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This paper aims to analyse the conceptual bases of the related terms of “host” and “guest” in Chinese and reveal essential, though overlooked, cultural differences that relate to “hospitality” in Western and Chinese cultural contexts.

A presupposition of this conceptual investigation is that culture manifests itself linguistically. The analytic approach used here is textual analysis. Confucian classical texts are the main source of evidence for examining the conceptual commitments of the Chinese characters 主 and 客 and their corresponding practical expressions.

Cross-cultural comparison reveals asymmetries between the term “hospitality” and its Chinese translations, etymologically and culturally. This study demonstrates how the Chinese 主–客 paradigm is both hierarchal in nature and centred on the role and interests of the host. It further compares this paradigm with its Western counterpart along five different dimensions.

The specific Chinese norms for the host–guest paradigm synthesized here could prompt both academicians and operators to question the cultural attachments associated with hospitality by participants and the cultural differences in hospitality transactions and management. The cultural sensitivity modelled here is intended to facilitate harmony between a hospitality setting and the culture in which it is embedded.

This conceptual paper is the first in the Anglophone literature to explore the Chinese cultural roots of the concepts “host” and “guest”. The linguistic perspective used in this study allows the concept of “hospitality” to be studied cross-culturally and in an interdisciplinary way, addressing a blind spot in the extant hospitality literature.

This rejoinder aims to critique some of the perspectives in Chen’s (2018) study on hospitality and host–guest paradigm in China.

In this preliminary probe into Chen’s study, critical analysis is performed on Chen’s approaches, whereas document analysis is applied to the relevant ancient Chinese writings. Translations are the author’s own unless indicated otherwise.

Chen’s views are problematic and supported by patchy evidence. “Hierarchy principle” and “host-centric foundation” do not hold up. In a series of asymmetrical comparisons, Chen goes a bit too far in arguing for uniqueness.

This rejoinder presents valid critiques of Chen’s study, thus directing future research in the right direction. It is of some significance to clarify Chen’s misrepresentations and offer a truer and fuller account of Chinese hospitality, given the difficulty for international scholars to validate Chen’s views because of language barrier and cultural unfamiliarity.

This study aims to further an understanding of hospitality employees’ perceptions of their customers in the context of service encounter by utilizing the concepts of contact hypothesis and cultural distance in a multi-ethnic environment. The study compares perceptions of Chinese immigrants working in restaurants of their British patrons (from a remote culture) and Chinese patrons (from a proximate culture). The service encounter takes place in the London Chinatown. The dynamics of Chinatown as a “third space” adds complexity to service encounter and employee perceptions.

A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 118 Chinese restaurant employees in the Soho area of the London Chinatown. Perception questions were based on interviews undertaken in an earlier phase of the research. A paired t-test was run to identify significant differences in the Chinese restaurant employees’ perceptions of the Chinese and British patrons. Discriminant analysis was performed to determine which perception variables discriminated the most between the two patron groups.

Despite cultural proximity, the perceptions held by Chinese restaurant employees of their nationals were negative compared to the perceptions of British patrons. Out of 16, in 15 areas of measurement, there were significant differences in the Chinese restaurant employees’ perceptions’ of their Chinese and British guests. Six variables that discriminated the most between the two groups of guests were no tips, not polite, loud, no compliment, messy and demanding.

Research in ethnic and minority quarters, such as Chinatown in London, may suffer from “recall bias”, or in this case from making the difference between customer groups. Also, the Chinese are not a homogeneous group. For example, despite cultural similarity with mainstream culture, cultural and behavioral characteristics may exist between residents from the South, North and Hong Kong.

The cultural diversity of the industry’s employees necessitates managing cultural diversity effectively, especially in the sectors that rely heavily on guest–employee interaction. Perceptions affect attitudes and behavior. Training programs about perception and its roots may bridge the service gap in high-contact service encounters.

This study provides a ground for future empirical research into understanding the immigrant employees’ perceptions of their guests, nationals versus non-nationals and the ways for improving these perceptions. Taking the example of Chinatown as a dynamic “third space” is another approach to understanding the effects of “ethnoscape” on encounters in a more globalized village.

The purpose of this paper is to apply conservation of resource (COR) theory and the buffering hypothesis of social support to explore occupational stress and its negative outcomes such as job engagement and turnover intentions for front-line hospitality industry employees in the People’s Republic of China.

Primary data were collected in two waves from 318 front-line employees in a chain of restaurants located in the eastern region of the People’s Republic of China.

Integrating COR theory and the buffering hypothesis of social support, job satisfaction is found to be a mediating mechanism in the relationships between occupational stress and job engagement and occupational stress and employee turnover intentions for front-line hospitality industry workers. Moreover, the authors found the boundary condition role of work-social support. The relationships between stress and its negative outcomes are weak for the employees receiving high social support at work.

This study calls for researchers’ attention towards the issues of occupational stress focussing on the implications of work-social support for front-line hospitality industry employees.

Service innovation benefits hospitality organizations’ service quality and competitive advantages. However, how and when team culture amplifies team service innovation is still not fully comprehended. Thus, this study aims to reveal the mediation and moderation mechanisms behind the team-level culture and service innovation nexus.

This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to validate the research model. The authors collected data from leaders and their members working in the hospitality sector in China.

The results demonstrated the positive nexus of developmental culture and team service innovation. This nexus was sequentially mediated by aggregated creative role identity and aggregated creative self-efficacy and was also strengthened by task interdependence.

