Research group - Tourism Workforce

The ITRC´s Employment Working Group was created at the 13th Responsible Tourism in Destinations conference, held in Reykjavik 28, 29 September 2017.

The group’s purpose is to advance and share practice-relevant knowledge on tourism employment. Tourism’s impacts, economic, social and environmental are widely acknowledged. However, challenges surrounding tourism employment and the place of tourism workers as key stakeholders in the development of tourism remain relatively poorly researched.
Issues the working group seeks to explore (this list is indicative, not exclusive) include:

• Immigration for tourism work and its impacts
• Perceptions of Tourism Employment and their relation to career development
• The nature of tourism work (e.g. decent work, self-employment, burnout/stress/ work pressures, productivity)
• Tourism work and human capital (high skills/low skills debate, emotional and aesthetic labour, education and training for tourism).
• Group leader is Andreas Walmsley, [ad3412@coventry.ac.uk], Coventry University, UK

Íris Hrund Halldórsdóttir [irish@unak.is] researcher at the ITRC is the groups secretary.

List of research group members can be viewed here

Those who are interested to participate are welcome to contact either Íris Hrund or Andreas. 

A book on tourism employment in the Nordic countries

A new book ´Tourism Employment in Nordic Countries – Trends, Practices and Opportunities´ was published, 2020 by Palgrave MacMillan (part of Springer Group). The book is an initiative of the research group and are the four editors of the book, all members of the research group. This is the first book of its kind, not only to focus on tourism workforce in Nordic countries, but the first of its kind that will take a geographic perspective on issues that relate to tourism employment specifically. Examples of topics that will be included are migration, youth employment, responsible tourism and employment and current trends in tourism employment. Thus, the text will appeal to a wide readership, in academia and policy making circles in Nordic countries, but also beyond. The book can be found on the webpage of the publisher Palgrave.com.