ABSTRACT
Many tourism programmes in higher education are based in business schools, or at least grounded in the business studies vocational area, and, as a result, tend to incorporate a range of links with industry (Cooper & Westlake, 1998; Evans, 2001; Tribe, 1997). Higher education — industry links occur through supervised work experience (SWE), comprising both short and long placements (Busby, Brunt, & Baber, 1997), involvement with programme validation (Morgan, 2004), through guest speakers and via field trips. There are other forms of involvement although these are the principal ones. This chapter focuses chiefly on the period of supervised work experience for this appears to be probably the single most important link; certainly it is the activity emphasised by Dearing (1997) and Harvey, Moon, Geall, and Bower (1997) in their extensive reviews. In Britain, the most frequently used term for the period of SWE is sandwich placement; elsewhere the terms ‘internship’ and ‘cooperative education’ are used (Busby, 2003a; Leslie & Richardson, 2000; Waryszak, 1997).
