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This article examines representations of housekeeping and housekeepers in the popular television series Hotel Babylon. We take a reflective approach in consid-ering how identities and roles in the Hotel Babylon series are constructed, regarding the housekeeping department and its workers. We identify that the
representation of housekeeping work and employees is one of mainly sexualized victims, migrant workers and denigrated employees. Some possible effects of the identity and role constructed in this series are discussed; in particular an under-mining and undervaluing of a career in housekeeping. This study suggests more fundamental concerns about sustaining service quality and employment relation-ships in the hotel sector.
When considering cultures and peoples in virtually any context, there can be an underlying tendency to compartmentalise these groups and make assumptions about their features and characteristics that are not necessarily borne out in practice. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the analysis of the dichotomy of traditional and modern societies presented in the writings of the American economists Walt Rostow and Neil Smelser. Rostow and Smelser both cast traditional, non-European communities as having rigid hierarchical systems, limited opportunities for social mobility, fixed limits on productive capacity, low formal educational attainment, and a generally static state of development.1 A challenge to this depreciatory portrayal was made by the Latin American economist Andre Gunder Frank, who methodically dismantled these stifling clas...
Web structure mining in static web contents decreases the accuracy of mined outcomes and affects the quality of decision making activity. By structure mining in web hidden data, the accuracy ratio of mined outcomes can be improved, thus enhancing the reliability and quality of decision making activity. Data Mining is an automated or semi automated exploration and analysis of large volume of data in order to reveal meaningful patterns. The term web mining is the discovery and analysis of useful information from World Wide Web that helps web search engines to find high quality web pages and enhances web click stream analysis. One branch of web mining is web structure mining. The goal of which is to generate structural summary about the Web site and Web pages. Web structure mining tries to discover the link structure of the hyperlinks at ...
In this paper we present our work in progress towards obtaining a Nelson-Oppen style combination for combining quantified theories, where each individual component theory admits quantifier elimination. We introduces the notion of good model for union theories, and show that for the good models of union theories, there exists a simple quantifier elimination scheme which uses the elimination procedures for individual component theories as black boxes. Using a priority argument, we show that good models exist for the union theory of dense linear order and random graph.
Globally distributed stakeholders employ various collaborative technologies to manage requirements. While these technologies facilitate requirements collaboration, their perceived purpose, use and structure co-evolve over time. In this paper we report the results of a study in two global software development settings involving client-vendor relationships. In both cases we noted that the vendor and client sites appropriated spreadsheet technology in quite specific ways, for use locally and for bridging across sites. Yet these spreadsheet files were embedded within different collaborative technologies. Through close study we note how team members practices co-evolved with the spreadsheet artefacts involved in the process of managing requirements change. We note how through a single spreadsheet cell, we may see a world as in William Blake...
COBIT is a well-known framework for IT governance, and provides an extensive list of control objectives for IT managers. However, anecdotal evidence shows that many organizations that use COBIT do not implement the entire framework. Instead, they focus their efforts on only some of COBIT’s control objectives. We argue that this could be due to the bounded rationality of IT managers, which affects their ability to assess the outcomes of control, and the diminishing returns from implementing controls, because of enforcement costs incurred to control shirking. Managers would thus find it useful if the various control objectives could be ranked, so that they could prioritize their efforts. We use network analysis to identify the most central control objectives in COBIT. We also discuss the development of a measure of “control capital” to c...
This paper looks at the representations of housekeeping and housekeepers in the popular television series Hotel Babylon. The paper discusses some possible effects of the impression constructed of this area of hotel employment and suggests that the image of a hospitality career in housekeeping is undermined and undervalued by this construction. The paper takes a reflective approach and looks at how language and image in the ‘Hotel Babylon’ series are constructed regarding the housekeeping department and workers. The paper posits that image of housekeeping work and those employees is one of mainly migrant workers, sexualized victims and denigrated employees. The paper goes to suggest that housekeeping is in fact often the largest and most important department in hotels as the majority of their income is derived from the sale of rooms. Th...
A recent (2010) report by Business and Economic Research Limited (BERL) has highlighted concerns regarding qualification levels and productivity within the New Zealand hospitality workforce. The hospitality sector employs 6.6 percent of all working people in New Zealand, yet it only produces two percent of national gross domestic profit (GDP) (Stokes, Norman & Ganesh 2010). The report suggests the hospitality sector suffers from lower than average qualification rates, which may be one factor driving poor productivity performance.
This paper focuses on the New Zealand hospitality accommodation sector and investigates the types of qualifications held by employees within a large hotel organisation. An online survey was completed by 172 respondents (59.3% response). The paper discusses the effect of gender, ethnicity and age on qualificat...
Until recently, master’s degrees were primarily focused on developing research skills and enabling further specialisation in a subject area studied at undergraduate level. Over the last twenty years their focus has broadened and there is now a wide variety of master’s degrees, partly as a result of increasing participation in higher education and also because of the demand for professional qualifications at postgraduate level. Alongside this, not only has there been significant growth in the numbers of master’s qualifications, but also increasing variation in terms of the focus of the curriculum and, the volume of work required for completion of the degree. As Davies (2009) so fittingly comments, this variety of modes and purposes gives the master’s degree ‘a polymorphous character, which is not yet well charted’ (p.17). Taking a quali...
In order to make timely and effective decisions, businesses need the latest information from data warehouse repositories. To keep these repositories up-to-date with respect to end user updates, near-real-time data integration is required. An important phase in near-real-time data integration is data transformation where the stream of updates is joined with disk-based master data. The stream-based algorithm Mesh Join (MESHJOIN) has been proposed to amortize disk access over fast stream. MESHJOIN makes no assumptions about the data distribution. In real world applications, however, skewed distributions can be found, e.g, certain products are sold more frequently than the remainder of the products. The question arises, how much does MESHJOIN loose in terms of performance by not adapting to data skew. In this paper we perform a rigorous ex...
