ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies ways in which gut feel is implicated in shaping the complexities of decision-making for equity investment in hospitality businesses. This chapter argues that the emergence of directional gut feel is an initially pre-cognitive response to the impressions of bodies in the investment collective, and it represents a kind of affective thinking. This initial reaction is interpreted through the impingement of past histories into cognitive, representational emotions that work to enable bodies in the investment to do things with these gut feelings to shape the decisions of hospitality investment. In short, we will show that affect is “disclosed in […] gut feelings”. Throughout this chapter, we will use only the term ‘gut feel’, though interviewees used many terms interchangeably: gut feel, gut instinct, gut reaction, intuition, first impressions, and instinctive feel, amongst others. According to our findings, individuals engaged in investing in hospitality businesses experience and act on gut feel. They get a feeling about or for an investor, a business, a founder, a deal, indeed, about many things present in the activity of investing, and in turn, they act on these feelings.
