Paradise Laborers

Paradise Laborers

Author: Patricia A. Adler

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1501726706

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Resorts have become important to American society and its economy; one in eight Americans is now employed by the tourism industry. Yet despite the ubiquity of hotels, little has been written about those who labor there. Drawing on eight years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the renowned ethnographers Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler reveal the occupational culture and lifestyles of workers at five luxury Hawaiian resorts. These resorts employ a workforce that is diverse in gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Hawaiian resort workers, like those in nearly all resorts, consist of four groups. New immigrants hold difficult and dirty low-status jobs for little pay. Locals provide an authentic Polynesian flavor for guests, a ready pool of youthful high-turnover employees, and a population trapped in a place that offers few occupational alternatives. Managers tend to be middle-class, college-educated young and middle-aged men from the mainland whose lifestyles are occupationally transient. Seekers, mostly young, white, and from the mainland as well, escape to paradise seeking adventure, warmth, extreme sports, or some alternate life experiences. The Adlers describe the work, lives, and careers of these four groups that labor in organizations that never close, with shifts scheduled around the clock and around the year. Paradise Laborers adds to the growing interest in the global flow of labor, as these immigrant workers display different trends in gendered opportunities and mobility than those exhibited by other groups. The authors propose a political economy of tourist labor in which they compare the different expectations and rewards of organizations, employees, and local labor markets.


Leaving Paradise

Leaving Paradise

Author: Jean Barman

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2006-05-31

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0824874536

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Native Hawaiians arrived in the Pacific Northwest as early as 1787. Some went out of curiosity; many others were recruited as seamen or as workers in the fur trade. By the end of the nineteenth century more than a thousand men and women had journeyed across the Pacific, but the stories of these extraordinary individuals have gone largely unrecorded in Hawaiian or Western sources. Through painstaking archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii, Jean Barman and Bruce Watson pieced together what is known about these sailors, laborers, and settlers from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States. In addition, the authors include descriptive biographical entries on some eight hundred Native Hawaiians, a remarkable and invaluable complement to their narrative history. "Kanakas" (as indigenous Hawaiians were called) formed the backbone of the fur trade along with French Canadians and Scots. As the trade waned and most of their countrymen returned home, several hundred men with indigenous wives raised families and formed settlements throughout the Pacific Northwest. Today their descendants remain proud of their distinctive heritage. The resourcefulness of these pioneers in the face of harsh physical conditions and racism challenges the early Western perception that Native Hawaiians were indolent and easily exploited. Scholars and others interested in a number of fields—Hawaiian history, Pacific Islander studies, Western U.S. and Western Canadian history, diaspora studies—will find Leaving Paradise an indispensable work.


Service Work

Service Work

Author: Cameron MacDonald

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-08-20

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1135926603

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Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studie


Differences That Matter

Differences That Matter

Author: Dan Zuberi

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1501711253

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This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.Zuberi demonstrates how labor, health, social welfare, and public investment policy affect these hotel workers and their families. His book challenges the myth that globalization necessarily means hospitality jobs must be insecure and pay poverty wages and makes clear the critical role played by government policy in the reduction of poverty and creation of economic equality. Zuberi shows exactly where and how the social policies that distinguish the Canadian welfare state from the U.S. version make a difference in protecting Canadian workers from the hardships that burden low-wage workers in the United States. Differences That Matter, which is filled with first-person accounts, ends with policy recommendations and a call for grassroots community organizing.


The Hungry Cowboy

The Hungry Cowboy

Author: Karla A. Erickson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-07-07

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1604733462

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At a Tex-Mex restaurant in a Minneapolis suburb, customers send Christmas and Hanukkah cards to the restaurant, bring in home-baked treats for the staff, and attend the annual employee party. One customer even posts in the entryway a sign commemorating the life of his dog. Diners and servers alike use the Hungry Cowboy as a place to gather, celebrate, relax, and even mourn. Moments such as these fascinate Karla A. Erickson, who worked for the restaurant, and they make up her new book The Hungry Cowboy. Weaving together narratives from servers, customers, and managers, Erickson explores a type of service work that is deeply embedded in personal relationships and community. Feelings, play, and emotions are inseparable from the market transactions within the restaurant. Based on extensive interviews and two years of working as a waitress, Erickson provides insights into the ways that people make contact in our society and how they build on the fleeting connections in the service exchange to form more intimate relationships. Written for readers, scholars, and students interested in American culture, consumerism, and community, The Hungry Cowboy offers a case study in how consumers and producers in the marketplace perform, and how dignity, meaning, and community can all be built at work.


A Hospitable World?

A Hospitable World?

Author: David Jordhus-Lier

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1317751752

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The hospitality and tourism sector is a large and rapidly expanding industry worldwide, and can rightfully be described as a vehicle of globalisation. Hotels are among the cornerstones of the industry often drawing workers from the most vulnerable segments of multicultural labour markets, accommodating and entertaining tourists and business travelers from around the world. This book explores the organisation of work, worker identities and worker strategies in hotel workplaces, as they are located in heterogeneous labour markets being changed by processes of globalisation. It uses an explicitly geographical approach to understand how different groups of workers experience and respond to challenges in the hospitality industry, and is based on recent theoretical debates and empirical research on hotel workplaces in cities as different as Oslo, Goa, London, Las Vegas and Toronto. A multi-scalar analysis is taken where concrete worker bodies and their physical, emotional and embodied labour are seen in relation to, among other aspects: the regulation of national and regional labour markets, city governments with global city ambitions, and global corporate actors and labour migration patterns. The book sheds light on the hotel workplace as a hierarchical and fragmented social space as well as addressing questions on worker mobility, the fragmentation of work, scales of organisation and how workers can help shape the regulation of their industry. This timely volume brings together contributions from international academics and is valuable reading for all those interested in hospitality, tourism, human geography and globalisation.


A Counterfeiter's Paradise

A Counterfeiter's Paradise

Author: Ben Tarnoff

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-03-06

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1101574836

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"This tale of counterfeiting is a treat for everyone...a delightful history lesson...Admirable and altogether charming." -The Washington Post As Ben Tarnoff reminds us in this entertaining narrative history, get-rich-quick schemes are as old as America itself. Indeed, the speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff suggests, has its origins in the counterfeiters who first took advantage of America's turbulent economy. In A Counterfeiter's Paradise, Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters who flourished in early America, from the colonial period to the Civil War. Driven by desire for fortune and fame, each counterfeiter cunningly manipulated the political and economic realities of his day. Through the tales of these three memorable hustlers, Tarnoff tells the larger tale of America's financial coming-of-age, from a patchwork of colonies to a powerful nation with a single currency.


Social Psychology

Social Psychology

Author: Karen A. Hegtvedt

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2024-08-20

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1544368771

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Social Psychology is a comprehensive exploration of how individual behaviors and interactions shape societal dynamics and contribute to social inequalities. The Second Edition provides a unique, sociological perspective on social psychology that is both academically rigorous and accessible to undergraduates.