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While no two businesses are the same, examples from Edinburgh Pakistani community convenience store owners illustrate business survival strategies developed in response to increased environmental challenges presented by changing consumer behaviour, increased competition and demographic variations. These are related to the individual’s motivation, experience and family business background, and include exiting the sector, gaining recognised qualifications and alternative employment, and involving second and third generations in expanding family business activities. The resulting smaller, but stronger, convenience(c)‐store sector continues to provide opportunities for individual businesses, thus maintaining the economic and social benefits for the ethnic minority community and the wider city population.

This paper aims to explore tacit knowledge and managers’ supervision styles in a sample of Edinburgh's Indian restaurants.

The paper reports a qualitative fieldwork of managers’ perceptions of their role in directing tasks, supervising operations and staff recruitment.

The research findings describe tacit knowledge contexts derived from restaurant owner‐managers directing operations.

This is an exploratory study of views and perceptions of a small sample of ethnic managers. It asks questions of tacit knowledge within Scottish‐based Indian restaurants, and attempts to place these within a cultural context of kinship networks.

The research questions how academic researchers may make nebulous concepts such as tacit knowledge accessible to practical hospitality managers, policy‐makers, students and teachers.

The research findings describe the context to relationships in small ethnic hospitality businesses. Conceptual development emerges from deductions made from literature, fieldwork, shadowing, interviews, and by asking questions.

This paper reports on the findings of qualitative fieldwork aimed at exploring the motives, financial implications and the perceived benefits of achieving the Investors In People Standard. It examines perceptions of IIP at three different organisational levels. The research found differences between the motivation for, and perceptions of, IIP at all three levels as well as differences in the perceived benefits of the Standard. The views of senior management regarding the benefits of IIP were not generally shared at the other levels of the organisation. Indeed front‐line staff felt that IIP made little difference to them personally, the way they performed their jobs, or to the levels of satisfaction of their customers. This presents a major problem for senior management of local authority services if they are to achieve all the benefits attributed to IIP and so get beyond the “plaque on the wall”.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the issues of dyslexia and the management of learning support within two Scottish suppliers of premier HE hospitality education: Napier and QMU universities of Edinburgh.

This exploratory, qualitative fieldwork outlines course managers', teachers' and disabilities support staff perceptions of dyslexia support. Students' views are noted, not interviewed. The paper describes the views of 12 of a sample of (eight female and four male) staff interviewees. Napier University and Queen Margaret University are post‐1990 “new” universities; Napier has a larger student/staff population than QMU.

The emergent findings in this paper highlight the fact that managers, teachers and support staff operate an under‐resourced and largely ad hoc system of dyslexic support, although Napier, with greater central funding, shows signs of more strategic insight with the appointment of a full‐time dyslexia coordinator with strategic potential. The findings pinpoint the strengths (personal attention) of decentralised support with ambiguity problems and the need for a generic centrally coordinated support system capable of codifying tacit experience into customised support packages for hospitality students.

The paper is a small exploratory study of the views and perceptions of dyslexia of course managers', hospitality teachers' and support staff from two of Edinburgh's new universities. Both have decades of internationally respected work in hospitality education and elsewhere in higher education.

The fieldwork draws attention to this situation and suggests ways to make concepts of dyslexia and disability more relevant to academic hospitality managers teaching in higher education and to those practising in the field.

The paper examines the proposition that, while dyslexia is a condition open to support and improvement, it is for many practitioners a vague concept. What emerges from the interviews is that disability and what to do about it seems to be an attitude of mind, a question of perceptions, frames of references, intangible properties: that the essence of enhanced dyslexic support is how to do things better. Napier and QMU give valuable ad hoc examples here on which to design future practice. What is needed is a systematic approach to design, implementation and sustainability, and an understanding of the tacitly held knowledge that underpins experience‐generated systems of knowledge. Bringing out such tacit and explicit notions of the complexity of perceptions of knowledge lies in future studies.

Earlier work examined the factors that affected staff motivation and satisfaction in small food businesses, focusing on staff whose roles did not include overall responsibility for the firm. As part of this work, 38 small food processing and manufacturing companies in Scotland were recruited and data collected using interviews and questionnaires. In order to examine the topic in greater detail and to offer a more complete perspective, the owners and/or managers of the 38 firms were interviewed and the results presented here as a contrast. Results highlighted differences in perception between the owner/managers and those staff who took part in the earlier data collection.

This paper aims to explore managers' perceptions of labour productivity within a sample of de luxe hotels located in Switzerland.

The exploratory, qualitative fieldwork outlines managers' perceptions of labour productivity. It describes the views of a sample of ten male, senior managers and human resources managers, of several 4‐ and 5‐star hotels.

The emerging findings highlight the fact that managers perceive productivity as a vague concept. Pessimistically, the harder managers try to understand it, the more nebulous such a notion appears to them.

This is a small exploratory study of managers' perceptions of labour productivity based on interviews drawn from hotels near Geneva and Lausanne.

The fieldwork draws attention to this situation and suggests ways to make concepts of productivity more relevant to hospitality managers.

Essentially, the work examines the proposition that for hoteliers productivity enhancement in hospitality is, in practice, a vague concept. It is interesting that, apparently, the more effort individual units managers put into an understanding/perception of productivity management, the further the concept recedes. Arguably, Swiss hotel managers tend to confuse productivity with profitability: as such recognition of the management of people as a vital element in successful hotel management is low. What emerges from the interviews is that productivity seems to be essentially an attitude of mind, a question of perceptions, frames of reference, intangible properties: that the essence of productivity enhancement is how to do things better. Are productivity and profitability perhaps not so far apart, after all ?

Examines the factors which affect staff motivation and satisfaction in small food businesses. Explores previous theories of motivation. Thirty‐eight small food processing and manufacturing companies in Scotland formed the sample. Interviews and open‐ended semi‐structured questionnaires were employed in the research. Results emphasise the importance of the management style of the owner/manager particularly when it comes to factors such as “lack of appreciation”, “poor communication” and “training”.