Tourism workforce research: a review, taxonomy and agenda

This paper offers a critical review, purview and future view of 'workforce' research. We argue that the tourism (and hospitality) workforce research domain, beyond being neglected relative to its importance, suffers from piecemeal approaches at topic, analytical, theoretical and methods levels. We adopt a three-tiered macro, meso and micro level framework into which we map the five pervasive themes from our systematic review across a 10 year period (2005-2014). A critique of the literature, following a 'representations' narrative, culminates in the modelling of a tourism workforce taxonomy, which we propose should guide the acknowledgement and advancement of more holistic tourism workforce knowledge development.