PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review what we know – and don't know – about Generation Y's use of social media and to assess the implications for individuals, firms and society.Design/methodology/approachThe paper distinguishes Generation Y from other cohorts in terms of systematic differences in values, preferences and behavior that are stable over time (as opposed to maturational or other differences). It describes their social media use and highlights evidence of intra‐generational variance arising from environmental factors (including economic, cultural, technological and political/legal factors) and individual factors. Individual factors include stable factors (including socio‐economic status, age and lifecycle stage) and dynamic, endogenous factors (including goals, emotions, and social norms).The paper discusses how Generation Y's use of social media influences individuals, firms and society. It develops managerial implications and a research agenda.FindingsPrior research on the social media use of Generation Y raises more questions than it answers. It: focuses primarily on the USA and/or (at most) one other country, ignoring other regions with large and fast‐growing Generation Y populations where social‐media use and its determinants may differ significantly; tends to study students whose behaviors may change over their life cycle stages; relies on self‐reports by different age groups to infer Generation Y's social media use; and does not examine the drivers and outcomes of social‐media use. This paper's conceptual framework yields a detailed set of research questions.Originality/valueThis paper provides a conceptual framework for considering the antecedents and consequences of Generation Y's social media usage. It identifies unanswered questions about Generation Y's use of social media, as well as practical insights for managers.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitality workforce in situ between mid-April and June 2020. Design/methodology/approach This is a viewpoint paper that brings together a variety of sources and intelligence relating the impacts on hospitality work of the COVID-19 pandemic at three levels: macro (global, policy, government), meso (organisational) and micro (employee). It questions whether the situations faced by hospitality workers as a result of the pandemic are seed-change different from the precarious lives they normally lead or just a (loud) amplification of the “normal”. Findings In light of the fluid environment relating to COVID-19, conclusions are tentative and question whether hospitality stakeholders, particularly consumers, governments and the industry itself, will emerge from the pandemic with changed attitudes to hospitality work and hospitality workers. Practical implications This raises questions about hospitality work for key stakeholders to address in the future, some of which are systemic in terms of how precarious labour forces, critical to the global economy are to be considered by policy makers, organisations in a re-emerging competitive market for talent and for those who chose (or not) to work in hospitality. Social implications This paper contributes to ongoing debates about precarious work and the extent to which such practices are institutionalised and adopts an “amplification model” that may have value in futures-orientated analysis about hospitality and tourism. Originality/value This paper is wholly original and a reflection on the COVID-19 crisis. It provides a point of wider reference with regard to responses to crises and their impact on employment in hospitality, highlighting how ongoing change, fluidity and uncertainty serve to magnify and exacerbate the precarious nature of work in the industry.

Consumer attitudes and behavioural intentions towards environmentally sustainable practices in restaurants is an under-explored area in the hospitality literature, despite the growing ‘green’ trend. This article analyses data collected from 455 restaurant customers across five casual dining restaurants to gain insight into consumer attitudes towards, and willingness to pay more for, restaurants that engage in ‘green’ practices. The findings illustrate that there is an unfilled market niche for ‘green’ restaurants, as customers care about restaurants protecting the environment and would be willing to pay more to offset any additional costs associated with ‘green’ practices.

This paper offers a critical review, purview and future view of 'workforce' research. We argue that the tourism (and hospitality) workforce research domain, beyond being neglected relative to its importance, suffers from piecemeal approaches at topic, analytical, theoretical and methods levels. We adopt a three-tiered macro, meso and micro level framework into which we map the five pervasive themes from our systematic review across a 10 year period (2005-2014). A critique of the literature, following a 'representations' narrative, culminates in the modelling of a tourism workforce taxonomy, which we propose should guide the acknowledgement and advancement of more holistic tourism workforce knowledge development.

This article reports the findings of a study of 327 Australian hotel frontline employees using a survey of job embeddedness. The research provides a novel application of the job embeddedness construct to the hospitality industry, not only validating the factor structure of the job embeddedness scale, but also investigating the relationship between job embeddedness and other job-related attitudes that influence employee turnover. Findings indicated that a six factor solution is the best explanation. Testing a model of the embeddedness-commitment and embeddedness-turnover relationship, the embeddedness dimensions of organizational sacrifice and community links displayed a positive relationship with organizational commitment. A negative relationship was found between organizational sacrifice and intentions to leave, while a positive relationship was found between community links and intentions to leave. One implication for hospitality managers is that there is an opportunity for hotel organizations to increase the job embeddedness of their employees by increasing the perceived costs of leaving.

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There is consensus that the social, or people, dimension of sustainability including its workforce thematics are neglected in the tourism literature and policy despite its prevalence in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Premised on the understanding that sustainability is inherently set in neo-liberal discourses of progress, development and growth, we set about to investigate tourism's performance principally relative to SDG, no. 8 (UN, 2015), which calls for 'decent work'. Underpinned by precarity, an emerging sociological concept applied in the workforce context, and adopting critical approaches, this paper presents a review of a sample of industry reports from global, regional and national levels. The study provides evidence that tourism sustains precarity vis-à-vis its employment practices. Our findings suggest that, counter to prevailing sustainability discourse, tourism (employment) sustains deep social cleavages and economic inequalities-a triumvirate of precariousness of work, precariousness at work and subsequent precariousness of life.

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