working for the family

Working for the family

Sandy MacDonald, University of NorthamptonSonia Liff, Warwick Business SchoolHuman Resource Management Journal, Vol 17, no 2, 2007, pages 118–133

Recent writing about the ‘service encounter’ suggests that high-quality servicerequires employee commitment and this will involve a more developed andsophisticated approach to HRM than has traditionally characterised the sector.Through an in-depth study of a sample of high service level hotels in the US andUK this paper argues, in contrast, that commitment can be created through aworkplace culture that draws on family discourses and practices. It explores theways in which this culture is developed and endorsed by both management andemployees. This approach to generating commitment has costs in terms of the timeand priority employees can give to their ‘real’ friends and family. By drawing onthe highly gendered and hierarchical organisation of the family, it is argued thatculture also contributes to gender stereotyping and hierarchies within and outsidethe workplace in ways that limit women’s career opportunities.Contact: Dr Sandy MacDonald, Northampton Business School, Universityof Northampton, Northampton NN2 7AL. Email: [email protected]

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries a group of ‘progressive’ companiesin both the US and the UK developed a range of welfare initiatives aimed at‘supporting’ employees’ roles within the family (Niven, 1967; Jacoby, 1997;

Tone, 1997). Niven (1967: 35), writing about the UK context, records the founding ofa domestic school at Rowntrees (as a compulsory addition at the end of a long workday), which ‘was described as having been started to meet the criticism that the firmwas employing girls up to the time of marriage who had no chance of learninganything about housework’. Tone (1997: 43), writing about the US, reports similarinitiatives claiming that employers ‘vowed to transform the factory into a trainingcamp for superior maternal citizenship’. While contemporaneous legislation aimedto protect women and young children from the adverse consequences ofemployment, these employers ‘promised enriched womanhood as a condition ofwage labour’ (1997: 43, emphasis in original). Rather than destroying family life associal critics claimed, or opening up opportunities for women to escape domesticwork and dependency as feminists might have hoped, such welfare employers‘reified the “new and improved” workplace as the best site for affirmation oftraditional gender roles’ (1997: 12). The main lesson that has been taken from suchaccounts has been that women were drawn into paid work in ways that did notchallenge the view that domestic roles would remain the focus of their lives. It is alsoimportant to note that this employer approach drew on women’s domestic roles to

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reinforce gendered hierarchies within the workplace including the characterisation ofwomen as a temporary and distinctive type of labour.

The types of initiatives previously described are normally seen as the more‘positive’ side of a paternalistic management style, whose other features includeauthoritarian relationships and the assumption of a deferential worker. Paternalismis seen by some as an anachronistic concept for analysing contemporaryorganisations. However, Purcell and Ahlstrand (1994) include both ‘paternalist’ and‘modern paternalist’ in their typology of management styles. These two styles sharea positioning between management views of employees as a resource or as acommodity but differ in the extent to which they accept the legitimacy of employeeinterests as distinct from those of management. Ackers (1998) draws on a broadersociological approach and argues that paternalism is a way of categorisingrelationships which has continuing relevance within specific workplaces andlocalities. Ackers and Black (1991) identify hereditary family ownership, personalrelations, religious mission, social welfare and public service as companycharacteristics common to paternalistic firms. Clearly, as with any ideal type, actualexamples will fit some aspects of this typology better than others and, as Ackers(1998: 173, 180) cautions, paternalism is a loose descriptive term that ‘confuses theactual and the ideal’ and one where ‘there is always a wide gap between (its)ambitions . . . as a management strategy and its realisation in . . . commitment andloyalty to the business’.

From the perspective of the study discussed here, two elements are touchedupon but remain underdeveloped in most accounts of paternalism. The first is theuse of the metaphor of the family. Many accounts of paternalism tend to treat familyrelations as though they were an actual description of employment relations. Thislack of distinction between the metaphorical and the literal risks losing theopportunity to reflect on the ways in which employment relations do and do notresemble family relations and on the relationships between real and supposedfamily members. It also fails to pursue the metaphorical insight that fathers aremasculine and that families tend to treat sons and daughters in distinctive ways.In this paper, we draw on qualitative research in hotels to reflect on situationswhere both managers and employees widely deployed the metaphor of the familyto describe workplace relationships. We explore the extent to which this can beseen as one way in which commitment develops in a sector where employeerelations are normally characterised as a ‘bleak house’ (Sisson, 1993) or as ‘blackholes’ (Guest and Conway, 1999). We will also explore the tensions and ambiguitiesin the family metaphor and its wider consequences – including its reinforcementof gender segregation and its implications for women workers with responsibilitiesfor ‘real’ families.

