Organic food and green values: an educated choice

Interest in organic food is developing slowly in New Zealand, gradually attracting attention from the general public. With just 1.16% of agricultural land in organic production, it is misleading for New Zealand to market itself as 100% pure, and then expect international tourists to eat chemically enhanced food. This study of motives for eating organic food is based on data collected in Scotland and California, where surveys and interviews were undertaken with 30 participants who choose to eat organic food. Preliminary results indicate that organic food choices are strongly related to being well educated, and motives are primarily around environmental concerns and personal health. Motives for ethical purchasing choices are discussed

Using TF-IDF n-gram and word embedding cluster ensembles for author profiling: Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2017

This paper presents our approach and results for the 2017 PAN Author Profiling Shared Task. Language-specific corpora were provided for four langauges: Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Arabic. Each corpus consisted of tweets authored by a number of Twitter users labeled with their gender and the specific variant of their language which was used in the documents (e.g. Brazilian or European Portuguese). The task was to develop a system to infer the same attributes for unseen Twitter users. Our system employs an ensemble of two probabilistic classifiers: a Logistic regression classifier trained on TF-IDF transformed n-grams and a Gaussian Process classifier trained on word embedding clusters derived for an additional, external corpus of tweets

Terrorism, rugby, and hospitality: she’ll be right

In 2011, international attention was focussed on New Zealand, host of the Rugby World Cup (RWC 2011), which brought 133,200 visitors to New Zealand over a three-month period. This exploratory study, undertaken before the event, investigates the attitudes of hotel managers and staff as they prepared to host spectators, rugby teams, and media personnel. The aim of the study was to determine preparedness for an attack, and assess attitudes and approaches to risk management in relation to terrorism. Interview data collected from senior hospitality managers revealed a distinctly laissez faire approach to security, which is partly explained by Hofstede's (1984) low uncertainty avoidance category for New Zealand. This attitude is reputedly common in New Zealand, where it is proudly expressed as 'she'll be right'. It is hoped that this study will bring attention to the weak security measures in New Zealand, which would have been insufficient protection for life and property, had a serious terrorist attack been planned

Death by hospitality: beyond the call of duty

Hospitality staff are often very dedicated to their work, protecting guests’ privacy even when circumstances are suspicious, and treating their wants and needs as paramount. In November 2008, several hotel staff were killed in India while protecting hotel guests from terrorists. This paper briefly overviews the circumstances of a death in which a hospitality employee went beyond the call of duty to protect guests. The implications of extreme dedication to service work are explored in terms of the duty of hospitality, along with the concept of sacrifice, particularly with respect to the exploitation of hospitality workers. Topics for further study are suggested, particularly that of identifying the essential characteristics of hospitality service workers. The concept of lifestyle labour is proposed, as this, in conjunction with the characteristics of ‘hospitality people’, is thought to explain the dedication to service exhibited by many hospitality workers

Enjoyment, tolerance, or rejection: responses to sexuality in the workplace

Sexual harassment in hospitality workplaces is endemic, with more hospitality employees reporting incidences of harassment than in any other private sector industry. Various causes are proposed, but the sexualisation of hospitality labour, exacerbated by the blurred demarcation lines between flirtation, harassment and assault, seems the most likely. This paper explores the common features of sexually charged working environments, and presents qualitative data collected from hospitality workers, revealing a wide range of attitudes to sexual behaviour at work. A model is suggested to help managers and staff identify areas of disagreement about sexual behaviour, rather than merely imposing a proscriptive approach, which is neither achievable nor necessarily desirable. Recommendations for reducing harassment focus on the concept of choosing to either sanction or reject specific behaviours at work

Ethics in commercial hospitality

Anecdotally, hospitality has a reputation for poor ethical standards, and it is anticipated that this research will provide a basis for that reputation. Several themes are being explored, such as the causes of poor ethical standards in hospitality, and in particular, management’s role in encouraging and preserving these standards. Unethical behaviour in hospitality is investigated, in order to measure tolerance according to different demographic attributes. It is hypothesised that hospitality managers both passively and actively support unethical behaviour, by providing inadequate financial, physical and human resources to meet profit targets by ethical means. Managers may be aware of unacceptable behaviour, but do not take preventative action, perhaps because the behaviour helps them meet short term goals. Preliminary research included a review of literature relating to moral philosophy, business and hospitality ethics, and the origins of hospitality. Studies influencing the direction of the research are reviewed in this paper, with an outline of the research design and some preliminary results. This study is expected to make a significant contribution to improving ethical standards in hospitality workplaces by identifying the existence and scope of ethical problems, as well as their major causes. Staff and managers have conflicting views about what is fair and unfair, and by identifying these, a common understanding can be established. The ability to predict functional areas in which ethical problems will occur, as well as the kinds of incidents likely to generate unethical behaviour, is likely to help hospitality managers incorporate preventative techniques into training programmes. Furthermore, if unethical behaviour is tolerated in specific areas of hospitality, it is possible that causes of unwanted behaviour can be identified and minimised