The results indicated that hospitality practitioners should consistently instill the values of developmental culture into their members to trigger their teams’ service innovative endeavors. They should also design more tasks requiring intensive teamwork and encourage members to complete these tasks collaboratively.

This study advances the understanding of the direct, mediating and moderating effects behind team service innovation.

The study aims to provide an inventory of the existing English and Chinese research on service quality in China’s hospitality and tourism industry. The study aims to identify the reasons for the lack of research on service quality in China’s hospitality and tourism industry and the ignorance of the Chinese language literature in the field.

A synthesis review is conducted of 31 articles published in 11 leading Chinese and English academic journals from 1998 to 2013.

Popular research themes are service quality management and evaluation in the hotel sector. The majority of the reviewed articles are empirical studies that adopt quantitative methods, and none of the English articles use qualitative methods. Recent studies tend to use sophisticated statistical techniques such as confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Changes in disciplines, publication trends and statistical techniques are observed. The theoretical and practical contributions of the Chinese and English publications are compared, and recommendations are made for future research.

This study is one of the first to review and compare the existing publications in the leading Chinese- and English-language journals. It provides a platform for scholars, especially non-Chinese literate researchers, to understand the research on service quality in the China hospitality and tourism industry.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate an instrument intended to measure servant leadership behavior in the Chinese hospitality industry.

After reviewing the literature, a scale of nine dimensions with 81 items was generated and then subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using a sample of 600 participants from a polytechnic college and hospitality industry, resulting in 6-factor-33-item solution. The derived measure was then shortened to 24 items by using item response theory (IRT). Drawing on the data from 440 respondents in the hospitality industry, this 6-factor-24 item measure was subsequently validated with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the test of construct validity.

Difference in factors has been found between this instrument and western-developed scales. This study resulted in 6-dimension-24-items scale. These dimensions were named integrity, self-sacrifice, building community, empowering people, emotional healing and visioning. This servant leadership scale was demonstrated to have good internal consistency reliability and strong construct validity.

This is the first study that used IRT as a statistic tool to shorten a servant leadership scale and also this study provided additional support to cultural psychology theory.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American hospitality customers who report critical incidents and the resulting influences that these incidents and recovery efforts had on behavior. Recognizing that hospitality-based organizations are increasingly operating internationally, the study provides insights for managing customer relationships.

The study utilizes the critical incident technique in conjunction with a structured self-administered questionnaire. The sampling approach resulted in 1,146 usable responses.

The results demonstrate statistically significant cultural differences between American and Chinese consumers in terms of reported critical incident types, recovery approaches, and post-incident private voice, public voice, and repurchase intention.

This research uses cultural value scores for China and the USA as a way to explain and discuss the findings. Hofstede's model was not tested and the provided explanations should be viewed with caution.

The results of this research can provide practitioners with guidelines in regards to service recovery tactics, as well as insights into how customers respond to critical incidents across different cultures.

This study adds to the existing literature by investigating empirically critical incident types, recovery tactics, and the consumer post-encounter behaviors of public voice (i.e. complaining), private voice (i.e. negative word-of-mouth, positive word-of-mouth), and repurchase intention in China and the USA.

This paper aims to examine the primary determinants of Chinese consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions of imported organic wines.

This study used a multi-stage data collection via multiple sampling techniques. Data were collected from close to 2,000 Chinese wine drinkers across 33 provincial-level administrative units in China. The consumer data were subject to a two-step structural equation modeling analysis.

Chinese consumers express favorable attitudes and are interested in making a purchase. The results also reveal distinct influences of cognitive and emotional determinants on consumers’ positive attitudes and purchase intentions of organic wines. Health benefits and symbolic value positively influence consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions. Emotional assessment of organic wines, despite exhibiting a positive effect on attitudes, does not drive Chinese consumers’ purchase decisions.

China has become a world leader in consuming wines, especially wines imported from traditional wine producing countries. The increasing health concerns have also prompted Chinese consumers toward favoring organic products. Despite the evident shift in Chinese consumers’ travel expenditure toward food and wines and the growing wine consumption while dining out, existing research is scant in explaining the decision drivers of Chinese consumers’ organic wine purchase. A greater and deeper understanding of Chinese consumers’ purchase decision of organic wines not only provides marketing intelligence for countries exporting wines to China but also is meaningful for international destinations to capture a lucrative market to support local attractions and hospitality businesses.

This study aims to model and test the relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate reputation, customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

A total of 451 complete questionnaires were obtained from randomly approached ethnic Chinese leisure tourists. Following a two-step approach, a measurement model was estimated and then a structural model analyzed to test proposed hypotheses.

CSR and reputation significantly impacted customer satisfaction, which, in turn, affected repurchase and word-of-mouth intentions. Customer satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between CSR and behavioral intentions in addition to corporate reputation.

The study considered only a limited number of lodging customers in a specific geographic area in China. Additional investigation across hospitality business types and cultures is needed.

Investments in CSR activities in a Chinese hospitality consumption context can contribute to customer satisfaction and ultimately contribute positively to customer future behaviors.

This study provides insights into the role that CSR may play for domestic Chinese hospitality customers. Little attention has been paid to the importance of corporate reputation in a tourism/hospitality context. This study contributes in helping to close this gap. Finally, this study embeds customer satisfaction within a framework of antecedents and consequences in an integrated causal model.