THE USE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANISATIONAL ANALYSIS – THE FAMILY

AS A METAPHOR

The use of metaphors is a well-established feature of organisational analysis(Morgan, 1986, 1996) despite criticisms that they may often be imprecise orsuperficial (Alvesson, 1993). To be successful, Alvesson claims, metaphors need to be

Sandy MacDonald and Sonia Liff

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extended beyond the initial similarities to provide a deeper resonance withorganisational practices.

The ‘family’ metaphor is often invoked in the management literature on theservice sector (e.g. Berry, 1999). However, as with the literature on paternalism, itsuse is rarely subject to reflection: for example, a recent practitioner account (Ingram,2005: 261) suggests that hospitality management could use the nuclear family asa model for ‘improved practice’. In contrast, Martin (2002: 125) describes anorganisation where the employees’ accounts of the notion of ‘family feeling’ emergedas ‘abstract and ambiguous’. Metaphorically, families are usually represented assupportive, caring and benign. In practice, real families may also be dysfunctional,controlling and stifling. To fully explore the metaphor it is important to recognisewhat sort of family relationships are being drawn on in which contexts, and to noteits limitations by pointing to the dissimilarities between families and organisationsas well as their similarities (Oswick and Grant, 1996). The use of the family metaphorby organisational members is further complicated by the attempt to draw on theemployees’ in-depth experience of ‘real’ families in a context in which home andwork roles have been traditionally counterposed but which is now subject to‘family-friendly’ policies which claim to help employees manage work/non-workboundaries.

In the following discussion, the metaphor of the ‘family’ is used to explore a formof organisational culture within which employees tolerate long hours of work,demonstrate commitment to work in the absence of ‘high-performance workpractices’, accept a gendered division of labour and experience the boundariesbetween such work and other areas of their lives as blurred. This use of ‘the family’goes beyond a metaphorical exploration of manager–subordinate relations toconsider relationships between employees. Workplace cultures are not simplyimposed from above and the studies described here involved both management andemployees drawing on family metaphors to characterise workforce relations and thecommitments that flowed from them (see also Baum, 1991). The influence of thisculture beyond the workplace for the management of boundaries between home andwork are also explored, particularly in relation to the tensions employees experiencein their commitments to these two areas of their lives.

CONCEPTUALISING EMPLOYMENT WITHIN THE HOTEL SECTOR

The study described below draws on cases within the luxury hotel sector in the UKand US.1 Hotel management has traditionally been analysed as having limited andrelatively unsophisticated HR policies and practices, where it makes little sense totalk about a ‘strategy’. Competition is based on cost minimisation and peoplemanagement focuses on recruitment and selection in an effort to respond to highturnover rates. However, some have claimed that such an analysis is outdated andrecent research has aimed to assess whether the emergence of a more sophisticatedapproach based on ‘soft’ HR strategies and practices (Purcell and Ahlstrand, 1994;Guest, 1995) can be detected. In part, such claims are based on new analyses of themanagement of the ‘service encounter’ and the role of the customer (Normann, 1991;Berry, 1999; Nickson et al., 2001). Hotels that occupy the quality end of the sector havebeen of particular research interest internationally (e.g. Hoque, 1999; Bernhardt et al.,





2003) as they could be expected to find such practices of greatest relevance. However,even those who argue that hotel management should be interested in such approachesreport that ‘the majority of empirical studies have suggested a lack of interest in theapproaches to HRM that are most likely to support a quality enhancer strategy’(Hoque, 2000: 32) Lucas (2004) reviews a wide range of studies and the most recentUK survey data, the Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) (DTI, 1998), andconcludes that the ‘bleak house’ characterisation still best describes employmentrelations in the sector overall. However, she does identify some contradictory findingssuch as a surprisingly high level of job satisfaction within the sector.

