3. Organization structure and culture
There has been relatively little recent work which looks at hospitality organizations
as organizations; focusing on their structures and cultures. Ironically this was a major
focus of some of the earliest studies into hotels and restaurants. It could also be argued
that Whyte’s classic research in restaurant organizations (1948) is as much about
structures and the effect that these have on people as about human interaction.
Certainly a later reinterpretation of Whyte’s case (Galbraith, 1977) emphasised the
extent to which human problems could be interpreted as organizational design
problems. An early article by Shamir (1978) demonstrates how organizational theories
can be applied to, in this case, British hotels but both the theories he used and the
structures he described are now outdated.