59 TOURISM WORK AND EMPLOYMENT – Contributions by Adele Ladkin
59 TOURISM WORK AND EMPLOYMENT – Contributions by Adele Ladkin
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Philip Larkin, ‘Toads’. The Less Deceived, 1954. Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 1988.
I have always been fascinated by work; how for many of us it shapes the rhythm of our lives, defines our identities, restrains and affords opportunities and at the more mundane, pays the bills. I remember package holidays abroad as a child and becoming vaguely aware of people who spent their days on beaches setting out umbrellas, serving food and drink in hotels and restaurants and organising tours….was this work? People where I lived went to work in shops, factories or offices, they certainly didn’t spend days in the sunshine being hospitable and making people smile. What was this all about? Could anyone work in tourism and hospitality? Could I?
Fast forward to my early twenties and I worked as a travel consultant in a retail travel agency, in a high street shop in those days. By this point I was becoming less interested in work (concurring with Philip Larkin) and more interested in travel…this combined with an obsession with maps led me to a Geography degree at Leicester University, where the course I loved the most was on mobility and migration (I’ll come back to this). Following my degree I continued to study, for an MSc in Tourism Management, and then on to a PhD, both at the University of Surrey.
At the time of writing it is now 25 years since I gained my PhD and I have remained in academia since that time. So I did get to work in the tourism industry, but I strayed into academia and for much longer now and better suited to me, have been able to study tourism generally and more specifically, tourism and hospitality work and employment. It is within this narrower field where my contribution lies, broadly in three areas.
Career Analysis and Hotel General Managers
The first area, under the expert guidance of my PhD Supervisor Professor Michael Riley, was to use career analysis to explore how individuals develop their skills, move between jobs, and make the most of networks and opportunities to become successful in their careers. The career where I learnt and undertook this form of analysis was that of a hotel general manager. This prestigious hospitality occupation, whilst being the epitome of some of those pervasive characteristics of hospitality work (long hours, customer facing, 24/7) could also be highly rewarding; attracting dedicated, ambitious individuals whose identity was intertwined with their occupation. Largely located within the discipline of Psychology, there is an extensive body of work relating to career choice (most famously the work by Schien, 1977), a literature that had not found its way into tourism and hospitality at that time and formed the basis of my investigation (Riley & Ladkin, 1994). An important finding from this work was that experiences gained working in food and beverage were an essential route to becoming a GM, an