TABLE OF CONTENTS Colin Hales
The accepted wisdom is that organizations and management are undergoing radical transformation and that few industries, including tourism, will be unaffected. Key drivers of this are the pressures to reduce costs and raise quality which stem from increasingly intense competition in an increasingly global marketplace, coupled with growing demands from better educated and informed employees, consumers and other external stakeholders. The major facilitators of this change are rapid developments in technology, particularly those that have increased the volume and speed with which information is stored, accessed, retrieved, processed and distributed.
Three broad, inter-linked transformations are identified: first, a shift away from centralized, process-oriented bureaucracies to more decentralized, performance-driven management structures; secondly, a shift away from fragmented, standardized operating systems to more holistic, integrated forms of working where there is greater employee involvement and empowerment; and, thirdly, a change in the role of managers away from 'command and control' to more loosely-defined cross-boundary leadership and coordination. A key issue, therefore, is: to what extent and how will these changes impact on the tourism industry in the future?
Organizations are social entities that bring together people, materials, information and technologies in coordinated activities and relationships in order to pursue specific goals. They may be economic, political or social, public or private, for-profit or not-for-profit, large or small. Tourism encompasses all such organizations.
To achieve their goals, these 'social entities' have to be organized and managed in certain ways. There must be mechanisms in place to plan and decide...
