This study aims to explore how regular bar-goers in urban China conceptualize the spatial and social functions of bars, and how everyday acts of hospitality shape the ways these venues are experienced, used and negotiated as meaningful night-time third places. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixteen frequent bar-goers across several Chinese cities, data analysis reveals three interrelated themes. First, bars are experienced as cafés for the night, semi-public settings in which the private sphere extends into night-time urban life. Second, the sociality they sustain is deliberately bounded: participants express a preference for ‘light’, situational and withdrawable connection over long-lasting intimacy, and establishing such social lightness is not seen as a failure to connect but as a deliberate way of being with others. Third, these conditions are actively produced through the curatorial hosting of bartenders, who manage atmosphere, mediate encounters among patrons and protect the affective boundaries within which bounded sociality can unfold. Collectively, the findings position urban bar settings as a crucial social infrastructure of everyday coexistence after dark and advance the understanding of hospitality as non-obligation, a condition of being among others that manifests through autonomy, social lightness and the freedom to withdraw as one wishes.
This article focuses on the Chicago-based organization The Chicago Hospitality Accountability and Advocacy Database (CHAAD) Project to examine how advocacy for labour justice in restaurants can revitalize abolitionist politics in the twenty-first century and illuminate restaurants’ connections to wider struggles over racial capitalism and societies’ overreliance on police and penal institutions. This organization of restaurant workers emerged from a moment of racial reckoning in the United States in 2020, when both the demands for better work conditions in restaurants and abolitionist ideas gained unprecedented visibility. Through interpretive analysis of digital materials produced by The CHAAD Project between 2021 and 2025, the article explores how CHAAD denounces the vestiges of slavery in restaurant work culture and advances towards a definition of hospitality that rejects service practices through which historic patterns of subordination are reproduced, envisioning instead the collective construction of life-sustaining models. To contextualize this intervention, the article includes a brief exposition on the emergence of the modern restaurant as an institution that conceals and devalues labour, as well as of contemporary abolitionism in the United States. By foregrounding restaurant workers as producers of abolitionist theory and radical thought, the article contributes to existing conversations in hospitality scholarship concerning the role of hospitality in systems of control and the horizons of non-transactional hospitality, while highlighting the potential for worker-led transformation of the status quo in the restaurant industry.
Despite acknowledging and pushing for an interdisciplinary turn in hospitality studies, recent agenda-setting publications have found that this field is still being treated too inhospitably, with many academic disciplines locked into their respective intradisciplinary ipseities. Although this article confirms this perception to some extent, it also pushes back against it by highlighting and comparing some of the most enduring and influential transdisciplinary, intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives that have contributed to theorizing hospitality. Indeed, the article demonstrates that there is a yet formally unrecognized multidisciplinary consensus regarding hospitality’s conceptual centrality across the social sciences and humanities. To do this, it considers three important theoretical thresholds of hospitality studies – philosophy, social anthropology and education – selected for their particularly transdisciplinary, intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, respectively. The article then suggests that, whether transdisciplinary, intradisciplinary or interdisciplinary, these different thresholds to hospitality studies nonetheless always already centre this concept on two of its principal points of interest: an anti-disciplinary epistemological hospitality, sufficiently robust in its unity-in-diversity to include inhospitality epidemics as generative hospitality epistemics, always already inviting selves to encounter others in between.
Service productivity is vital for competitiveness and sustainability in hospitality, yet the influence of cultural and philosophical traditions remains understudied. This study introduces service divinity, a construct based on Indian values such as Atithi Devo Bhava , karma yoga and bhakti yoga. Service divinity views customer service as a sacred duty and integrates spiritual principles into professional practice. The study uses a pragmatist mixed-methods approach that blends eastern ontologies with western analytical frameworks to ensure cultural inclusivity and methodological rigour. Survey data from 419 hotel employees and interviews with 13 managers show that service divinity enhances work satisfaction and service productivity. Work satisfaction serves as a mediator, and value congruence strengthens these effects. The model explains 50.3 per cent of the variance in service productivity. The study advances theory by integrating spiritual and cultural constructs into Person–Environment Fit frameworks and linking eastern and western perspectives. Practically, it shows that aligning cultural values with organizational goals can strengthen employee motivation, satisfaction and competitive performance. The findings also highlight how principles from Vedic Hindu traditions, such as non-reciprocity and non-attachment to outcomes, differ from western reciprocal hospitality and influence service productivity and work satisfaction.
Research on migrant labour in hospitality shows how organizations script demeanour and body for competitive advantage, yet we still know little about how employers actively construct migrants as ideal service providers and how this legitimizes segmentation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with hotel managers and HR leads in two intermediate cities in south-central Chile (Talca and Curicó), this article examines employer evaluations at two moments: pre-hire profiling/screening and post-hire appraisal/role allocation. We find a composite ideal of the ‘good worker/good migrant’ anchored in availability for unsocial hours, punctuality, cordiality and ‘good looking’, frequently couched in nationalized/racialized common sense yet framed as business–rational service culture. Employers toggle between a competency discourse (soft skills as trainable and scriptable) and an idiosyncrasy discourse (warmth and deference as ‘natural’), which improves placement in customer-facing roles without an economic reward. We theorize this oscillation as idealized cultural production, a meso-level process that converts biographical and the challenging socio-legal features of migrant life (e.g. regularization, remittances and family networks) into valorized labour capital. The study extends debates on emotional/aesthetic labour beyond the Global North, clarifies how territory sets employer preferences, and identifies practical levers for fair evaluation of soft skills.