The labour intensity of the hospitality sector would make soft HR strategies andpractices an expensive management approach. In this context, we are interested inexploring the alternative hypothesis that aspects of paternalism can explain theexistence of levels of commitment and forms of behaviours which deliver servicequality. Nickson et al. (2001) note that the recruitment of front-line service workershas been based less on ‘technical’ skills and more on the ability to relate tocustomers. Since Hochschild’s (1983) study of airline workers, this ability has beenanalysed in part through the concept of emotional labour: the work involved inmanaging feeling through the display of emotional states by the employee. James(1989) notes that much emotional labour can be seen as typically ‘women’s work’. Incall centre work, Mulholland (2002) found that women were regarded as having‘traditional’ caring skills and therefore assumed to be able to handle calls requiringhigh degrees of sympathy. More recent work (Bolton and Boyd, 2003) has stressedthat this labour is not simply directed by management through scripts orrequirements to smile but also involves complex choices and levels of engagementby employees. In what follows, we attempt to draw out assumptions about the kindsof emotional performances which could be expected from men and from women inthe hotel industry and their links with the organisational culture based on the familymetaphor described earlier.

Management styles in the UK and the US are often seen as similar – particularlyin their stress on individualism – in contrast to some European approaches. In thecontext of this study, we are also more focused on the similarities of approach thanon their distinctiveness. However, there are areas where differences were important.Most significant is that there is less government regulation of what might be termed‘family matters’ in the US than in the UK (Gonyea and Googins, 1996; Crompton,2006). One expression of this is the limited welfare system in the US, which makespart-time work a far less viable option for employees than it is in the UK (Housemanand Osawa, 1998). This difference is further exacerbated by the tendency for USemployees to work longer full-time hours than those in the UK. An additionaldifference is the degree of occupational segregation by ethnicity that is apparent in theUS. Both countries have similar patterns of gender segregation (Adkins, 1995;Macdonald and Sirianni, 1996; Purcell, 1996) and ethnic minorities are clearlyover-represented in the UK hospitality industry (Modood, 1997), particularly in majorcities. However, ethnic segregation is much more comprehensive in the US.Ehrenreich (2001: 7) reports, ‘(in) Key West, I originally sought what I assumed wouldbe a relatively easy job in hotel housekeeping and found myself steered instead intowaitressing, no doubt because of my ethnicity and my English skills’. This variesbetween regions but Glenn (1996: 133) points to a general tendency for white women





to be preferred for positions requiring contact with the public, whereas ‘racial-ethnicwomen are preferred in dirty back-room jobs’. She argues that this ethnic segregationboth reinforces job hierarchies and allows employers to simultaneously draw on whatare seen as gendered skills relating to domestic and childcare experience, whiledenying their responsibilities as actual wives and mothers.

CASE STUDY ORGANISATIONS

The research on which this paper was based was carried out in three quality hotelcompanies: two in the US (‘Luxco’ a five-star hotel and ‘Metco’ a four-star equivalentboth operating in urban locations) and one in the UK (‘Britco’ a four-star hotel withproperties in London and the countryside).2 Such hotels make up a small proportionof the sector in terms of numbers of properties3 but, as discussed earlier, areinteresting in research terms because they are expected to be the type most likely toadopt HR policies and practices which generate employee commitment and high-quality service. The research took a cultural perspective on women’s position inthese hotels based on Acker’s (1990, 1992, 1998) analysis of how organisations cometo be gendered. Her categories were taken as a starting point but the data analysishighlighted the need to extend these to include the boundaries between work, homeand leisure. Ethnographic methods including document analysis, formal andinformal interviews, and observations made during extended periods on site wereused to produce cultural descriptions of ‘organisational life’ in each research site(Rosen, 1991; Spradley, 1979).

Data on the US hotels was collected by ‘living in’ the properties for a period of twoweeks in each instance, with access to all parts of the ‘backstage’ areas. Some overnightstays were made in the UK hotels and repeated all-day visits were made over asix-month period. In all cases, the observations were made of the routine work of thehotels and hotel staff and of particular events such as staff meetings, recruitmentprocesses, staff events and training sessions. Formal interviews (around 90 in total)were carried out with all senior and most junior managers in all the hotel properties.Access to staff canteens and rest areas during break times and meal times provided anopportunity to talk with staff members who were not scheduled to be interviewed. Itfurther allowed the observation of informal interactions, which provided data on howthe work and the company were viewed by staff members and the company ‘myths’and ‘heroes’ which were commonly mentioned in casual conversation.

