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This is an invited 75article for Tourism Review addressing tourism employment, past and future.

Conceptual analysis of tourism employment with a focus on paradox.

Inherent paradox which underpins tourism employment.

A wholly original take on tourism employment.

Given the dramatic technology led service innovations that are putting pressure on hospitality and tourism businesses, competitive advantage may depend significantly on remaining opportunities for a human element to be incorporated into the customer experience.

This conceptual study provides a synthesis of the past and the future understanding of the importance of service management.

A conceptual framework is provided that extends our understanding of emotion connection and reliance on technology. The examples are given to enrich the discussion.

This study is among the first to highlight and explore the interrelationship between emotional connection and the reliance on technology in the context of hospitality experience.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of the Journal of Service Management dedicated to the Thought Leadership in Services Conference held in Brisbane Australia in 2017. The paper also explores the disruptive and transformative role that technology is set to play over the next 30 years.

The paper provides a brief summary of the papers within the special issue. The paper also introduces a conceptual framework identifying four quadrants that reflect different combinations of human touch and technology. This framework is used to examine the treatment of technology in the eight papers.

While it is clear that technology is having a profound impact on service, and is contributing to major changes within the eight service domains captured by the papers in the special issue; there were significant differences observed across the eight papers in the special issue. From the associated discussion, it is clear that the humanistic paradigm is still dominant within services, even though there is strong evidence that a shift is occurring.

This paper extends earlier work exploring the infusion of technology within services to highlight the progress from a humanistic paradigm to a technology-centric paradigm.

This article aims to build on the insights from the systematic reviews included in this special issue (SI) on frontline service employees (FLE) by adding practitioner perspectives. Its purpose is to gauge knowledge, awareness and practices from industry and government regarding topics related to frontline workers and to offer critical and, in places, provocative insights on the relevance of scholarly focus in serving the needs of industry.

Insights were developed through consultation with managers who are responsible for leading frontline employees, who offered insights on the important issues affecting their workforce as well as direct comments on each of the key topics covered in this SI articles. Additional insights were gathered through a review of policy document reviews with relevant government agencies and trade publications, a review of a body of conference topics and speakers and personal reflections developed over decades of consulting work.

This paper presents insights from industry about looming challenges facing managers of frontline service employees, including a forecasted worsening of labor force availability to perform many frontline jobs; growing competition for workers from other sectors; a relatively shallow understanding by industry of academic research topics on workforce in service; the emerging increased cooperation between industry and governments to address these challenges and a clear deficit in necessary frontline skills.

This paper provides rare and direct insights from industry practitioners about current and critical topics investigated by academic researchers and offers opportunities for further collaboration and collective thought on addressing global challenges faced by frontline service employees.

This paper aims to challenge existing assumptions in talent management (TM) research, showcasing a misalignment between commonly held assumptions and the characteristics of the youth-intensive hospitality sector workforce.

Following a review of the TM literature, Piirto’s educational talent pyramid is adopted to conceptualize a recalibration. Drawing on multidisciplinary literatures (i.e. adolescent development, youth employment, positive psychology), and adopting a (talent) developmental approach, a reframing of prevalent TM discourses is enunciated based on the logic that the hospitality workforce is predominantly in a developmental state.

TM discourses are misaligned with the workforce composition of the hospitality industry, which is dominated by young, often unexperienced, workers. The need for dramatically recalibrated TM structures and underlying assumptions, centred around a greater attention to the “development” of talent and a more employee-focused and inclusive approach, can facilitate greater alignment between TM and hospitality.

This paper extends a body of work advocating for more inclusive TM and developmental postures. The contribution, via a hospitality industry context, has been to create linkages between talent- and youth-development discourses.

This paper outlines a number of implications, among which are a pathway forward for hospitality industry to rebuild its poor HRM image and conversion of “transient” hospitality jobs to career jobs (for youth).

This paper identifies youth as a distinct workforce entity and suggests that hospitality jobs represent a critical developmental context for young people, resulting in a series of critical implications for TM practice and theorizing.

The purpose of this study is to identify across a number of workplace variables the similarities and differences in attitudes between three key frontline hotel worker groups: housekeepers, front office employees and food and beverage front-of-house staff.

A qualitative study was conducted using 25 semi-structured interviews with frontline workers employed in full-service hotels across Eastern Australia. Analysis was augmented through the Leximancer® software package to develop relational themes in the aggregation and disaggregation of the occupations.

Although work/life balance was a common theme across the three occupations, several distinct attitudinal differences emerged, in particular regarding perceptions of one occupational group towards another.

This study highlights the importance of hotel managers being cognisant of occupational differences and collecting data capable of assisting in the identification of these differences. Several practitioner relevant recommendations are made.

