree course titles, and in several countries, educators describe their professional association using this term. Without wishing to explore the emergence of hospitality and its appeal to both practitioners and academics, it does open up potential avenues for exploration and research about hospitality which hotel and catering discourages. That said, the current research agenda and curriculum could still be described as hotel and catering under a new name. It is the contention of this chapter that the topic of hospitality is worthy of serious study and could potentially better inform both industrial practice and academic endeavour.

In the UK, several senior academics from universities across the country have been considering the meaning of hospitality as an academic discipline. This chapter attempts to co-ordinate and expand the themes which have been emerging from our discussions and papers written by various colleagues keen to build a theoretical framework for the study of hospitality and hospitality management. There...