All companies running these hotels could be said to display some of the corefeatures of paternalism as described earlier. The characteristics of hereditary familyownership and personal relations between employer and workers were present inthe practices at Metco, with the religious commitment of the founders still central tothe operation and an emphasis on knowing and interacting with members of staff atall levels. The notion of commitment to welfare and public service was apparent inthe attitudes to employee welfare. The programmes around work–life balance weretargeted at employees on lower wages, not at managers. Taking care of the staff whowould then take care of customers was an often-repeated mantra. Operations inLuxco also demonstrated some paternalistic features, for example, hereditaryownership and a strong emphasis on knowing each member of the staff and theirproblems. No religious overtones were present in Luxco, nor was there a formal





attempt to address issues of work–life balance for employees, but there was somesupport for minority development into management and a great deal of informalintervention in the personal lives of employees who had problems with housing orbureaucracy and had limited English skills. Britco, based in the UK, presented asubtly different form of paternalistic management. A hybrid between a traditionalfamily-owned firm and a newer franchise, Britco seemed to be at a juncture betweentwo opposing forces. The pre-existing paternalistic style of management might bethought to be opposed by attempts to bring in specialists from outside the industrybut the aim to supply an ‘American’ style of service drew on a particular style ofmanagement. This appeared to be harking back to another version of paternalism,perhaps closer to that of Metco. Public service and welfare in Britco were apparentin the contribution of the hotel, its staff members and the general managers (GMs)in charity and fund-raising work. The welfare of employees was also promotedthrough English classes for those who wanted to improve their language skills in theLondon property. All hotels had HR departments, with policy decisions made at theHR divisions of their various head offices.

Within the hotels the diverse mix of nationalities and ethnicities was a source ofpride to managers in both US properties, who referred to the staff canteen as being ‘likethe United Nations’ and it was said that ‘over 100 different languages’ were spoken.There were differences between properties both at a national and a local level in theethnic composition of the workforce. In the US, the different cities in which Luxco andMetco were located produced a different ethnic mix, with more Hispanic and Asianstaff in housekeeping departments in Luxco, while in Metco there were more AfricanAmericans. One author was asked whether ‘white people worked in housekeeping inEngland?’ (informal conversation with an African American housekeeper at Metco).There was more diversity in the ethnicity of front-of-house staff in the US than in theUK. However, only in Metco (located in a city with a high percentage of AfricanAmerican citizens) was there any degree of ethnic diversity within the seniormanagement team. Even here, an African American assistant manager said it waswidely observed that ‘there are not many faces like yours’ at senior levels.

In the UK, there was less ethnic diversity than in the US in front-of-housepositions and most senior managers were white males. In the rural property, againreflecting the local population, there were few ethnic minority employees in any jobs,while in the London hotel such employees were more likely to be found in thelower-paid occupations. Gender segregation in all hotels in both countries followed‘traditional’ lines for the sector, with most women in housekeeping departments andmost men in portering/kitchen work.

All the hotels were embedded in their local communities and had levels ofautonomy from the ‘head office’, which made them feel in some ways at least morelike small, independent businesses than the large public companies they were.Recruitment of staff was done at hotel level and drew on local residents, except forappointment to the most senior posts. As such the hotels were important localemployers and the hotel properties themselves had further significance as sites wherefamily celebrations and local functions occurred. Hotel managers and senior staffwere active in the community, for example, by participating in local fund-raisingactivities. So although financial targets and policies were decided elsewhere, thehotels were important as establishments in their own right and GMs had standing in





the local communities. In most cases the physical distance from the administrativeheadquarters made an emotional distance as well. In Britco, for example, staff could‘get away’ with their refusal to wear uniforms except when visitors from the headoffice were expected. At Metco, the staff tended to visit the head office rather than theother way round. In these ways, local rules and informal practices carried on inparallel to the official policy line emanating from the head office.

THE CREATION AND SIGNIFICANCE OF FAMILY METAPHORS WITHIN HOTELS

Our focus on the family metaphor within the hotels studied derives both from theorganisational rhetoric within the companies and its wider use as revealed by theethnographic data. The metaphor is used not only with respect to employmentrelations but also in discourses around the service the hotels provide via theiremployees and through their physical setting and resources. For customers, thenotion of being a ‘guest’ in a high-quality hotel is frequently described in ways thatinvoke an (idealised) version of family life. For employees, their work takes place inthe context of leisure facilities and staff are often recruited into the industry on thebasis that it is a ‘fun’ place to work (with the consequent blurring of work/non-workboundaries). For example, Britco had a recruitment advertisement which claimed‘enjoyment is the key to everything we do’. In the sections that follow, we explorethe ways the family metaphor and the multilayered characterisation of the hotel as‘home’, workplace and a site of leisure activities contribute to the creation ofworkplace relations within which workers are interdependent and committed to oneanother and in which gendered roles were well understood and largely accepted.

