Rembrandt's "Good Samaritan": The hospitable Samaritan delivers the robbed man to the inn, paying the landlord well for his services. The dog probably symbolizes Rembrandt's opinion about the payment for hospitality. (Luke 10: 25-37)

Hospitality as interaction

How is it possible that a concept such as “hospitality”, which, as we have seen above, bears so many moral connotations, is so widely used as a characteristic of a service produced by one of the biggest commercial industries in the world? Indeed, raising the question of compatibility of “hospitality” and “profit making” often seems to be a waste of time in the eyes of many qualified and motivated hotel managers (Slattery, 2002). Nevertheless, problems may arise from ignoring the balance between making profit and offering genuine hospitality. These problems occur in hospitality companies on a daily basis, and have to do with stressing the buying aspect of the service. Some examples:
- checking liability of the guest before the check-in will take place at all;
- “impolite” guest behaviour (not belonging to generally accepted guest behaviour according to social norms), justified by the guest “because I pay for it”;
- Serving staff who see their job as a sequence of actions outside the interest of the guest, i.e. they focus on the operations, not on the way the guest perceives the service;
- Managers and supervisors who constantly emphasize the “profits” results of the employees’ work, and see hospitable behaviour as subordinate to “profitable” activities;
- Marketing staff and consultants who advise ways and methods to keep poor spenders out of the door and to attract big spenders.

These problems are often experienced as pure business problems, without any relation to a hospitality frame of reference. (references) In many instances the credo is that hospitality is needed to earn profit, thus turning it into a means for profit, which is exactly the opposite of the traditional hospitality concept which prohibits profit objectives (references). This attitude of upholding a hospitality image but practising a business culture can result in morally and socially undesired situations such as:
- causing guests to expect a genuine hospitable environment because it is promised by promotions, but giving them a buy-and-sell situation;
- causing disappointment of staff, asked to do overtime work and to pay other extra efforts, but feeling humiliated by guests who see them as mere paid servants, not as hosts;
- granting extra service to guests who spend big amounts, at the cost of service granted to less-spending guests, or at the cost of extra unpaid work by staff.

In order to clarify these seemingly contrary attitudes, often unconsciously united in one person’s mind, we may consider hospitality as a form of social interaction. In interaction people follow rules prescribing their roles, under certain conditions, one could consider interaction as a role play. If found convenient and both parties agree, sharing a norm allowing them to play a different “ritual” than one would expect outside these conditions, both guest and host will play a harmonious service production interaction which they are allowed to give the name of “hospitality”.

Let’s have a closer look at interaction. Man as a social being attaches meaning to interactions. Without these meanings the actions by means of which responding actions are elicited, will not result in interaction as intended by the actor, because the initiating actions are not recognized as interaction starters. These actions often take the form of symbolic actions, gestures, words etc. and can be responded by other symbolic actions, gestures, words etc. to indicate that the other wants to continue, close or change the interaction. This way social rituals develop as more or less prescribed sequences of interaction for specific situations. The sociological school of Symbolic Interactionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966, Blumer 1969, Goffman 1958) uses this perspective to explain social behaviour. Man lives, according to the symbolic-interactionists, in a perceived reality that he has to cope with. A part of this reality is social reality which the individual needs for acquiring knowledge about the reality he lives in. This knowledge is acquired and passed by through interaction. The interaction is steered by the actors’ self-concepts and the adjustments the inter-actors make to adapt to the roles they have to play. The symbolic-interactionists use the terms “role” and “ritual” not to use the theatre as a metaphor for social behaviour, but to demonstrate that human interaction exists for a great deal in genuine rituals or ritual-like sequences of exchange of meaningful activities: there is a scenario (the way norms and values prescribe certain actions in a certain sequence, recognized and acknowledged by the inter-actors) and there are roles (the set of expectations of each other held by the inter-actors).

