The Industry of Cruises: Neglecting Hospitality

Introduction

The expansion of globalization has created not only high mobility but also a liquid society which expanded the limits of sociology as never before (Bauman, 2013). Recently, mobilities became a buzz-word, a widely-used term in the circles of academicians in Europe and the US. However, as Bauman puts it, there are two types of mobilities between the global North and South. On one hand, tourists living in developed nations are legally encouraged to travel to different geographical points. On another, in the opposite scenario are situated asylum-seekers, migrants and refugees who are systematically persecuted and deported (Lyon & Bauman 2013). The global North seems to be reluctant to welcome migrants coming from the South. Based on the needs of rethinking the migratory paradoxes, academicians who are interested in mobilities emphasize on the material asymmetries created to capitalism. In Mobilities Paradox: a critical analysis we hold the thesis that the modern nation-state disciplined and controlled many nomad ethnicities disposing their subordinations into a specific territory. In so doing, the state imposed a false sense of mobility to construct the basis of its hegemony. To put the same in other terms, mobilities serve as an ideological discourse to legitimate workers´ exploration (Korstanje 2018). Once mobilities became in a dominant narrative the world was divided into two: mobile and immobile societies. Being or not mobile seems to be a question of status and privilege. While the exemplary center enjoys from a climate of economic prosperity where travels and cultural consumptions are the main characteristics, a “doomed” periphery remains immobile. The evidence suggests that tourists demand the same comfort they had in their societies, which lead locals to import countless commodities and goods. This global modernity escapes to the hegemony of nations. The scrutiny of governments on the private sector or the “liberal market” is slim. In a more than interesting book as Advances Introduction to Globalisation, Jonhathan Michie (2017) alerts that the liberal thinking has failed in introducing a clear understanding of mobilities and globalization. The recent stock and market crisis happened in 2008 reminds the importance of regulating the capital market. Based on the theory of A. Glyn, the author acknowledges that the European powers –in the former centuries- imposed a colonial rule which allowed a rapid growth. Once consolidated, cynically they promoted the idea of free-market in order for the impoverished periphery to bolster a fluid commerce with them. The golden Age of Capitalism, which characterized by the induction of scale production set the pace to a global and disordered capitalism where speculation, privatization and the weakening of working unions prevailed. The dominant ideology convinced scholars that globalization was the hallmark of modernity ignoring that each civilization –adapted to their particular backgrounds- were mobile and modern. From that moment onwards, the exegetes of “the unleashed capitalism” introduced the belief that deregulation and the lack of financial barriers were the key forces towards development (Michie 2017). What is more important, the velocity and liberty for capital reproduction is inversely proportional to human movement. Rather, for Oswin & Yeoh modernity cannot be conceived beyond the expansion of travels and end of nation-states. High mobile cities characterize by the constant negotiation and multiple identities. The act of travelling implies surely new forms of power, which confront to the established national sovereignty. Travels and discoveries were the symbolic touchstone of West. Although as a cultural project the concept of nationhood was oriented to encourage mobilities, no less true is that mobilities are now eroding the basis of nation-state. At the time globalization expands, the classic hegemony of nation-state dilutes (Oswin & Yeo 2010). The modern mobilities allow great financial corporations to move freely while blue-collar workers are constrained to their native home.