‘The family will take care of you’

The sense of people being part of a ‘family’ of hotel staff was often articulated bymembers of the staff, particularly in Metco where the founding family still exerteda strong influence and, on occasion, a physical presence. One member of the Metcomanagement team described it as “a public family business. Mr X is a good guy”.‘Family feeling’ was most evident in the Housekeeping department. Nearly all thehousekeepers worked full-time and most had children. Some did not speak orunderstand English to any great extent. Managers worked alongside them in timesof staff shortage. It was referred to as ‘The Heart of the House’ and the housekeeperswere described by the Food and Beverage manager, who had been trained there, asfollows:

They are very dedicated, very loyal and they come in . . . and you knowthey are not making a lot of money. But they still do a tremendous jobon a day-to-day basis and they always have a smile on their face. It’s amotivator . . . what is motivating them is coming to work. They love eachother; they are like a little family. They are a family away from their family.They are like comfort zones. They don’t mind doing the other stuff. (Foodand Beverage manager, Metco)

This provides a very direct example of the management’s belief that the ‘family’atmosphere of Housekeeping was what kept the housekeepers committed and loyal





to the company despite the pay and conditions. For their part, management took the‘parental’ role of ‘looking after’ employees. In the Housekeeping department atLuxco the manager said:

It’s funny, the housekeeper and Housekeeping department end up beingHousekeeping/social services. We do try to assist. We steer them in theright direction and tell them what legal things they can do. Maybe I’llmake a phone call to the landlord and say “Why are you doing this?”Just by that alone, they turn the heating back on for them.(Housekeeping manager, Luxco)

This parental role appeared to be exercised in a gendered way as no similarinitiatives to help male workers were mentioned despite the presence of many malefirst-generation immigrants working as porters. This arguably constructs women asin need of assistance, powerless and dependent. Through this it may also reinforcetheir gender-segregated role as domestics – both in and outside work

The management’s parenting role could also be seen in the use of theHousekeeping department as a training ground for new young managers (of eithergender).

I have the most management support of any department. It allows meto stabilise them, give them all the training they need, all the attentionthey need to get, and then they’ll move on and they will feel morecomfortable. (Housekeeping manager, Luxco)

This ‘nurturing’ type of behaviour even extended to the researcher to whom it wassuggested that Housekeeping will ‘take care of you’, and in a sense that was the case.

This management approach appeared to be both expected, and valued, by thestaff. Within Luxco, there was a company ‘myth’ in circulation about a previous GMwho had known every member of staff by name and could enquire after theirfamilies knowledgeably. He was often cited as the template for a good GM bymembers of staff who had worked there during his regime and contrasted with theprevious GM who had not been so concerned with ‘being there’ for the staff.

Advancement within the family through appropriately gendered behaviour

Internal promotion (in the sense of in-company, including between hotels) was themost common route to senior management and the only way to become a GM in allof the companies studied. In the UK, Britco policy required that 75 per cent of seniormanagement posts would be internal appointments. During the research, Luxcorecruited staff for a new property and the aim was to fill all management jobs fromwithin the company. Internal promotion meant that those likely to succeed werealready socialised in the ways of the company, if not the particular hotel, and had hadtheir behaviour and performance monitored and vetted. People were often known, orknown about, by managers through their visits to other properties and to the headoffice, and patronage from senior management was important to success. Exampleswere given in both Luxco and Britco of how this could help or hinder a career. Thisuse of internal labour markets could be seen as keeping jobs within the family. Hotelproperties within the group were referred to as ‘sister’ hotels, adding to the familyimagery.





Yet these promotion opportunities were not equally available to all employees.The ‘metaphoric counterpart’ (Oswick and Grant, 1996: 217) of the father of thefamily could be read into the role of the GM and this gendered imagery provides aguide to what is perceived as necessary to be a good manager. This may constrainopportunities for women managers through the difficulties they, and others, mayhave in seeing them in this paternal role. In practice, the study found very fewwomen with aspirations to be GMs. The image of a caring and concerned GMreferred to earlier, would not seem to preclude women from adopting the role, butthere were other aspects of the job that seemed to label it a male preserve. Theseincluded the need to discipline employees in a ‘hire-and-fire’ regime, work all hoursand socialise on equal terms with high-status male customers.

