Research: Theorizing hospitality - A reprise

Paper (2021) by: Paul Lynch, Jennie Germann Molz, Alison Mcintosh, Peter Lugosi and Conrad Lashley. Source: https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp_00046_2.

I have read the paper so you don't have to. The 5 biggest lessons that teach you about the essence of hospitality, tourism and leisure management.

The field has become intrinsically inhospitable to the interdisciplinary study of hospitality. This inhospitableness stems in part from the fact that there is limited interaction between scholars working in different academic traditions of hospitality, and perhaps even less interaction between practitioners and academics.

In consequence, the study of hospitality requires a more hospitable approach that is accepting of difference and presents an open face to its various intellectual representations.

One of the problems with the current state of hospitality studies is that different disciplines and sectors frame hospitality in quite distinct ways. Even a brief review of the literature reveals that scholars and practitioners are approaching hospitality from very different perspectives and with very different objectives. Hospitality is framed quite differently in the social sciences than it is in the managerial sciences.

Furthermore, perhaps because the vast majority of publications on hospitality emerge from the business and managerial sector, the definition that tends to dominate public and academic discourse on the topic is one based on organizational practices and the provision of food, drink and accommodation. Such a definition, whilst useful, is limited as it fails to address the essence of hospitality and constrains its intellectual possibilities. This narrow focus reduces hospitality to an economic activity, just as it reduces the interactions between hosts and guests to commercial exchanges and the elements of hospitality (food, beverages and beds) to commodities.

Historical analyses of hospitality have depicted it as concerned with managing the stranger who represents a potential for danger (e.g. Visser 1991) and is civilized through the process of providing hospitality, which facilitates the development of relationships (Selwyn 2000).

Selwyn indirectly categorizes types of strangers: ‘Hospitality converts: strangers into familiars, enemies into friends, friends into better friends, outsiders into insiders, non-kin into kin’ (2000: 19). One can see how the categories are based upon the seemingly bipolar nature, and foundations, of hospitality.

Hospitality operates on a knife edge, embodying its etymological origins, viz. hospes, meaning friend as well as enemy (Visser 1991). Thus, antonyms commonly associated with hospitality in the literature include inter alia: stranger/ friend, inclusion/ exclusion, welcome/ non-welcome, hospitality/ inhospitality, conditional/ unconditional, duty/ pleasure, morality/ transgression, religiosity/ bacchanalian, order/ disorder and high/ low (Bell 2007a, 2007b; Derrida 1998, 2000b; Selwyn 2000; Sheringham and Daruwalla 2007).

1. The publication in the 1970s of Valene Smith’s influential collection Hosts and Guests established hospitality and the related concepts of hosts and guests as a foundational structure through which to understand the social interactions between tourists and local residents in both commercial and non-commercial settings.
2. The host–guest relationship whereby the host, through the provision of hospitality, imposes their sense of order upon the other. The other, while symbolically elevated, is subject to domination by the host, and to the rules of being a guest.
3. Intrinsic to the host–guest transaction is a recognition of the interchangeability of these roles during the course of a hospitality interaction (Lynch et al. 2007). Lugosi (2008, 2009) draws attention to the importance of guest–guest relations in constructing hospitality with guests taking on roles of hosts in relation to other guests. Indeed, it is perhaps better to conceive of multiple instances of hospitality occurring in many social situations whereby people may be both hosts and guests simultaneously according to the analytical perspective.
4. The hospitality relationship often involves micro-hosts such for example, the train guard and macro-hosts such as the train company.
5. While many studies of hospitality centre the host–guest relationship at the heart of the hospitality encounter, such labelling has been challenged in the context of commercial hospitality. For example, as noted above, Aramberri (2001) rejects ‘host–guest’ terminology on the basis that it is not relevant in commercial tourism, suggesting that ‘service provider–consumer’ is more relevant; a consequence of such an approach is to reframe the nature of the relationship to give much greater emphasis to the economic rather than social side of the exchange. Or, to paraphrase Lugosi (2009), to perpetuate a common divide between ‘the social or philosophical dimensions of hospitality from its organizational and commercial manifestations’. One could in fact posit hospitality as operating on a continuum with commercial hospitality at one end, ulterior-motives hospitality a bit further along, reciprocal hospitality somewhere in the middle and genuine altruistic hospitality at the other end.
6. Hospitality, and the related roles of ‘host’ and ‘guest’, serve as powerful metaphors for making sense of and critiquing the dynamics of control and exchange that shape economic and social life in an increasingly mobile world.

Although stating that hospitality is not anchored to buildings, Bell (2007a) nevertheless draws attention to the mediatory role of non-humans, such as the (broader) built environment, in the affordance of daily hospitableness. For instance, public seating constitutes a form of non-human hospitality. With good reason, hospitality is typically represented as a human phenomenon.

However, as Bell’s examples demonstrate, use of the host–guest metaphor extends the potential of hospitality analyses to examine human and non-human relationships, including divine–human relationships (Navone 2004), terra–human or human–animal relationships; the latter two appear to have been neglected to date in published academic studies.

This [non-human] approach also opens up new possibilities for thinking about the relationship between humans and machines. It is not incidental that computing discourse draws on the language of hospitality: hosting, ports, home pages. This terminology suggests that the interface between humans and computing technologies is akin to a relationship between strangers, involving both the transgression and reiteration of various boundaries.

Ciborra (1999, 2004) takes a somewhat different approach, asking instead how humans and technologies host each other. Focusing on information and technology systems in organizational settings, Ciborra acknowledges that technology often appears to users as an ambivalent and threatening stranger. He suggests reaching out to technology as a guest. He explains that ‘hospitality is the human process of making the Other a human like oneself.

Hosting the new technology is then seen to mean accepting a paramount symmetry between humans and non-humans’ (Ciborra 2004: 27). Ciborra goes so far as to suggest that, following Kant’s notion of the universal right to hospitality, ‘humans should grant a set of rights to technology, such as the right to visit – but not necessarily the right to stay’ (Ciborra 2004: 27). Yet, he warns, like all guests, technology can dominate the host. Technology can turn into an enemy; humans and technologies can become hostages of each other.