Many conceptualisations of strategic HRM are predicated upon a rational perspective of managerial decision-making where decisions are definable acts of planning, choice and action. Bratton (2003) suggests, however, that the assumption that a firm’s business-level strategy and HR strategy have a logical, linear relationship is questionable given the evidence that strategy formulation is informal, politically charge and subject to complex contingency factors. As such the notion of consciously aligning business strategy and HR strategy applies only to the “classical” approach to strategy, where the manager is a reflective planner and strategist. Furthermore, the relationship between business and HR strategy is often said to be “reactive” in the sense that HR strategy is subservient to “product market logic” and wider corporate strategy. In the hotel industry, the process of strategic formulation would appear to be less clearly delineated. For example, HR “strategy” and practice in some hotels may well be determined primarily by local market conditions (e.g. the scarcity of particular skills leading to deskilling or the unpredictability of demand leading to the mass casualisation of employment) which, in turn determines, wider competitive strategy. Even in hotel establishments which are part of a larger chain (like most of those in which interviews were conducted) managers are likely to be trying to reconcile business strategy and environmental pressures and whatever HR strategy emerges is likely to be an amalgamation of policies and practices which are an ad hoc response to local market conditions and those imposed from senior management. This has more in common with Purcell’s (2001) portrayal of HR strategy as “emerging patterns of action” that are likely to be formed intuitively, rather than a set of proactive edicts that are born from and complementary to competitive strategy.