Conceptualising the Lecturer as Customer: Establishing Principles Underpinning a New Model for Organising the Tourism, Hospitality and Events School, an Exploratory Paper

Abstract

Higher education has, under the influence of global political, economic, social and other forces, undergone significant change, the results of which include a higher demand for user pays education and the positioning of the student as customer within a system that more and more resembles a managed economy. The concurrent emergence of management cultures, commoditisation and casualisation of education challenges traditional concepts of the role and status of faculty and the academic community. Within Tourism, Hospitality and Events education (THE), itself a relatively recent arrival, faculty status is further complicated by broader questions of legitimacy and sustainability as reseachers continue to disagree on the very essence of the THE disipline and graduate. This paper seeks to develop the principles underpinning a new model of organising the THE School and its internal actors to negotiate these challenges and stake a claim within the new higher education market economy, advancing the debate between the traditional and the managerial approaches to higher education managament. Identifying through a review of the literature a consensus on the THE graduate as the service thinker-doer, the paper then seeks to propose principles for organising the school that can best enable such a student to develop. The paper does this by identifing a gap in the approach of service marketing as hitherto applied to higher education; the paper uses an application of the ‘internal service blueprint’ to propose principles underpinning a model for re-aligning the institution around the core functions and missions of teaching, learning and research. Specifically, the lecturer is positioned as customer within the service blueprint and the student as service provider, an original exploration of the internal service blueprint within THE education.