Best Paper award for Professor Conrad Lashley 

Along with Michael Chibili, Professor Conrad Lashley attended the annual Council for Hospitality Management Education research conference in Bournemouth, UK. They co-presented a paper entitled, Attitudes to Hospitableness: insights from an industry study, which reported on a study of staff attitudes to hospitableness in two hotels within a major Swiss Hotel company. The study gathered responses from over 300 hundred staff in both front of house and back of house departments of company hotels located in Amsterdam and Dubai. Findings suggested that some staff have more positive attitudes to hospitality than their colleagues. Conference delegates were enthusiastic about the findings and many offers of further collaboration were received. 

Professor Lashley also presented a discussion paper reflecting on future hospitality education. This received the ‘Institute of Hospitality award for Best Paper’. The work was based upon a document circulated to Hotel School staff some weeks ago. The title is ‘What To Do About How To Do: reflections on the future direction on hospitality education and research’. The paper made a case for taking a long critical look at the very applied nature of vocational courses in the field. It suggested these might be potentially improved in two ways. The first argued that the student empow-erment, rather than industry readiness, should be the 

primary focus of these programs. The second theme suggested programs might be given more critical social science content; as well as activities drawn from performance arts, the visual arts, social events and critical discourse.