Global tourism and informal labour relations : the small scale syndrome at work

Abstract

The worldwide expansion of the tourism industry involves many encounters between global agents and local forces yet this host-guest interaction is rarely considered from the point of view of the experience of work. In hotel subsidiaries of transnational chains, top-down corporate philosophy interfaces with bottom-up employee street wisdom. This study illustrates this value collision, embodied in employee relations, and analyses its implications, particularly on professional management an organized labour. Original and comparative fieldwork, carried put in hotels in Barbados and Malta, documents the 'peculiarities' in human resource management functions which result from a home-grown behaviour pattern bred out of the monopoly, intimacy and totality, associated with 'social island' settings: the small-scale syndrome. Useful insights are drawn from a colorful review of such issues as recruitment, promotion, redundancy, discipline, security, communication, expertise, total quality management initiatives, trade unionism and industrial action. This commentary shows how global designs in tourism are activated through, and by, the local workforce and how the unfolding human geography of the labour process ma~es short shrift of intimations of one-worldism.