Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2014), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-05-2014-0265

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 26, Issue 4

We celebrated International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management’s (IJCHM) 25th year anniversary in 2013. Detailed information can be found about our activities and initiatives related to this milestone achievement at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/promo/ijchm_25.htm. As part of this important celebration, we decided to publish two special issues on contemporary hospitality research that can address key issues and challenges in the hospitality and tourism field. We have invited leading scholars in the hospitality and tourism field to contribute to these two special issues. I am now pleased to announce that that IJCHM Vol. 26 No. 5 is the first special issue on contemporary hospitality research. The second special issue will be published in Vol. 27 in 2015.

This first special issue on contemporary hospitality research contains eight review articles. In the first article, Evert Gummesson provides an update on his previously published article in IJCHM in 1998 on productivity, quality and relationship marketing in service operations. He offers a critical review on the evolution of services management and marketing through three paradigms, the latest prescribing a new logic of service. Practitioners and scholars should pay close attention to the new logic of service. The second paper by John W. O’Neill and Sean McGinley explains and synthesizes major services operations research foci from the past century. The paper evaluates how hospitality scholars have conducted operations-related research with a particular focus on research related to hotels and lodging. The authors claim that hospitality scholars have been conducting research that generally reflects trends in general operations management literature.

In the third paper, J. Bruce Tracey presents a critical review of the human resource management (HRM) research in the generic HRM and the hospitality fields. A comparison of the findings shows a substantial degree of overlap in the themes and results that have been generated to date. However, several studies in the hospitality field have identified a number of variables that appear to be particularly relevant for labor-intensive and service-focused settings. As such, context-specific factors should be considered in efforts to advance our understanding about the ways in which hospitality HR systems may impact a wide array of individual and organizational outcomes in hospitality organizations. The fourth article by John T. Bowen, Cristian Morosan and Morgan Atwood provides a domain statement for hospitality marketing research. The authors critically evaluate the evolution of hospitality marketing research over the last 25 years and illustrate how the research paradigms changed over time in hospitality marketing relative to mainstream marketing. This article offers specific suggestions for developing and managing a marketing research agenda.

In the next article, Rob Law, Dimitrios Buhalis and Cihan Cobanoglu evaluate the progress of information and communication technology (ICT) research based on a critical review of articles published in tourism and hospitality journals between 2009 and 2013. The authors grouped articles into two major categories, consumer and supplier, which generally comprise the key players in the industries. A content analysis showed that hospitality and tourism industries use ICT in different functional units and for different applications. This, in turn, indicates their wide adoption in the industry. The authors offer theoretical and practical implications. For example, industry practitioners can learn from this article about up-to-date practices and decide how to take advantage of recent technological developments. In the sixth paper, SooCheong (Shawn) Jang and Kwangmin Park present a critical overview of hospitality finance/accounting (HFA) research. To further improve HFA research, they suggest the need for interdisciplinary research that could integrate finance/accounting with other management subjects in the hospitality field. This study sheds some light on the need for interdisciplinary research and proposes paths for conducting interdisciplinary HFA research.

The following paper by Robert Harrington, Prakash Chathoth, Michael Ottenbacher and Levent Altinay reviews the hospitality and tourism strategy literature to identify trends related to key topical areas of research. The authors claim that the hospitality strategy research continues to improve and extend the boundaries of strategic thought in the hospitality literature. In assessing the literature from 1980-2013, these authors note that the hospitality strategy literature was following the mainstream trend of combining theoretical perspectives to some degree as well as applying more process-based concepts to hospitality strategy research. The article identifies several challenges for propelling hospitality strategy research, which include the educational infrastructure, theory development and the quantity and quality of researchers in the field. In the final article, Dogan Gursoy, Joseph S. Chen and Christina G. Chi identify the most critical antecedents of destination loyalty formation and develop a series of propositions for the relationships among the antecedents of loyalty formation and their direct and indirect impacts on loyalty formation. In the proposed conceptual model, the sequential relationships among the antecedents of tourist destination loyalty postulate that previous experience is the most influential driver that could manipulate tourist destination loyalty. Place attachment and involvement constitute the second most influential factors of destination loyalty formation. In addition to the above two variables, destination image is proposed to have direct and indirect effects on perception of service quality and satisfaction. Meanwhile, service quality and tourist satisfaction are proposed to have the largest magnitude of direct impacts on destination loyalty.

We hope that our readers find all the articles published in this special issue timely, relevant and insightful. We welcome any comments and suggestions about this article and also for future research topics and special issues.

Fevzi Okumus