Guest editorial: (In)equalities in hospitality and tourism – exploring diversity and equity issues

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-05-2023-378
• Published date: 04 May 2023
• Date: 04 May 2023
• Pages: 465-468
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
• Author: Vanessa S. Bernauer,Abhishek Bhati,K. Thirumaran

Guest editorial: (In)equalities in

hospitality and tourism –exploring

diversity and equity issues

Hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry (including airlines, hotels, resorts, cruise ships,

restaurants, etc.) is one of the most important sectors of the economy. It is a major source of

employment, where the share of part-time, temporary or seasonal work and self-employment

is generally higher than in the overall economy (International Labour Organization [ILO]

2014 ILO] 2014,2017). Very often, H&T employment requires little or no formal training, and

work is associated with precarious working conditions, such as low wages, long and

unpleasant working hours, high work pres sure, etc. (European Foundation for the

Improvement of Living and Working Conditions [Eurofound] 2004;ILO, 2014). The H&T

industry attracts mostly young people, migrants, members of the LGBT community and

women (Kalargyrou and Costen, 2017), with the latter making up as much as 60–70% of the

global H&T workforce (ILO, 2014,2017).

Although international tourism in 2022 continued to recover from the coronavirus disease

2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, it still “remained 61% below 2019 levels”(World Tourism

Organization [UNWTO], 2022) according to the latest UNWTO World Tourism Barometer

2022. The H&T workforce has been and continues to be severely affected by the COVID-19

pandemic.

We invited contributions addressing labor and employment in the H&T industry in order

to present various perspectives on this important topic concerning vulnerable groups of

workers and to draw attention to widespread precarity in this sector. The idea for this special

issue was inspired by a professional development workshop (PDW) organized by this guest

editors’team for the first virtual Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) in

2020 with an impressive and inspiring panel of internationally known scholars: Jean Helms

Mills, Albert J. Mills, Dennis Nickson, Renate Ortlieb, Anna Schneider, Alexander Trupp and

Chris Warhurst. With the PDW, we aimed to raise awareness for the (in)equalities faced by

workers in the H&T sector by discussing issues of gender, race and class and to identify ways

to address them. We were encouraged to host this special issue by Eddy Ng, then PDW chair

of the AOM Gender and Diversity in Organizations (GDO) division [1].

To highlight the significance of the various contributions on H&T published in Equality,

Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal (EDI) and identify prospects to further

research in this field, we conducted a semantic network analysis using VOSviewer. We

identified high-frequency words of all the 627 articles’titles and abstracts published in EDI

since 2010 [2] and generated a semantic network map (Figure 1). The main advantage of using

a semantic network analysis lies in its ability to systematically and objectively identify

thematic trends. From the initial item bank, several items were deleted (e.g. study, sample,

size, qualitative, quantitative, data collection) to refine the cluster results. The semantic

network map helped capture the diversity of subject categories: The analysis revealed five

distinct yet overlapping regions: (1-red) workforce issues, (2-purple) support structures,

(3-yellow) institutional context, (4-blue) equality/inequality discourse and (5-green) gender

equity research.

On the right side, the red “workforce”cluster was linked to “employer”(55 occurrences),

“decision”(55), “attitude”(52), “behaviour”(45), right (40) and disability (39). Also noticeable

in this region were “representation”,“benefit”,“diversity management”and

“implementation”. A prominent theme –disability –encompassed disability disclosure

Guest editorial

465

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 42 No. 4, 2023

pp. 465-468

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-05-2023-378