Conversely, the domestic division of labour is mirrored in the normal practice ofhaving a female counterpart in the head of Housekeeping, who is in charge of thedomestic realm while the GM deals with financial matters and the ‘outside world’.Ingram (2005: 63) prescriptively equates the ‘mother’ role in the hotel ‘family’ to thatof someone who has responsibility but who can also ‘adopt a counselling andpastoral role’. Organisational ‘children’ may look to the maternal figure for care, notpunishment. The strong internal labour market and the presence of so many youngpeople in hotels, some as managers and others as line staff, gives the metaphorfurther credence as these gendered children can be seen to develop in different ways.

Practices which reinforce the sense of an organisational family

A sense of family was fostered by the rituals and practices of the hotels. For example,eating together in the staff canteen was talked about, practised and remarked onfrequently. Communal eating provided a source of contact and of community for allmembers of staff, particularly those without offices of their own. Managers,housekeepers, sales staff, maintenance workers and all other levels of staff could allbe seen sitting down together at meal times. GMs were expected to make an effortto eat in the canteen in all the hotels.

Organised social events, such as Christmas parties, designed to engendercompany loyalty and bonding were also common, as they are for employees in arange of workplaces. However, in the hotels they stressed the particular features ofmanagement–employee relations described earlier and characterised by the familymetaphor. For example, the Luxco Christmas party was hosted by the GM and hiswife, who greeted staff on arrival, and photographs of the hotel staff from the partywere pinned up on the HR notice board. This event was only one of the ‘family’gatherings; picnics were arranged in the summer months for employees.

At a broader level, the hotels could be said to provide many of the functions ofthe family for employees as food, shelter, clothing and a community are all containedwithin the hotel property. In addition, at the level of each hotel property, attachmentis invoked through company training, such as induction programmes, which valuethe property itself. Attention was paid to the building, the artefacts and the clientele.Interaction with staff and customers provides further emotional engagement.

The organisational family as a support for – and claim on – employees

Hotel employees mentioned that what they enjoyed about the business was contactwith other members of staff and the opportunity to work with so many different





kinds of people. In practice, the workforce was very diverse in terms of ethnicity,age, qualifications, etc. They valued the ‘extended family’ of the hotel staff andappreciated the sense of ‘belonging’ to a close-knit community despite, or perhapsbecause of, its disparate composition. This is something which Fine (1996), in hisstudy of kitchen staff, also found. However, this is not to deny that the ‘family’ couldalso be divisive and dysfunctional or a context for ‘bad behaviour’ but rather thatmembers of staff ‘looked out for each other’ in ways that could be seen as protectiveand familial. To an extent the organisation could be thought of as ‘forgiving’, witha paternalistic tolerance of some kinds of ‘bad behaviour’ between its members suchas lateness or fighting (the two most common disciplinary issues in Britco). Baum(1991) found, in the self-described organisational ‘family’ which he studied, thatmembers accepted difficult or deviant behaviour such as smoking, alcoholism anduncontrolled outbursts. This also seemed to be true in the hotels.

In an environment in which emotion work was prized and praised, commitmentto each other was also highly valued. The identification with a hotel ‘family’ ofemployees was reinforced by the kind of work that was required. The high demandson the emotional labour of staff made support from colleagues very important,allowing the public ‘front’ to be let down ‘backstage’ with colleagues who hadshared similar experiences. The gendered nature of the emotional labour whichemployees were expected to perform (e.g. the different types of service required fromporters and housekeepers) linked the men and women in the organisations tostereotypes about male and female roles outside the organisation. In this way, theemotional labour of hotel workers also connected their work to their real orsupposed ‘families’ outside the hotels.

At Britco, as at all hotels, quite a lot of socialising went on between and amongstaff, particularly between the younger members of staff. While this wascharacterised by employers as part of the ‘fun’ of such work, it also cut into hometime as well. One young manager at Britco said that at his appraisal he had been toldhe did not seem approachable enough and so had begun to go out after work withhis staff and felt this had improved ‘family’ relations. Given the importance of suchassessments to advancement as described earlier, it can be argued that rewards arelinked to behaviour which valued the family at work over the family at home.

