Hospitality Education: A Third Paradigm

Abstract

What is the right model for tomorrow’s hospitality higher education? Should hospitality education at Bachelor’s and postgraduate level feature substantial elements of vocational and practice-based training or should it resemble an applied business school curriculum with a research base and a social science focus? Are either of these two models adequate in a rapidly evolving experience-based hospitality environment which asks managers to create good surprises then tear down and rebuild the offer to provide new sensations and elicit new emotions? Post-industrial hospitality education may continue to require elements of the vocational and elements of the scientific, but it may also require a third paradigm with an increasingly artistic slant and a new curricular approach.

As the hospitality industry enters the era of the post-industrial experience economy, hospitality education finds itself facing a third major paradigm shift in order to meet the needs of tomorrow’s consumers. Just as practice-based vocational education suited to the needs of a local artisanal cottage industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made way for a science-based management model suited to the industrialized service economy of the late twentieth century, a new design and arts-based paradigm is now needed to meet the demands of an experience economy requiring rapid innovation and creativity. While still maintaining elements of vocational training and business management education, this new model must go beyond mastering set pieces and measuring and codifying management observations, providing students with the mind-set and capabilities to create and design and then tear down and redesign the hospitality experience.

For the last 35 years, a debate has raged in the hospitality community over the nature of hospitality higher education. Should hospitality education favor technique and etiquette, or should it focus on developing business acumen? Should it be practice based and vocational (with elements from finishing schools, language schools, and military academies) or grounded in applied social science? Should the outcomes of hospitality education be skills or competencies? Although hybrid solutions have been found, the supporters of the two approaches have tended to bond into distinct camps, finding it difficult to accept compromise: those in the technical camp have viewed management theory as suspiciously vague, esoteric, and ivory tower, while those in the management camp have increasingly rejected technical training as baseless, anecdotal, and anti-intellectual. Each camp has developed its own norms and culture and devotion to a set of principles. In large part, the two schools of thought can be traced to the history of the development of the industry in divergent locations as well as to the exigencies of specific academic settings.