ABSTRACT
The balance between liberal and vocational values in hospitality higher education studies has long been a space within which education stakeholders have contested the rationales and merits of particular conceptual emphases. The ideological hegemony of the vocationalist agenda in the hospitality higher education curriculum has been well documented (Foucar-Szocki & Bolsing, 1999; Lashley, 2009; McCabe et al., 2008; Mulcahy, 1999). Hospitality scholars have spent the last decades chronicling and lamenting the steady and seemingly irreversibly hopeless decline of hospitality studies into the abyss of instrumental commercialism. Appeals for more attention to the balance between vocational and professional skills and the broader critical thinking and analytical skills usually associated with the social sciences and humanities are becoming more frequent in the tourism and hospitality education literature (Jamal, 2004; Jamal & Menzel, 2009; Munar, 2007; Ring et al., 2009). There has been a steady and growing stream of literature calling for the need to revitalize hospitality education and to incorporate liberal educational ideals and reflexive learning practices (Airey & Tribe, 2000; Inui & Lankford, 2006; Lashley, 1999, 2000, 2007; Morrison & O’Mahony, 2003).