Similarly, in Luxco, long hours were the norm for managers despite a formalcommitment to change. The GM had announced his intention of moving towards afive-day week, yet despite this rhetoric he still reported that he worked 60 hours aweek and did not count within this his civic activities or socialising after work:

I still haven’t quite figured it out, I don’t really call that work. I end upeating. It makes my wife crazy but I love this business. To me that is partof it. I see that as the enjoyment side of it. (GM, Luxco)

The dominance of the organisational family and its consequences for

women’s opportunities in management

Enjoyable aspects of the ‘family culture’ of hotel work, and the forms of support itsometimes provided, have been illustrated in the earlier discussion. However, thesepositive elements came at a considerable cost, particularly for women with outsidecommitments. The notion of the workplace as ‘home’ and colleagues as ‘family’





underpinned the long-hours culture. One ex-manager’s claim that ‘no one ever saysit is time to go home’ can perhaps be explained by the fact that in a sense they arealready home. In this culture, few images of successful women managers could befound. The images that pervaded the hotels were of women as subordinate, assecond in command or in what was considered ‘typical’ work for women, e.g. ashousekeepers, receptionists and front-of-house workers portrayed in a specificallyfeminine way. In some cases gendered behaviour occurred, which served to reinforcenegative images of women managers. For example, the operations manager at Britcorevealed an undercurrent of covert sexist behaviour through the ‘boys’ club’ anticsof senior managers out of working hours.

In Luxco, many ‘sideways’ moves had been made by women managers intofunctions that were not usually seen as giving them access to general management.This was not the case with the men, who moved up the managerial ladder in specificdepartments, perhaps crossing from one to another to gain broader experience beforegetting a further promotion. When women talked about their company-basedcareers, they mentioned that they had been advised that they would be ‘better off’in sales or other functions where the hours were not so long. Young women whowere asked to look ahead to future work roles reported feeling that they would bebetter able to deal with the demands of family and work if they changed directionand worked in (theoretically) less demanding functions.

The issue of long working hours was a commonly remarked upon aspect ofmanagerial work within the hotels. It was portrayed both as an inevitable feature ofthe job (in a ‘24/7’ business) and as a consequence of a very ‘hands-on’ form ofmanagement. In relation to the latter, managers were expected to step in and coverfor absent staff or to take calls at home for staff who could not handle problemsthemselves. Expectations were that managers would come in at weekends but nottake time off during the week to compensate. This did lead to excessive time spentat work with, for example, a director of Catering (Luxco) saying:

. . . last year I worked 40 out of 52 weekends. And you have to workmidweek too. It’s not like you can make up that time.

Both men and women argued that these patterns ‘explained’ the absence of womenGMs. Yet there was little or no reflection on whether work could be organiseddifferently, on the fact that even given the excessive hours worked by some men eventhey were not actually available 24/7, or on the senior jobs women did manage todo within the sector.

Luxco’s rhetoric claimed a commitment to looking after its employees and,through them, its customers. However, in practice, priority was given to customerdemands – via a policy which told staff to ‘never say no’ to customers. Theboundaries between work and family life are particularly difficult to sustain in suchorganisations because it was effectively telling staff that this level of service couldonly be provided by always putting work first. Staff understood that in this contextthe company valued people who are ‘available’ over those who have othercommitments which they may prioritise. But it was not simply commitment to thecompany (or to its customers) which made staff work long hours. For staff memberssocialised into the notion of colleagues as family, leaving others in the lurch whenthere were busy times was frowned upon because it was letting the family down. In





Luxco, conflicting work and family pressures resulted in an assistant managerchanging her job status from full- to part-time work, with a concomitant loss ofstatus, earnings and company benefits, including healthcare. It was, she felt, the onlyway to stay ‘loyal’ to both her ‘families’.

Such choices have high personal costs (part-time work being generally rewardedat a lower level both in financial terms and in terms of career opportunities) (seeFagan and O’Reilly, 1998) and the attempt to demonstrate such dual commitmentwill not necessarily be successful in organisational terms. Wider debates equate thechoice to work part-time with a commitment to home over work (Hakim, 1995)although this is contested (e.g. Warren and Walters, 1998). Recent research in theservice industries suggests the organisational context and structuring of such workmay be more important to perceptions of low commitment than is the orientationof part-time workers themselves (Tomlinson, 2006). While patterns of part-timeemployment in the US and the UK differ (Dex and Shaw, 1986; Fagan and O’Reilly,1998), with more women working full-time in the US, the decision to work part-timein order to devote time to the family was regarded organisationally, in the currentstudy, as a lessening of commitment to the hotel family in both countries.

