Hard-skills, soft-skills: undervaluing hospitality’s ‘service with a smile’

Abstract

Hospitality gains profitable value-added from the highly developed social skills of its so-called ‘unskilled’ labour force. Applying terms such as ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ to a post-industrial workforce, especially in services, is not only anachronistic but, in the case of front-line hospitality workers, creates something of a myth that serves to undermine their contribution to bottom line results. This paper examines two key human resource areas. The first concerns categorising workers as either ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, floating a postmodernist idea that perhaps this is something of a social construct, being rooted both in ‘modern’ manpower planning for heavy industries and in the former power of trade unions to control entry into the workplace through lengthy apprenticeships. The second area reviews the quantitative approach to manpower planning. The contextual frame is characterised by a two-sided cross-cultural theme; first, that the male-dominated culture of Fordism and ‘scientific management’ socially constructs skill definitions so as to allow management more control over the workforce. Second, that there is evidence of a culture clash when ideas based on this (i.e. essentially Western industrial culture) are superimposed on Third World countries through the manpower planning component of aid-assisted tourism master plan programmes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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