Shapes of Tourism Employment

5The Globalized Hotel Business: Worlds within a World

5.1. Worlds at stake and human resource management

The complexity and turbulence¹ of the tourism system [ALT 09; BAR 16; TRI 97] have increased with the globalization of economies. This forces hotel companies to be responsive, which results in many strategic movements, as we have seen in Chapter 1, and new contingencies in the hotel sector must therefore be taken into account as the latter becomes more global. Firms’ strategies must consider all the different “worlds” (segments, ranges, cultures, locations, sizes, etc.) that constitute them in order to maintain a leading position in the market. These strategies tend to be applied in a global way, in particular in order to facilitate the coordination of the very different job profiles that make up these organizations. Such processes gradually erase the local specificities of hotels and significant gaps can thus widen between prescribed labor standards and the reality of work. However, the requirement also includes the means and objectives allocated to hotel teams. In order to reduce costs to gain competitiveness, teams are often forced to operate, not according to their needs, but according to what the organization imposes on them, that is, to do more with less. Because, let us remember, the main resource of hotel teams to provide a quality service is the temporal and psychological availability of the employees. As a result, “an employee who, by any chance, attempts to challenge ...