Tourism Culture

Student name: YUSI SHI

Student number: S2915385

Tutor: Mr. Darren Crawford

Workshop Time: Thursday 15:00-15:50

Introduction

Cultural diversity is a key factor for today’s individuals and organizations in hospitality and tourism industry. The increasingly number of people are experiencing the cultural diversity in their workplace because many companies are multinational and they are more likely to require employees coming from different place in the whole world. However, in this phenomenon, also some issues will occur. This research report will discuss three common issues resulted by culture diversity which are discrimination, prejudice and racism in hospitality and tourism industry, and some real case will be analysed for each circumstance, also, two strategies used for overcoming the one of these issues will be mentioned and evaluated.

Discrimination

Discrimination now has been characterized as a kind of unfair treatment for different individuals in the workplace. Hunter (1992) pointed out that discrimination phenomenon is about the allocation of position and benefits with organisational norms and rule. Buckle, Wheeler, Halbesleben and Emerald (2015) claimed that anyone could be treated differently in their workplace which could result some effects for their career life. The discrimination could be referred to individuals’ race, colour, gender, religion, sexuality, disability political opinion and so on (Buckle et al., 2015). Specifically, in the hospitality industry, the most symbolic discrimination in current workplace could be the gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

Gender discrimination is a common phenomenon in workplace. It is an unequal treatment between different gender (Buckle et al., 2015), such as women earn less than men or transgender hard to get job. Buckle et al. (2015) reported that compared with men, women’s working capacity are undervalued and their promotion opportunities are less than males. For example, in some hotel, female workers are not encouraged to do some physical works (Buckle, 2015). Furthermore, after understanding the Chinese working environment, Kuhn and Shen (2013) pointed out because of physiological factors, men are more likely than women to obtain an important position in an organization, and, the possibility of pregnancy of female workers could be considered and once pregnant, women could lose their promotion opportunities.

The other significant discrimination in hotel workplace is sexual harassment. Sexual harassment means any unwelcome and unnecessary sexual behaviour (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.). It often occurs because of the relatively low social status of room attendants and intimate working environment, which influenced them in negative (Kensbock, Bailey, Jennings, & Patiar, 2015). Although some policies have been published to reduce the sexual harassment, however, there are still some of female room attendants experienced sexual harassment in their working environment. There is a real case about discrimination in hospitality workplace, and the case investigation involved five 5-star hotels on the Gold Coast, Australia (Kensbock et al., 2015). 46 female room attendants were respondents and interviewed, and 44 females room attendants indicated that they had experienced this circumstance by male guests more or less (Kensbock et al., 2015). That is a great proportion. Boon (as cited in Kensbock et al., 2015) emphasized that a hotel room is a relatively intimate privacy space for guests, and when the females room attendants working in this kind of space, they are likely to be harassed. One of the respondents, Jane, claimed that some of male guests could associate the bed with the female room attendants when they see the female attendants working at their room, and that make her feel uncomfortable (Kensbock et al., 2015). Another female room attendant considered that the uniforms are not suitable for many attendants and even cannot cover their knees, and that could be seen by other male guests (Kensbock et al., 2015). These fact reveal that the female room attendants working at hotel are very worried about sexual harassment.