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This paper aims to explore the opportunities and challenges faced by hospitality employers in accommodating a culturally diverse workforce in Northern Ireland.

This is an exploratory paper based on interviews with hospitality employers in Northern Ireland. It seeks to answer the question “What opportunities and challenges does a culturally diverse workforce create for hoteliers in Northern Ireland?”.

This research highlights the potential of international workers as an invaluable new source of labour for the hospitality industry, provided that they are properly looked after and managed.

Future research could analyse the role of multicultural management in assuring business benefits associated with cultural diversity.

The research suggests the importance of a positive proactive management system and solutions for training that could be incorporated into the workplace that celebrates its employee's cultures, that values and explores differences and that actively seeks to learn from other cultures, demonstrates tolerance, respects differences, identifies similarities and strives for inclusiveness. Training solutions are provided.

This study suggests the removal of barriers to the successful integration of international staff into the workplace and society, while benefiting all staff, their organisations and the Irish tourism product.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the structure of government-funded event agencies affected the development of the events industry in Northern Ireland. The institutional arrangements for two agencies which operated at different times in Northern Ireland were analysed.

A total of 62 in-depth interviews were conducted with event organisers and public officials who had worked directly with these two organisations.

The standalone National Events Agency which began operating in 1999 was found to be more hands-on and worked closely with event organisers to develop the quality of their event. As a quango it worked at arms length from government. Unfortunately it abused this freedom and used public monies to manage its own events, highlighting the need for transparency and accountability when managing this type of agency. In 2008 it was replaced by an Events Unit which was set up within the National Tourism Organisation. Under this structure event tourism and not event development was the priority. For the events industry this created development issues and reduced its clout at government level.

This paper addressed a gap in the literature and found that the institutional arrangements did affect how a government-funded events agency operated and what it regarded as a strategic priority. This in turn had repercussions for the development of the events industry.

The economic recession, which began in late 2007 has, and will continue to have, repercussions for the events industry. Unemployment and inflation coupled with shrinking public and private sector budgets have made the operating environment difficult. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the recession and the austerity measures that followed have affected UK events – and will continue to do so.

Some previous research has argued that a downturn in the economy can stimulate creativity and innovation. This paper lends some support to this argument as it examines how the recession has forced the organising committee of one of Europe's most prestigious international youth football (soccer) tournaments to “think beyond the football” and start to look at innovative ways to off‐set the cuts in its funding. The paper focuses on the Northern Ireland Milk Cup Youth Football Tournament, which is regarded as one of the most prestigious youth football tournaments in Europe.

Based on data gathered from various stakeholders via interviews and focus groups the paper discusses how the tournament can generate extra revenue from gate receipts, corporate hospitality, merchandising, programming, sponsorship and marketing.

Event organisers can learn two important lessons from this study: first, the current economic climate is challenging but they should try and think “outside the box” as challenges can present opportunities; and second, consult and collaborate with event stakeholders, as their insight and ideas may prove invaluable in these challenging times.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the impact of the recession on the events industry.

This viewpoint paper aims to assess a curriculum response within a specific vocational sector, hospitality, driven by the recent surge in intra EU labour migration and the ensuing increase in workplace cultural diversity.

The paper identifies an appropriate curriculum response by assessing the industry implications and proffering a conceptual model of curriculum response.

The experience across business sectors, such as hospitality, emphasises the need for training that is geared to meet the needs of both international and indigenous employees and that, critically, intercultural issues represent a significant training gap. It is posited that the curriculum response is multifaceted embracing the need to address course content, learning outcomes, assessment methods and the training needs of educators.

The paper is targeted at academics within applied business education, specifically in those areas of the services sector that have experienced significant labour migration in recent years. It is also of wider value to those involved in curricula design in a vocational context.

The purpose of this paper is to address the growing importance of migrant workers to the hospitality industry of peripheral locations in the UK.

The paper draws on data collected through in‐depth surveys of and focus group discussions with migrant workers in hotels in three peripheral locations in the UK.

Findings point to varied experiences for international workers in terms of recruitment and selection of international workers; their work‐related and social integration within the workforce and the wider community; aspirations for training and development among international employees; insights into the futures that migrant workers see for themselves; and their overall experience of living and working in the UK.

The study is located in three regions of the UK and each study is of relatively small scale. This is a potential limitation but compensation is afforded by the depth of information collected in each location.

The study suggests that employers are unwilling to invest in the development of international staff who have high levels of general education and training that is not sector specific. Promotion opportunities are seen to be limited. The paper points to the need for hospitality management to make more effective use of this source of labour.

This paper is the first to undertake a study of the migrant worker experience in peripheral areas of the UK and to focus on a diverse skills sector such as hospitality.

This chapter explores the inter-urban dimensions of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom. It does so by drawing on quantitative measures of inequality from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Great British Class Survey’ experiment of 2011–2013 and representative economic indicators of productivity. It takes its starting point as an acknowledgement of the deepening inequalities in western, developed economies, a reality reflecting in the burgeoning of literature on macro-economic disparities at the start of the twenty-first century. Whilst invaluable, this literature has tended to focus solely on economic definitions of inequality between countries or regions. The purpose of this chapter is to continue the expansion of our understanding of the manifold dimensions of inequality into the social and cultural domains. The data from the Great British Class Survey are uniquely positioned to do this: approximately 325,000 people participated in the online questionnaire, providing information not just on their stocks of economic capital but also on the size and scope of their social networks and the nature and extent of their cultural activities. The size of the sample thus provides an unparalleled tool for analysing the complex nuances of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom using a framework informed by the theoretical approach to cultural class analysis pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu. The analysis here focuses solely on inter-urban disparities in the United Kingdom and demonstrates the ways in which economic inequalities are reflected and reinforced in the social and cultural domains.

Recent socio-economic trends have made Artificial intelligence (AI) a vital institutional force driving development among countries with optimal opportunities and costs. Among researchers in this domain, the benefit of AI is highly espoused, having been underexplored in Africa. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to strengthen the education sector, given that many schools have migrated their teaching and learning online. While face-to-face teaching was the norm, the transition to online teaching has brought about the need to rethink the use of Information Technology to strengthen teaching and learning. To proffer solutions for the implementation of AI in Africa, there is the need to understand the challenges. Therefore, in this chapter, we explore the possible challenges that hinder the implementation of AI in Africa. Further, we propose solutions for the implementation of AI in the education sector, especially in this era of the COVID-19 pandemic. The solutions stem from rethinking the role of AI in the education sector. Finally, a conceptual framework that synthesises the problems and the proposed solution is developed. We envision that the proffered solutions can mitigate the deepening misconceptions and challenges bedevilling AI implementation in Africa.