Lost in hybridity? About dilemmas endangering meaningful tourism education at German universities of applied sciences

Rundshagen Volker () and Gronau Werner ()
Additional contact information
Rundshagen Volker: University of Applied Sciences Stralsund School of Business Studies Zur Schwedenschanze 15, 18435 Stralsund Germany
Gronau Werner: University of Applied Sciences Stralsund School of Business Studies Zur Schwedenschanze 15, 18435 Stralsund Germany

Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft, 2022, vol. 14, issue 1, 42-65

Abstract: The contribution at hand sheds light on dramatically mounting tensions that academic tourism education in Germany is facing within the context of applied science universities. Drawing on the concept of organizational hybridity, we distil two dilemmas resulting from respectively incongruent expectation sets. Firstly, a spatial hybridity dilemma results from opposing missions of regional development and embeddedness versus internationalization prescriptions and efforts. Secondly, there is an ideational hybridity dilemma resulting from imperatives to serve employment markets versus academic purposes of serving social and scientific ideals. Based on a tourism program case from Northern Germany we highlight how a mélange of diverse, partly obscure and increasingly conflicting missions as well as largely inflated and for the most part incongruent stakeholder expectations threaten to tear the institution apart and to lead tourism education onto pathways where it could lose its bearings. We summarize our three major concerns of academics drifting off the course of integrity out of desperation resulting from overwhelming pressures, impoverished learning experience for our student constituencies and impoverishment of research in an era where we need meaningful research more than ever in tourism and beyond. We thus contribute to the debate about the future of tourism education in academia.

Keywords: tourism education; university of applied sciences; hybrid organizations; institutional logics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/tw-2021-0037 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:touwis:v:14:y:2022:i:1:p:42-65:n:4

DOI: 10.1515/tw-2021-0037

Access Statistics for this article

Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft is currently edited by Andreas Kagermeier

More articles in Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().