A phenomenological approach to hospitality management research: Chefs’ occupational commitment

• Adopts an interpretivist paradigm, and phenomenological approach, for a hospitality workforce investigation.
• Addresses the lack of critical methodological appraisal in hospitality management research.
• Recasts and refines rhetoric analysis, previously applied to professional chefs.
• Findings suggest that unrequited needs for creativity in work lead to boredom, job malcontent and turnover decisions.

This paper showcases the development of a mixed methods study empathetic with the interpretivist paradigm and deploying a phenomenological approach designed to investigate a perennial hospitality industry human resource management issue – organisational and occupational commitment. In so doing this paper builds onto a body of work which hallmarks the developmental maturity of hospitality scholarship. Specifically, the paper proposes that the judicial selection of various conceptual and operational research tools in the development of a methodology, including research strategy and design, facilitates commensurability and insights into research problems not otherwise necessarily illuminated by ‘aparadigmatic’ studies. The study finds that chefs, cookery being a core hospitality occupation, employ a range of rhetorical devices to reveal the meanings and understandings of shared values and beliefs integral to their occupational community; including creativity, which if unrequited, the research concludes, compromise organisational and occupational commitment.