ABSTRACT
This study has tried to do justice to home-grown reflexivity. It has sought to espy the character of global tourism via its articulation within the labour relations set-up extant in particular small-scale settings. This involved firstly a critical review of the various interpretations, metaphors and slogans surrounding the small island developing state. Out of the rubble were constructed a conceptual framework, a typology and a methodological stance which are inspired by what is imputably going on in the small-scale domain, and therefore transcending the strictures and limitations of a tightly themed literature. Secondly, there has been a similar subversion of the equally themed, caricatured pronouncements relating to the alleged ethnocentrism of global players. The research suggests that both the global and lilliputian must redefine themselves away from the totalizing rigidity of a stubborn, reductionist ecology. The contours of the contested terrain of work have been identified by means of the, often unacknowledged, behavioural dynamics which constitute the ‘soft underbelly’ of the labour process and which mould labour-management relations where global meets local. The focus has been more on process than on structure, more on practice than on policy pronouncement, more on good sense rather than on common sense: a distinction which may prove idiosyncratically so where ‘social island’ encounters with global intent are concerned. There are conditions which accentuate, distort and somehow influence, in a culture-specific but conceptually comparable manner, behavioural encounters between global agents and local culturalities prevailing in the small-scale domain. These go beyond the narrow implications of working in hospitality-geared service industries.
