Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Tourism is often associated with movement, leisure, and pleasure.Yet behind every journey lies a dense and uneven infrastructure made up of routines, spaces, and workers that sustain the rhythms of travel and leisure.From hotel rooms and dining services to cleaning, entertainment, transport, and emotional care, tourism rests on a labour force that is highly segmented and exploited, and often rendered invisible, both in public discourse and in academic research.While the guest's experience may appear seamless and immersive, this smooth surface is sustained by a workforce subjected to fragmented schedules, insecure contracts, and low wages, irregularities conditions that reflect the structural precarity underpinning the tourism economy.This special issue begins from that blind spot.It brings together contributions that share a common concern: to foreground labour as a central category for understanding tourism.Labour is conceived as a constitutive element that defines what tourism is, how it functions, and how it materialises in practice.Consequently, the authors approach tourism not merely as an economic sector or a cultural practice, but as a field in which specific social relations, institutional arrangements, and spatial hierarchies are produced and contested.By situating tourism within the world of work, the five articles that compose this special issue move beyond celebratory accounts of creativity, mobility, and experience.They examine instead how tourism labour is produced, managed, and contested across different geographies and through diverse empirical and theoretical lenses.From grounded case studies to varied analytical frameworks, these papers explore the concrete ways in which tourism depends on, and contributes to, evolving labour regimes, modes of value extraction, and forms of social inequality.Building on the concerns raised by the contributions collected in this special issue, this introduction unfolds in five parts.It begins by retrac-
Authors: Francesco Iannuzzi, Marco Marrone
Institutions: Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Salento
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4412829359