Work families and home families were, in a sense, in competition. If the hotelrepresents a family and loyalty to that family involves supporting your colleagues‘all the time and all over the place’ (Metco manager), then it becomes difficult to givethe same amount of attention to your real home. As one employee pointed out:‘we’re all one big family because none of us have a life outside of work; work shouldnever be your hobby’. The way family issues were dealt with at Britco revealed that‘real’ families were often disregarded, or looked on as a nuisance, getting in the wayof careers. Acknowledging managers as people with families of their own was notsomething which happened at work, except in the sense that they were a problem.Women complained that there was a lack of support for them as mothers. Quiteapart from any issues of policy, they complained that no one even acknowledgedtheir difficulties.

CONCLUSION

This study has demonstrated a way that commitment to work can be generated bydrawing on a discourse and set of practices deriving from the family. We argue thatthis is a distinctive approach to generating commitment from that which requires theadoption of ‘high commitment HR practices’. It is an approach that is more likely tobe applicable to all workers within a labour-intensive industry and may go someway to explaining the job satisfaction reported by some workers in apparentlyunappealing and poorly rewarded jobs in the sector (Lucas, 2004) and elsewhere. Yetit is also an approach associated with the reinforcement of gender and ethnicstereotyping and segregation within the sector.

Within the workplace, loyalties which draw on family roles are invoked and many‘family-like’ practices occur. Yet this dynamic relationship between work and familywhereby organisations draw on influences outside their own domain has costs forthe fulfilment of commitment to ‘real’ families or any wider social roles. The studyshows that simply making reference to employees’ other identities is not sufficientto indicate that an employer is willing to accept, let alone support, (real) family





commitments. These interconnections demonstrate the inadequacy of models inwhich work and home are regarded as separate spheres. Formal policies to reducelong working hours, or to achieve a better work–life balance will almost certainly failin this context because they conflict with the underlying culture and the demands itmakes on employees.

Similar points can be made about the limitations of conventional equal-treatmentapproaches, which have argued that equality is best promoted by attempting tojudge men and women against job-related criteria without reference to anypresumed wider commitments or gendered characteristics. In contrast, feministwriters from a range of disciplines (e.g. Adkins, 1995; Wajcman, 2000; Martin, 2002)have argued that it is disadvantageous to analyse work as a sphere isolated from therest of people’s lives and unrealistic to believe that managers can in practice dealwith workers as though they had no gender (Liff, 1997). The analysis presented herereinforces the view that one needs to understand workplaces as gendered not onlyin the superficial sense of containing men and women or even in terms ofoccupational segregation. Instead there is a need to understand management stylesand HR practices as themselves drawing on, and reproducing, gender divisions inthe workplace at the same time as creating commitment, career routes and so on.

CONTRIBUTION OF THE STUDY

This study was based on a detailed study of three companies and is limited by itsattention to the detail of those specific contexts. However, it has been argued thattheir location in the US and UK and their service level, while not representative ofthe industry as a whole, are precisely where a more ‘sophisticated’ managementapproach could be expected to be found. Its absence in these companies wouldseem to confirm that what have been defined as high-commitment work practicesare not the only, or necessarily the most successful, way to generate commitment.The extent to which this approach was clearly understood and consciouslyimplemented by the management would require further investigation. However, ourdemonstration of the multifaceted nature of this organisational culture wouldstrongly suggest that management could not choose to simply draw on this analysisand impose a new culture from above. Rather the study shows that employees arealso engaged in reproducing these cultural practices. The research further highlightsthe legislative, cultural and labour market differences which have to be taken intoaccount when understanding the consequences of similar workplace practices indifferent countries.

Notes

1. The original reason for this comparison is derived from different equalitylegislation and approaches and is not specifically relevant to this paper. US/UKdifferences in HRM approaches are discussed further.2. All were publicly quoted companies. Metco operated solely within the US,Britco solely within the UK and Luxco operated properties worldwide, althoughthe majority were in the US. Britco’s hotels were operated on a franchise basisand were part of a larger company in the UK. Names have been disguised anddetailed locations withheld for reasons of confidentiality.





3. The sector is dominated by small hotels and low-cost ‘budget’ hotels are onthe increase. Hotels in the UK with more than 200 employees represented onlyaround 4 per cent of all units (Key Note, 2005).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the hotel employees who took part in the research. Wewould also like to thank Paul Edwards and the anonymous referees for their usefulcomments.

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