Impact of Evolving Economies on Socio-cultural Aspects of Hospitality Systems, India

Abstract

The influence of the perceptions of people towards the growing and emerging economies and the resulting marked changes that took place on values, norms, religious beliefs, lifestyles along with attitude towards other members of the society is investigated. Cultural metamorphosis has taken place in the social domain in India, drifting away from the very composition of the traditional family structures and as a result of this, India has become one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The society has started witnessing a new kind of predicament emanating from a relatively faster phase of transition in socio-economic characteristics. Personality traits of the people are studied to determine how the economy affects human nature and their enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to and thinking about oneself and the environment. The family structures are analysed with the origin and the nature of relationships based on Type theories and by a metaphoric comparison with Galaxy. Based on the Big Five Factors model, five types of psychological dispositions with varying degree of personality factors are found in the people. The five factors that are responsible to various psychological dispositions and for varying degree of personality traits are identified based on earlier established theories. The present analysis shows that depending on psychological dispositions, family orientation is tending to move, from open high spirits, towards more and more confined and self- centred structures.

Keywords: Evolving Economies, GDP, Family Structures, Psychological Types, Personality Traits

I.Introduction

An economic system is a way of policy formulation and implementation of public decisions that affect the general society or social systems (Charles F. Adrian, 1994). Economy involves in the production, distribution and use of goods and services by organizations or participants engaged (Morris Bronstein, 1989). A country’s social and cultural systems depend on and/or are shaped by its political ideology and economy. In a given society, a political ideology consists of a set of institutions and activities that link together with government, politics and public policy (David Easton 1957).

During the early 1990’s, Indian polity has set itself on the path of globalization and liberalization which was endorsed by all political parties. Shifting its attention from manufacturing to service industry, a major thrust has been given on the service sector as against the traditional agriculture and industrial sector. The process of dismantling of controls and regulations has started, state monopolies broken, tariffs, duties and taxes progressively lowered, which favoured an impetus towards the opening for new international trade and investments. Simultaneously, the Government of India further liberalized FDI to 100% in private participation in some crucial areas of development. The major components of the service sector, such as IT, IT-enabled services, along with the hospitality sector are intensively promoted.

Foreign direct investments (FDI) and foreign institutional investments (FII) have shown a marked growth, an average of fourfold rise in a short span of five years. As a result of these measures, the Indian economy with the GDP of $1.235 trillion stands as the 11th largest in the world (CIA, 2009). The perceptions of the people have started influencing the social domain both internally and externally towards the growing and emerging economies. The household hospitality nurtured and valued over thousands of years confronted a total transformation, bringing forth a new dimension of paid services by eating and dining out. As a result, a wide variety of changes have taken place in the families including family structures, functions, core values on regulated norms (Singh 2004).

The cultural metamorphosis has taken place, drifting away from the very composition of the family structures as a result of evolving economies in Indian society. These structures are analysed along with the nature of their relationships and metaphoric comparison with Galaxy and their universal relationships. It is observed that the structure is followed by consanguinity as joint families, supported by the extended family consequential to urban migration. Subsequently, conjugal nuclear families have emerged with the growth of the service sector and globalization, leading to the advent neutron single-parent family without any formal relationships.

These influences primarily appear to have a bearing on age, education, income levels, spending patterns (Chris Cooper et al, 2005) and personality traits. Personality types refer to the psychological classification of different types of people, whereas personality trait is personality types which come in different levels or degrees. Early works by Doxey (1975), Smith (1989) and Plog (2004) describe various personality types, their adaptation levels to local norms and psychographic analysis with regard to travels. However, during present investigations the author extended Types theory (Carl Jung, 1921) underlying psychologies to investigate the impact of evolving economies on family structures and hospitality patterns.

II. Impact of Liberated Economies

In India, the government institutions and their associates have pursued the path of liberalized policies, encouraging greater participation of private entities in both domestic and foreign capital investments. Duty-free enclaves, namely special economic zones (SEZ), are created by providing critical funding with several incentives in the core infrastructure which is essential to support the IT sector. The growth rate of GDP, share of service sector contribution to GDP along with the constituent components of service sector and their contribution with per capita income are presented in Table 1a and b.

S.No	Year	GDP Growth Rate in %	Share of  Service sector  in %	Per Capita Income  (in Rupees )
1	2004	8.3	58.8	20871
2	2005	9.3	60.2	23198
3	2006	9.7	61.1	26003
4	2007	9.1	62	29524
5	2008	7.3	63	33238
6	2009	5.9	64.5	37490

a. Growth rate of GDP, Share of contribution of Service Sector in percent along with Per Capita Income

S.No	Year	Components in the Service Sector and Percentage of Contribution
		Trade, Hotels,  Restaurants, Transport, