Obesity and hotel staffing: Are hotels guilty of ... - Ingenta Connect

HOSP 3 (2) pp. 111–127 Intellect Limited 2013

Hospitality & Society Volume 3 Number 2 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/hosp.3.2.111_1

Candice Harris AUT University Jennie Small University of Technology

Obesity and hotel staffing: Are hotels guilty of ‘lookism’? Abstract

Keywords

The idea that workers embody the brand is placing increasing emphasis on the personal attributes of employees. The drive towards aesthetic labour, which focuses on ‘particular embodied capacities and attributes that appeal to the senses of customers’, has the potential for a form of discrimination based on appearance, ‘lookism’. This article sought to examine the ‘face of’ 28 major hotels in Sydney through their online promotional videos, with particular reference to the perceived body size of employees. In total, there were 112 images of hotel staff, primarily in front-of-house roles. The images were overwhelmingly of slim to average sized workers. The few who were judged as slightly larger than the norm were older men in the role of doorman, exemplifying the portly, British gentleman in top hat and tails at a four to five star hotel. The question arises: are Sydney hotels employing only slim/average sized staff or are they presenting only these staff as the ‘face of’ the hotel? Whatever the answer, the message portrayed to guests and labour markets remains the same: the brand values slimness. Such practice could be interpreted as a form of weight prejudice and discrimination.

obesity critical hospitality hotels hotel staff representation websites critical discourse analysis

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Candice Harris | Jennie Small

Introduction Critical tourism and hospitality researchers, examining media representation of the consumers of tourism and hospitality, report a picture of a narrowly defined consumer. Although the message is unspoken, there is a tacit understanding of who is welcome as a tourist/guest and who is not. In the welcoming of some, and exclusion of others, P. Lynch et al. (2011) emphasize that hospitality always entails its opposite: hostility or ‘hostipitality’. Representational studies identify grounds for inclusion or exclusion in tourism/hospitality as based on body type. Those consumers who are young, white, able-bodied and slim (Jordan 2007; Small et al. 2008; Small and Jordan 2008) represent the image of an organization or destination and are welcome to receive its hospitality. In the present study we move beyond the recipients of hospitality to consider the ‘givers’ of hospitality who also embody the image/brand. The idea that the worker embodies the brand places increased emphasis on ‘particular embodied capacities and attributes that appeal to the senses of customers’ which C. Warhurst and D. Nickson (2007: 103) refer to as ‘aesthetic labour’. We ask the question: who is welcome to offer hospitality and who is not? In 2009, the hospitality global economy accounted for more than 235 million jobs, equivalent to about 8 per cent of the overall number of jobs (direct and indirect) or, one in every 12.3 jobs (Baum 2012: 8). With modern western society’s focus on the ‘thin ideal’, body size has become an important component of appearance. Thus, there are implications for the increasing number of people who are deemed overweight or obese especially in tourism hospitality. Hospitality establishments, especially those towards the luxury end, reflect a strong aesthetic predisposition, concerned with style and appearance in the way they are designed and managed operationally (Kennedy and Homant 1984). Employment and obesity has come under scrutiny in the airline sector with the termination of employment of overweight flight attendants (BBC News 2009). Publicity about the treatment of overweight flight attendants clearly indicates that looks are important and reflect ‘how much customers want their Diet Coke served by someone who looks svelte in a uniform’ (jaunted.com 2010). This article sought to examine one sector of the tourism industry, the hotel sector and its representation of hospitality employees, with particular reference to body size.

Putting body size on the hospitality research and industry agenda The dominant discourse of obesity is a bio-medical discourse where ‘obesity’ and ‘overweight’ are defined as ‘abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health’ and are measured through the Body Mass Index, defined as a person’s weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of the person’s height (in metres) (World Health Organization 2006). Within this discourse, obesity is seen as a disease, an epidemic or crisis (Rich and Evans 2005). ‘Epidemic’ and ‘obesity’ are terms used so frequently that ‘they have seeped into the collective community consciousness, primarily due to the massive increase in coverage of this issue in the popular media’ (O’Hara and Gregg 2012: 33). However, L. O’Hara and J. Gregg (2012) argue that the weight-centred health paradigm is contributing directly to a broad range of human rights abuses, and not just those related specifically to health. Some authors suggest that weight bias is one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination in the western world (Swami et al. 2010). A. Drewnowski (2009: s36) discusses obesity as

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Obesity and hotel staffing

an economic phenomenon, framing obesity as the ‘toxic consequence of economic insecurity and a failing economic environment’. He states that not all consumers, given economic constraints, may have the same degree of choice when it comes to purchasing healthy food. The complexity of exclusion of/for ‘othered’ groups can be explored through the concept of ‘embodiment’ that is defined as ‘making and doing the work of bodies – of becoming a body in social space’ (Turner 1996: xiii). Body size and appearance are part of becoming a body in social space. Nonetheless, there are few studies in tourism and hospitality dealing with this issue. One study by J. Small et al. (2008) analysed 408 images of people in the advertisements in twelve issues of Qantas and Air New Zealand inflight magazines. They found that, with one exception, all the images were of people of slim to medium build, suggesting that this is the body endorsed by these airlines. Another study by F. Jordan (2007), which focused on the presentation of holiday bodies in British women’s lifestyle magazines, found that there was a uniform beach-holiday body to which women should aspire: slim, toned, tanned and well groomed. A later study by Small and Jordan (2008), that included Australian women’s lifestyle magazines in the analysis, came to the same conclusions. The message of the magazines is that one should work to achieve this body and ‘that without such a body women should not be happy to be unclothed in the public spaces of tourism’ (Small and Jordan 2008: 103). The question arises: what message do these publications give to those who are overweight/obese? If the representation of people in advertising material reflects the image the organization would like to present, then one can conclude that overweight or obese people are not part of that image. While it is well understood that the populations in OECD countries, amongst others, are increasing in size, the issue of the overweight or obese body has not been addressed in any depth in tourism representation studies or tourism studies in general. The exception to the latter is the study by Small and Harris (2012) that examined airline travel experiences of obese and non-obese passengers and airlines’ policies regarding obesity and travel. The findings revealed that while much of the industry was silent on the issue of larger-sized passengers, the passengers were not. Those who were obese reported shame, fear and annoyance with current airline conditions (e.g., narrow seat width, the need to request a seat belt extension, lack of respect for their right to travel in comfort) while many of those who were not obese contested their rights and displayed hostility towards those who were overweight. ‘Fat’ stigma was clearly apparent.

Weight bias and discrimination Like other forms of discrimination, weight discrimination is highly dependent on public perception (Caliendo and Lee 2011). The social acceptability of weight stigma is evidenced through the negative depictions of overweight and obese persons common in television shows, cartoons, movies, advertisements and news reports (Puhl and Heuer 2009). T. Judge and D. Cable (2011) highlight that the standard of attractiveness portrayed on television and in magazines is slimmer for women than for men (Silverstein et al. 1986) and often thinner than the criteria for anorexia (Wiseman et al. 1992). Exploring the gendered nature of weight bias, J. Fikkan and E. Rothblum emphasize that the media contribute to the marginalization of fat woman either by rendering them invisible when presenting a ‘norm’ of predominantly

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underweight women and/or by making fat women’s weight the most salient characteristic about them as people and a target for remedy (through weight loss), pity, or comedy. (2011: 585) The importance of increasing awareness of weight bias and stigma in media reporting was stressed by K. McClure et al. (2011) who suggest that caution be exercised when selecting a photograph to accompany news articles or information reported on obesity-related topics. Due to the pervasiveness of weight stigma in the general population, they urge professional media and journalist organizations to develop guidelines to ensure that all persons, regardless of their body weight, are represented equitably and appropriately in journalistic reporting.

Identity, weight and employment J. Brewis and S. Linstead (2000) explain that, with the contemporary critical shift to understanding identity as something created and negotiated within discursive language, image and action regimes (rather than fixed by rules, regulations, physical and cultural constraints), bodies have new roles and new meanings. Identity is a process, as opposed to a product, involving ‘societal factors, psychological factors, interaction, reflection, practice and performance’ (Pullen and Linstead 2005: 3). This process or construction of ‘identity’ governs and regulates the social-cognitive strategies used to construct, maintain, and/or reconstruct a sense of personal identity (Berzonsky 2011). To understand gender, body and identity in organizations, it is useful to consider the model proposed by A. Pullen and S. Linstead (2005). Their model of the processes of subjective identity suggests the relationship between individuals’ identity capital/resources (such as gender and body) and their identity formation (for example, individuals’ accommodation to the organizational social system’s discursive structures). The model also considers the performance/ generation of harmony with the mode of identity formation. Men and women experience the world of work quite differently. Wage disparities, occupational sex segregation, and gender differences in authority, for example, are well documented (e.g., Padavic and Reskin 2002). Inequalities are often legitimated through arguments that naturalize the inequality (Glenn 2002). For example, the continuing dominance of women in roles such as hotel housekeeping means that the traditional social construction of stereotypes regarding feminine versus masculine work continues to prevail (Zampoukos and Ioannides 2011). Women often populate certain hotel jobs, not so much because they are regarded as particularly appropriate for women but, because these jobs are regarded as appropriate only for those disadvantaged in the labour force (Harris 2009; Veijola 2009). Evident in hotels is a division of labour, not only along the lines of gender but also ethnicity and race. J. Acker (2006) posits the idea of ‘inequality regimes’ as ‘loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within particular organizations’ (Acker 2009: 201). Employment courts have recognized that age stereotypes, while real, can operate at a more subtle or unconscious level (Posthuma and Campion 2009) than other forms of discrimination such as race and gender. Overweight and obese individuals experience discrimination in almost every life domain, including employment (Brochu et al. 2011). Empirical

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research conducted over 30 years has found evidence of weight-based bias in the workplace demonstrating that a negative relationship exists between peoples’ bodyweight and a wide range of evaluative workplace outcomes (Roehling 2002; Rudolph et al. 2009; Zhdanova et al. 2007). M. V. Roehling et al.’s (2008) research indicates that there are widely held stereotypes about overweight job applicants and employees that reflect the belief that body weight is associated with a number of negative personality traits. Reviews of weight-based discrimination (Puhl and Brownell 2001; Roehling 1999; Roehling et al. 2008) found evidence for discrimination at nearly every stage of the employment process, including career counselling, selection (Klesges et al. 1990), placement, compensation (Baum and Ford 2004), promotion (Bordieri et al. 1997) discipline, training, and discharge (Kennedy and Homant 1984). Still today, according to M. Trautner and S. Kwan (2010), employees of either sex who do not comply with appearance norms face workplace sanctions such as prejudice at the recruitment stage, lower wages, transfer or denial of promotion, and even termination of employment. Addressing an important omission in the literature, N. Randle (2012) urges organizations to consider the behavioural effects of obesity discrimination on employee attitudes and behaviours (e.g., turnover, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour and job satisfaction). It is crucial, according to L. Finkelstein et al. (2007: 203), ‘that obesity prejudice and discrimination continue to be examined carefully through the eyes of social scientists in order to learn the underlying reasons for, and the conditions that encourage or discourage, unfair treatment of overweight individuals in the workplace’. According to N. Mik-Mayer (2008), a review of the existing literature on bodies and organizations indicates that the clearly overweight body is even more of ‘an absent presence’ in organizational studies than the gendered or sexual body. The hospitality industry has been described as having a fascination with ‘aesthetic labour’ – referring to the employment of workers with certain embodied capacities and attributes that favourably appeal to customers and which are then organizationally mobilized, developed and commodified (Nickson et al. 2001). Some bodies have ‘aesthetic capital’ and have been used to sell tourism as the realm of hedonistic pursuit, where everyone has a great time and is appealing enough to become part of the attraction. We argue that to exclude certain bodies is to promulgate loudly and clearly about who is desired as a guest and who is discounted as not suitable for imagery. As J. Urry (2002: 3) says, ‘The gaze is constructed through signs’. It is not only a matter of on what we want to gaze, but also, on whom we want to gaze. Beautiful bodies are used often in tourism for serious promotion of destinations and products where the body becomes part of the product, inviting the reader to come and experience the body as part of their guest experience (through gaze, and sometimes more overt sexual invitation). Bodies lacking ‘aesthetic capital’ are used in images for postcards, cartoons and greeting cards that poke fun at hosts and guests, or they remain absent from promotions for hospitality and tourism products. The notion of ‘desirable’ versus ‘undesirable’ can be explored through the theory of ‘lookism’, defined as ‘prejudice toward people because of their appearance’ (Tietje and Cresap 2005: 31). According to L. Tietje and S. Cresap (2005: 31), lookism ‘has been receiving increasing attention, and it is becoming an important equal-opportunity issue. People we find attractive are given preferential treatment and people we find unattractive are denied opportunities’. Warhurst et al. (2009) question whether lookism is the ‘new frontier of employment discrimination’, while L. Salkeld (2011) more confidently

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refers to lookism as ‘the new racism’. Similarly, B. Oaff (2003: 7) states, ‘If your gender and your race haven’t kept you off the short list, your physical appearance still might’. Lookism even has its own website, an ‘information and discussion portal’ (http://www.lookism.info/BACKUP/ eng/index2.html), the aim of which is ‘to motivate people to spot this form of discrimination and to act thereupon’. In Australia, the state of Victoria passed a law in 1995 which made lookism illegal. According to Stanford University law professor, Deborah Rhode (Swan 2012), it is the only jurisdiction outside the United States to do so. According to J. Swan (2012: 1), ‘The issue of lookism is gaining traction in the US with multi-million dollar payouts, and experts say it is a matter of time before Australian companies face similar legal challenges’. The websites of service organizations, such as hotels, have become a major recruitment tool and source of information for potential applicants. Job-seekers use these websites, not only to learn more about the job and career options available but also, to form impressions about the organization’s culture (Cable et al. 2000; De Goede et al. 2011). As M. De Goede et al. (2011) explain, ‘a website often provides the earliest exposure to an organization, cueing job-seekers about what further to expect about organizational values and leading them to form favorable or unfavorable first impressions of the organization’. However, the authors caution that ‘job-seekers are not “blank slates” when entering an organization’s website, but already have expectations about the organization based on common stereotypes about the organization’s industry’ (De Goede et al. 2011: 51). It appears likely that being obese would be a greater disadvantage when applying for jobs that have a high degree of public contact than when applying for positions out of the public eye (Finkelstein et al. 2007). The website is a powerful vehicle for communicating who is welcome and who is excluded in a company. Examining the promotional videos on the websites of Sydney hotels, the present study explored ‘the face’ of these hotels, with a specific focus on the representation of the bodies (in terms of size) of tourism workers, the hotel employees.

Research design The approach that guided our work was ‘critical hospitality’ that aims to deconstruct the cultural politics of hospitality practice and the relation of such practice to the wider political, economic, cultural and social contexts. For this purpose we employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (supported by authors such as Fairclough 1993; Van Dijk 1984; Wodak and Meyer 2001) as the method and framework to analyse the online promotional videos. CDA can clearly trace its roots to Habermas and the Frankfurt project of ‘critical theory’. In CDA, researchers make visible the social construction of all texts (which include images) and demonstrate the interconnectedness of things (Wodak 2001). Indeed, as K. Hannam and D. Knox (2005: 23) concur, discourse analysis ‘is not just interested in what is within the text itself but also in what has been left out and the “secret” meanings that are not obvious’. According to R. Wodak (2001: 2), as a method to analyse text and media, CDA is especially interested in the relationship between language and power: ‘CDA aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized and so on by language use (or in discourse)’. T. Van Dijk (2003: 352) describes it as ‘a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are

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enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’. CDA has been used in tourism studies to understand the underlying cultural and social meanings and messages that texts (brochures, signs, magazines and guidebooks) may represent (e.g., Cockburn-Wooten et al. 2005; Dann 1996; Hannam and Knox 2005) but it has not been used to any great extent in hospitality studies (Harris et al. 2011). In 2011, video images of hotel staff in 28 major three to five star hotels in the business district of Sydney were categorized by perceived body size. Business district hotels were included in the study if they had an online promotional video which featured images of staff. Included in the study were hotels such as Sofitel, Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Mercure, Novotel, Travelodge and Rydges. The categorization of body size was the perspective of the researcher but was made in relation to general media presentation of body size. Previous tourism research (Small et al. 2008; Small and Jordan 2008) has suggested little variation in body size in the media. We estimated that media representations of women rarely exceed: Chest 89–94 cm; Waist 69–74 cm and Hips 96–101 cm. For men the images rarely exceed: Chest 102–107 cm; Waist 86–91 cm and Hips 103–108 cm. We used these measurements as a ‘rough’ baseline against which body size was judged. Gender, occupational role, and perceived age and ethnicity were also noted. Although there is no one way to conduct CDA, for the purposes of this study, we adopted N. Fairclough’s (1993) three-dimensional model for critical discourse analysis: (1) analysis of the text; (2) discursive practice; and (3) sociocultural practice. The first dimension, analysis of the text (the website content), involved content analysis of the images of hotel staff. The second dimension, discursive practice, considered wider issues of how the websites and the images featured are produced, distributed and consumed. The third dimension, sociocultural practice enabled richer interpretation of the ideologies supporting the discursive practice. This extended the analysis to the sociocultural context of the content: the interests, power bases and motivations of the various players behind the images. The data are the result of the researchers’ judgements of body size. We are aware that others might have judged differently. We also recognize that caution is required in generalizing the findings from this study. We limited our research to one promotional vehicle (online videos). We focussed on one subsector of the accommodation sector (three to five star hotels) and in only one location (the business district of Sydney). While we were limited to an analysis of the bodies which were clearly visible, this is not considered a methodological limitation as these are the bodies which the public is seeing.

Findings and discussion The bodies presented in the videos were, in many ways, similar to those found in other tourism and hospitality representational studies. They approximated what is considered, in contemporary western society, to be ‘the ideal body’.

Analysis of the text In total, there were 112 images of hotel staff with the number of images varying by hotel. 26 (93%) of the hotels had seven or fewer images, with ten (36%) having only one image. One hotel had 27 images (i.e., 24% of the total 112 images). Staff were identifiable and distinguished from guests by their dress, location and active service behaviour (carrying suitcases, serving

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drinks, etc). 60% of the images portrayed the staff member from the waist up, 23% were three-quarter body images and 17% were full-body images. The roles in which they were engaged were primarily front-of-house roles (31% Front desk; 24% Bar; 15% Restaurant). Of the 102 staff where gender was obvious, 58% were men. Of those whose ethnicity was apparent, most were Caucasian and most were judged to be under the age of 40. Of the 106 staff for whom size could be judged, 91% were evaluated to be a slim build, in line with the body size dimensions previously cited; the remaining 9% were slightly larger. Some of these ‘larger staff’ were older, Caucasian men in the role of doorman and comprised half of the images of doormen. These portly gentlemen in British costume of top hat and tails or military uniform reflected the accepted culture found in many five star hotels. No image portrayed a person of a size considerably overweight or obese.

Discursive practice Our analysis considered the question: to whom are these website images speaking? Furthermore, with which employees (including potential labour pools) and customers are the hotels seeking to establish a relationship through the production of these particular images and messages – packaged under their names? It is important to extend analysis beyond the audience of the websites to also critique the ‘representers’; only then can such analysis reveal underpinning discourses and networks of power (Aitchison 2000). Advertising aims, not only to create identity but also, to create stereotypes which communicate an image to the ‘Other’ – and wider society – about the world of production and consumption of hospitality and tourism. Advertisements work to reproduce society’s structures and values. Hotel websites typically signal a strong brand presence, communicating the values and standards of the hotel while providing information about its products, services and the company itself. The websites also convey an invitation to the public to join them as either staff or guest. The design of the website and the images employed make clear the type of person that the designers and hotel executives welcome in the hotel and whom they consider worthy of representing their brand image. The absence of certain types of people (e.g., overweight/obese people) implies that the hotel is not speaking to them; they are not invited or welcome in the hotel.

Sociocultural practices Hospitality and tourism representations, like all representations, are created, filtered and mediated through cultural and ideological structures (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002; Pritchard 2001). Meanings that are produced and consumed by imaging represent certain ways of seeing reality; images reflect and reinforce particular societal relationships which are grounded in relations of power, dominance and subordination which characterize the global system (Morgan and Pritchard 1998). The imagery in advertising used to sell products and services is not innocent and unbiased. Indeed hospitality and tourism imagery has power to construct norms regarding those who are employed in the hospitality and tourism industry. Our exploratory findings do not explain why there are so few overweight people in the hotel promotional videos. However, contemporary sociocultural practices provide a context for preliminary discussion about the findings. To understand the absence of overweight or obese hospitality workers in the hotel

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images requires an understanding of western societal discourses on beauty (‘the tyranny of slenderness’ – Chernin 1983) and health and fitness, situated within contemporary neo-liberal culture. In both discourses the overweight or obese body is a serious contravention at this historical time when the presentation of the body has become so central to our sense of identity and self (Pritchard and Morgan 2011). In western society there is much stigma against those who contravene body-size ideals. The most commonly reported stereotypes reflect poor personal control (lack of willpower, laziness, poor self-discipline and self-indulgence) (Paul and Townsend 1995; Puhl and Brownell 2001). P. Brochu et al. (2011: 430) cite the temporal change in how body size has been viewed: ‘Although in the past excess weight was perceived as a symbol of wealth and power, today it symbolizes laziness and weak character’. Obesity is perceived to be a matter of choice (Hilbert et al. 2008) and, consequently, elicits disgust from others (Vartanian 2010) when people ‘choose’ to be overweight. L. Burrows (2009: 130) argues that the ‘allure of the obesity discourse’ is readily understandable in the western context where it is aligned with neo-liberal discourses which emphasize ‘self-responsibility, free choice, autonomy, the knowledge economy, lifestyle and consumption’. Within this context, the association of overweight/ obesity with unhealthiness also carries moral ‘weight’ and is thus more than a physical health issue. R. Puhl and K. D. Brownell (2003) elucidate that stigmas are representations of society’s negative perceptions about particular groups. They explain that obesity stigma is important to consider as stigmas are used to categorize information about social groups and to form impressions and expectations of individuals (Corrigan 2000). Puhl and Brownell (2003) draw attention to Social Identity Theory as a model that can be used to examine weight stigma. This theory suggests that stereotypes arise from a self-categorization process: we place ourselves into groups belonging to particular social categories, and develop our social identity by making comparisons between group memberships (Tajfel and Turner 1986). The desire to maintain a positive social identity is at the core of prejudice, achieved by stereotyping other groups as inferior on attributes that are valued by the in-group. ‘With weight stigma, normal weight individuals may believe that normal body weight is necessary for group membership, which would lead to downward comparisons to obese individuals as being inferior’ (Puhl and Brownell 2003: 219). In the context of employment, many employers are seeking to create congruence between employee appearance and corporate image, hence, as stated by Warhust and Nickson (2007), only those workers with the right appearance are employed. One might expect to find this custom even more so in the context of the hospitality industry since it is an aesthetic industry, concerned with style and appearance, where employees are part of the branding, referred to by V. Zeithaml and M. Bitner as ‘walking billboards’ (2003: 318). Research into weight bias has found that overweight people are seen as unattractive (Harris et al. 1982), aesthetically displeasing (Wooley and Wooley 1979), alienated from their sexuality (Millman 1980) and of a lower socio-economic status (Sobal and Stunkard 1989). These characteristics are not likely to represent the image the hotel wants to present. As Finkelstein et al. state: The components of the overweight stereotype include, but are not limited to, characteristics such as lazy, slow, lower in competence,

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sloppy, unlikable, and lacking in self-control (cf. Roehling 1999). It does not require a large conceptual leap to imagine how endorsement of these stereotypes could result in employment discrimination; it is not often we see an advertisement soliciting potential employees who are lazy, sloppy, and lacking in self-control. Indeed, these characteristics are polar opposites of those that employers consider necessary job competencies. (2007: 205) Studies of hospitality employers (e.g., Martin and Grove 2002) stress the importance of ‘pride in appearance’ as criteria for the hiring of entry-level hospitality industry employees. It may be that employers equate ‘lack of will power’ and ‘poor self-discipline’ (perceived characteristics of people who are overweight/obese) with lack of pride in appearance. In other words, if the employee had pride in appearance then he or she would be self-disciplined to maintain an ideal body weight. It may be for this reason that the overweight/ obese candidate is considered unsuited for hotel work (and absent from the hotel images). Or, perhaps, the job criteria for ‘pride in appearance’ is a smokescreen for aesthetic labour where a perfect environment of marble bathrooms, fluffy towels, king sized beds calls for perfectly sized people. C. Grey (2005: 122) discusses the disciplinary power in organizations – ‘the combination of hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgement’. However, he stresses that the concept of career ‘has the effect of transforming those instances of disciplinary power which might normally be thought of as regulative’ (2005: 123). Disciplinary power can be seen by employees to benefit career resulting in ‘a self-disciplined project of self management’ (2005: 123). The relevance of Grey’s conclusions to the topic of this study is uncertain as we do not know whether those persons included in the promotional videos are actual hotel employees or whether their weight is an issue to be managed (some people are naturally slim). We also do not know the body size of the employees who are not presented in the images and whether they self manage their weight. While the ‘thin ideal’ has traditionally been associated with women, men are becoming more conscious of their body size. Nonetheless, our findings showed that it is still acceptable for the older male in the role of doorman to be of larger size. Certainly findings have suggested that women are more likely than men to perceive that they have been discriminated against in the workforce and that it is their weight which is the basis for discrimination (Roehling et al. 2007).