For interaction to take place, at least two inter-actors are needed who recognize the meaning of each other’s behaviour because they share a minimum of norms and values connected to their interaction. We pre-postulate, that no interaction takes place without any intention, purpose or goal of at least one of the inter-actors. Even informal chats serve a purpose of at least one of the participants, the purposes or goals need not be rational or effective. In general any interaction purpose is intended to be self-directed, other-directed or directed towards the interest of society, group or organization, or contain a mixture of two or even three of these directions.

The intention with which an interaction is started, can also be negative, i.e. against or even damaging the other’s or the common interest. We call these interactions “hostile” interactions and most of them are against community norms and values, except those which are intended for law enforcement purposes.

This way, theoretically speaking, a vast number of possible interactions can take place. We can plot them in a two-axis diagram in which the axis represent the intentions of one inter-actor. In a harmonious situation the other inter-actor responds by positively “playing the game” in such a way that the interaction will lead to some outcome which is satisfying or at least meaningful to both inter-actors[1].
To illustrate the different intentions with which interaction can take place, we consider the intention “benefit for the other” and the intention “own’s benefit” as axes in a diagram in which types of interaction (according to their intention) can be plotted. We assume that the intention “benefit for the other” represents the community view on social reality, whereas “own’s benefit” represents the exchange view on social reality. We come back to these views later on.

Of course, interactions intentionally directed towards own’s and other’s damage will seldom occur and so the left down square will be filled with aberrant behavior. The left upper square is filled with altruistic interactions in which the inter-actor more or less tries to sacrifice himself for the other’s benefit. Hospitality interactions sometimes take this form, which are taken as examples of maximum hospitality (e.g. the good Samaritan, Luke 10: 25-37), or citizens in World War II who offered secret shelter to Jews, thus endangering their own lives. Usually hospitality interactions can be found in the right upper square of the diagram, together with business transactions. The typical business interaction is to be plotted close to the horizontal axis, indicating less attention for the other’s benefit (that’s his business, isn’t it?) and hospitality is plotted more in the middle or closer to the vertical axis. This is an indication that, looking at the intention, hospitality and selling/buying could belong to a same “family” of interactions. The diagram also intends to indicate that hospitality interactions differ in “degree of hospitality” in which the own-interest and the other-interest components have varying proportions. Mixtures of hospitality and business interactions might well be possible, but, as we will see in the next paragraph, are vulnerable for confusion when one inter-actor interprets the interaction as “business-directed” while the other inter-actor rather interprets it as more “hospitality-directed”, depending on views and situations.

In the rationale of this paper we noticed that managers and workers in hospitality industry might be motivated by “care for guests without concern for remuneration”, by simply pampering the stranger, as a fundamental attitude or personality trait, to pay efforts and hard work just for achieving the guest’s satisfaction as a reward. If that is the case, then they can manage to separate more or less the felt need for salary and profit on the one hand, and the felt need for recognition by the guest as a good host, on the other hand. In this view, slogans such as “the guest is paying our salary” might not be a good means to motivate hospitality workers. Concluding: we assume that in hospitality business the care for the guest is preferably not primarily linked to profit making or salary earning, if one wants to raise or maintain the quality of the service.. This is in line not only with our hypothesized inclination to hospitable behaviour as a personality trait of hospitality workers and managers, but also with some motivation theories, the clearest of which is the classical theory of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by Frederick Herzberg (Herzberg, 1959).

[1] Therapists and behavioral trainers often use the method of “transactional analysis” which is based on harmony and possible differences in role perception of two inter-actors of themselves and of the other. In the host-guest encounter in the hospitality industry these differences often occur. (Berne, 1964): Games People Play. Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1964. Berne focuses on differences in attitudes people have in their interaction towards each other (Berne prefers the term “transaction”), we are focusing on intentions people have in their interaction. Both are relevant in constituting a meaningful inter- or transaction.

Consulted literature:

Berger, P.L. and Th. Luckmann (1966): The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books)

Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B.B. (1959). The Motivation to Work (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Pinker, S. (2002).: The Blank Slate, Penguin Books, pp. 283-286.

Slattery, P. (2002): “Finding the hospitality Industry”, Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education, vol. 1, no. 1: 19-28.