Introduction

Subjected to unprecedented opportunities but also to the hazards of the triumph of the leisure society [VIA 15], human resource management (HRM), which is part of the world of large tourist organizations, appears to be critical in many respects [GRE 19]. In the same vein, the individual is in a paradoxical position: envied and desired as a consumer, he or she is too often seen as a burden or optimized as an employee. This twofold consideration compromises adherence to the managerial discourse and cultures developed in the name of spreading values backed by customer service. But above all, it makes the organization dichotomous, which undermines the substance that can be attributed to its societal mission, at a time when CSR issues are essential in democratic debates. Both the hotel industry and air transport are not spared from the aforementioned singularities that they sometimes illustrate even to excess.

In addition, the two sectors have experienced a concomitant expansion [GAY 17], especially from the 1950s onwards. The first is essential to the second in order to attract tourists to the destinations served, to urbanize them in part but also to provide good accommodation for crews, so that many airlines have chosen to invest in hotel chains. Pan Am was a pioneer in creating the Intercontinental Hotel Corporation (IHC), which opened its first 85-room hotel in Belem, Brazil, in 1949, due to the lack of quality hotels available on site. In the same perspective, Trans World Airways (TWA) acquired the international branch of the Hilton Group in 1967 in order to become more international. In Europe, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Air France was no exception, first making stakes in French air representatives located in the French colonies in Africa, then creating in 1970 the subsidiary Hotel France International (HFI), which became Le Méridien.

These examples, which could be further supported by the cases of holiday clubs and their integrated airlines and hotel chains, attest to the intertwining of the two sectors and sometimes their connection to a common parent company. These proximities undoubtedly explain why Accor has coveted - without success - the public shares of the Air France Group. Although financial and strategic logics meet, professional cultures remain far apart, which makes the idea of a corporate HR department producing homogenized and global policies illusory. However, beyond these obvious divisions, the hotel and airline sectors have similar basic trends: opposition of internal trades and formation of "clans" (front and back, room and kitchen, accommodation and catering, ground and sky, cabin and cockpit), wide range of qualifications, recomposition of skill portfolios and rise in soft skills, from receptionist to hostess, to the captain who must now act as an expert in crew relationship management. The turbulence endured is also comparable. As sectors largely affected by mergers and acquisitions, both the hotel and airline sectors are imposing changes on their staff that permanently alter their ability to project themselves and plan a controlled professional trajectory.

Similarly, the constant search for savings and improved profitability exposes individuals to increasing labor flexibility, exacerbated by the outsourcing policies observed in both sectors in order to bring about the "low-skills" class: the luxury hotel caretakers mentioned by Gilles Alfonsi and Edouard Deluxe [ALF 13] among Parisian hotel staff in charge of housekeeping, or the "invisible workers" [BRU 17] on airport runways.

Moreover, neither of these two domains can be reduced to a single sectoral approach, given the internal heterogeneity that reveals a complex logic of "worlds"1. Those of the hotel industry, presented in the first part of the book, suggest contrasting environments depending on the size and financial strength of investors, non-hotel owners or owner-operators, affiliated or not in a chain, voluntary or integrated (Chapter 1). Similarly, the choice of a heritage hotel transforms the mission of the staff responsible for embodying the site in its originality, while employees in the standardized hotel industry can better comply with preformatted scripts.

Finally, everyone is called upon to promote their personality in order to create emotion, re-enchantment, satisfaction and interpersonal skills in the service of an experience that is more than ever urged as a co-production. These "summonses" to intervene positively in the customer journey transform the professions traditionally built on restraint and discreet propriety, to confuse some of them through the enhancement of front office soft skills in particular (Chapter 2). The spaces invested in by the hotel industry also have other variabilities. On the one hand, the historic spaces of a hotel industry that is winning back its customers, attracted by the alternative promises of the collaborative economy but also strengthened by a tradition that underlies know-how that can now be negotiated elsewhere, are being recomposed on the basis of a reaffirmed combination between culture (art and design), heritage and the culinary dimension. These new attributes of the hotel equation call for the rise of back office professions, also enhanced by the globalization of the sector (Chapter 3). Alongside "Lifestyle" or traditional hotels, the timeless category of luxury constitutes an autonomous world, with its own codes and rules, capable of stimulating the motivations of passionate individuals, captivated by the possibility of capturing by proxy a little of the fantasized life of famous customers. In these "houses", the possibility of a career, built by internal evolution, still functions as an attractor with a commitment that is sometimes difficult to develop in the other levels of the range (Chapter 4).

On the other hand, recent and vertically extended hotels, defined within the outlines of emerging tourist countries, where accommodation capacities must accompany the metamorphosis of tourism practices between imitation of the West and definition of local customs, imprint their silhouettes in those of world cities and sometimes "high places", which are not metropolises (like the Hualuxe Hotels and Resorts of IHG). In these contexts and in these worlds (Chapter 5), the difficulty of HRM seems to be able to apply the principles of the "glocal" approach, which is ultimately complex to build and deploy, unless one has the ability to control interstitial zones, halfway between local and corporate culture, always subject to the nuances of interculturality. Poland (Chapter 6) and China (Chapter 7) will allow us here to illustrate these challenges and scales, after having demonstrated the structural presence of "worlds in the vast world" of the hotel industry.

In the aviation world, discussed in the second part of this book, the same pattern is reproduced: according to the geographical areas delimited by particular growth areas (United States, Europe, Asia, Middle East, etc.), but also according to the types of companies (legacy or full service, charter, low cost and no frills2, leasing companies, business companies, etc.) or from the ownership of a parent company or its regional and low cost subsidiaries, employment conditions such as HRM differ from one company to another, exposing employees of the same denomination to disparate and unequal positions. The situation rents of some people are not necessarily correlated to the economic success of the model of the company in which they operate, but rather to the age of the structure and its social culture, where social benefits won by the trade union struggle have been built and stratified, depending on the more or less decisive areas of uncertainty held by the forces involved. In this context, talking about HRM for the air sector does not mean that there is a homogeneous reality that would simply be modified by national legislation. Air transport is indeed characterized by worlds that intersect in the air and compete on land, at the cost of many social adjustments, and against a backdrop of uninterrupted social crisis.

However, from one sphere to another, the reasons for trade union demands change, sometimes based on defensive logics of preserving social heritage, sometimes on offensive logics of social conquest, but signifying, in any case, renegotiations of internal balances, undermined by the chaos of ever-increasing liberalization and the trivialization of travel, associated with its social diffusion. These worlds, designed in particular following the upheavals of the 1990s, are not frozen and have intense areas of permeability: when full-service companies develop low-cost subsidiaries internally; when they decide to convert to low cost themselves; when low-cost subsidiaries become charters or when low-cost subsidiaries return to the parent company; when a regional subsidiary also relies on charter companies to operate, occasionally offering leasing; or when, finally, a foreign company acquires a national company, with or without the desire to preserve it in its original identity.

Each situation evokes paradoxes and ambiguities for staff subject to double binds and unequal treatment, but also to group and clan logic, which leads to social friction. In these climates of division, there are still opposing ambitions to adjust upwards for some (the worst-off employees) and to level down for employers. These tensions undermine the stability of collectives whose passion for the profession and the need for permanent consideration of safety exclude true psychological...