Conclusion The study of hospitality is a potentially powerful tool of social analysis (Lynch et al. 2011). As a mirror of wider social relations, one’s role in the provision/ acceptance of hospitality displays social position (McIntosh and Harris 2012). In this article, we draw attention to how the practice of excluding the person who is overweight/obese (and thus defining them as the ‘Other’) is normalized and reproduced through the websites of three to five star hotels in the business district of Sydney. As overweight/obese bodies were conspicuous by their absence in these websites, we question which body size is expected of a host (employee) of a hotel. From our research we echo the sentiments of L. McDowell (2009) who concludes that certain bodies do not ‘fit’ in the new

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service economy, meaning that there is a ‘hierarchy of acceptability’ around different workers and jobs. Hospitality and tourism representations reveal just as much about the ‘representers’ as they do of the ‘represented’ (Harris 2002) in terms of whom they desire as a worker and a consumer. Those who are overweight/obese have not featured as welcoming hosts or desired guests in the representations by hospitality and tourism suppliers. The design of an organization’s website seems to act as a prompt from which job-seekers infer the overall quality of an organization as a potential employer (De Goede et al. 2011). We question what the absence of overweight/obese people from website images may say to the labour market about an organization’s desire for a diverse work force of employees of all shapes and sizes. Presenting an image of hospitality as the domain of thin workers does not reflect the real world where guests and workers are often larger than the ‘thin norm’ portrayed. The image presented in the images is limited and particularly curious considering that ‘in 19 of 34 OECD countries the majority of the population is now overweight or obese’ (OECD 2012). In Australia that has high obesity rates relative to most OECD countries (Sassi 2010), 72 per cent of the population is predicted to be overweight or obese by 2025 (Corderoy 2011). The question arises: are hotels only employing slim staff or are they only presenting their slim (attractive) staff, performing front line roles, as the ‘face of’ the hotel? Future research is required to investigate whether or not ‘the face’ of the organization reflects the body size of the workforce and, if so, whether the body size of employees varies across departments of the hotel. If the images are found to represent the workforce, application of Pullen and Linstead’s (2005) model would be helpful to examine the process by which body size contributes to identity formation and the performance of identity, and the place of body size in a ‘self-disciplined project of self-management through career’ (Grey 2005: 123). Whether or not the face of the organization is a reflection of the body size of its employees, the message portrayed to guests and existing and potential labour pools is that there is no place for the larger body in public (unless you are a doorman!). We suggest that hotels are not immune from the moral judgements made in other sectors of society of what is, and what is not, an acceptable body size. Portraying an exclusively ‘thin face’ of hospitality in the three to five star hotel sector in Sydney could simultaneously serve as an act of ‘hostipitality’ (Lynch et al. 2011), whereby those who are overweight/obese are excluded and not welcome. We argue that the omission of such people in hospitality imagery works to exclude them as the acceptable face of warm hospitality and thus serves as a form of weight prejudice.

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Suggested Citation Harris, C. and Small, J. (2013), ‘Obesity and hotel staffing: Are hotels guilty of “lookism”?’, Hospitality & Society 3: 2, pp. 111–127, doi: 10.1386/ hosp.3.2.111_1

Contributor details Candice Harris, Ph.D. is an associate professor in Management at AUT University. Candice has an M.B.S. in Management and a Ph.D. in Tourism Management. She teaches management and HRM and supervises postgraduate students working in the fields of careers and management. Her main areas of research are career development, gender issues in hospitality and management, discourses of work, and qualitative and critical approaches to research. Contact: Faculty of Business and Law, AUT University, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1142, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected] Jennie Small is a senior lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her specific teaching and research interests are tourism and hospitality from a Critical Tourism and Hospitality approach, focusing on equity and social justice issues. Her research publications centre on representation and the tourist and hospitality experience in relation to

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embodiment, obesity, gender, age, mobility and disability, in particular, the experience of tourists with vision impairment. Contact: Management Discipline Group, University of Technology, Sydney, Business School, Kuring-Gai Campus, PO Box 222, Lindfield NSW 2070, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] Candice Harris and Jennie Small have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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