This exploratory study challenges assumptions regarding a “pan-industrial” hospitality occupational community and applies an emerging qualitative software package to highlight occupational differences and relational perceptions.

With the ever-increasing adoption of technology and automation radically changing the nature of service delivery, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of human touch, introducing hospitable service as an enhancement for value creation in service organizations.

Drawing on management, social sciences and hospitality literatures, a four-configuration model is presented to illustrate dimensions which arise from the confluence of different degrees of relationship orientation – shared mental models held by the host organization (self- or other-oriented), and guests’ service preferences (transactional or relational).

A theoretically grounded model of configurations resulting from variations on three key dimensions is offered. These are: employee organization relationships – social exchange processes governing the interactions between employees and their employers; HRM systems – internally consistent combinations of HR practices; and tech-touch trade-off – prioritization of technology vs employees to deliver services.

Embedding hospitable service as a construct to support the leveraging of human touch in service organizations opens up new research opportunities including avenues to further conceptualize the nature and dimensions of hospitable service. Future research that supports further understanding about the role of human touch and value creation in service organizations is proposed.

Through the value-enhancing capability of human in the service encounter, firms can be enabled to accurately position themselves in one of the four relational configurations on offer and then identify opportunities for managers to leverage human touch to combat the diminishing role of the human touch in a technology-ubiquitous service context.

This is among the first papers to explore the influence of technology on the degree of human touch in the interface between hospitality employee and customer, and to develop a configuration model through which researchers and practitioners can operate during this declining era of human to human service interactions.

Employee wellness is vital to creating high-quality employee–customer interactions, yet frontline service workers (FLSWs) do not typically engage in, or benefit from, wellness initiatives. This paper aims to conceptually model the interactive influences of organizational and employee factors in influencing FLSW involvement in wellness programs and provides suggestions on how service organizations can enhance wellness behaviors and outcomes.

This paper builds upon classical and contemporary management theories to identify important gaps in knowledge about how employees and firms engage with wellness. Interactive psychology, emphasizing multidirectional interaction between person (employee) and situation (organization) wellness orientation, is introduced.

The paper develops a model that can be used to assess organizational wellness program effectiveness by emphasizing the interaction of employee and organizational wellness orientation. The model illustrates that wellness effectiveness relies equally on employee agency through an active wellness orientation matched with the organizational wellness orientation.

This paper questions the dominant approaches to assessing the effectiveness of workplace wellness initiatives, arguing for a more humanistic and agentic perspective rather than traditional organizationally centered fiscal measures.

This paper integrates the findings of the articles included in the special issue (SI) on frontline employee (FLE) research. Articles included in this SI systematically review multiple research domains, including employee and customer engagement, FLE vulnerability, customer mistreatment, service teamwork and service encounters; provide instructions on effectively conducting meta-analyses and discuss the practical applications of FLE research. This paper also provides future directions for FLE scholarship with a focus on theoretical/methodological rigor and relevance.

This is a conceptual paper that integrates and critically evaluates extant research and provides directions for future scholarship.

An integrative framework of extant FLE research is proposed consisting of situational predictors, psychological mechanisms, attitudinal/behavioral outcomes and boundary conditions/moderators. Further, three main areas for future scholarship are recommended including examining the transformative effects of technology on FLE work, focusing on decent work for FLEs and conducting practically relevant and impactful research.

This paper provides reflections, integration and future directions for scholarship based on systematic reviews of key domains of FLE research, a primer for conducting systematic reviews (specifically – meta-analysis) and practitioner perspectives on extant research.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality workforce in situ between mid-April and June 2020.

This is a viewpoint paper that brings together a variety of sources and intelligence relating the impacts on hospitality work of the COVID-19 pandemic at three levels: macro (global, policy, government), meso (organisational) and micro (employee). It questions whether the situations faced by hospitality workers as a result of the pandemic are seed-change different from the precarious lives they normally lead or just a (loud) amplification of the “normal”.

In light of the fluid environment relating to COVID-19, conclusions are tentative and question whether hospitality stakeholders, particularly consumers, governments and the industry itself, will emerge from the pandemic with changed attitudes to hospitality work and hospitality workers.

This raises questions about hospitality work for key stakeholders to address in the future, some of which are systemic in terms of how precarious labour forces, critical to the global economy are to be considered by policy makers, organisations in a re-emerging competitive market for talent and for those who chose (or not) to work in hospitality.

This paper contributes to ongoing debates about precarious work and the extent to which such practices are institutionalised and adopts an “amplification model” that may have value in futures-orientated analysis about hospitality and tourism.

This paper is wholly original and a reflection on the COVID-19 crisis. It provides a point of wider reference with regard to responses to crises and their impact on employment in hospitality, highlighting how ongoing change, fluidity and uncertainty serve to magnify and exacerbate the precarious nature of work in the industry.