ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the character of idiosyncratic features associated with small scale as they impinge on labour policy and labour relations in the tourism industry. The main evidence to this effect is derived from hotel case studies in the developing microstate milieu. A small-scale labour syndrome is therefore proposed. This is a composite dialectic of, on the one hand, the universe of peculiar, environmental, tendential elements exacerbated by small scale, and, on the other, their contestation, adoption, negotiation or manipulation in practice by social actors as producers, individually or collectively. The former, contextual elements may be gleaned from most secondary sources, especially those of a general, non-country specific nature. The latter, behavioural dynamics are more difficult to identify and are evidenced mainly from acculturalized behaviour patterns, good sense and insider knowledge:
as a lens might be capable of inverting, distorting, magnifying, reducing, blurring, bringing into sharper focus, polarising and creating chromatic aberration, so might the scale factor be perceived, even to the extent of its potential to create aberrations of the ‘rose coloured glasses’ type: epitomised by the cliches ‘small island paradise’ and ‘small is beautiful’.
(Smawfield, 1993, p. 29)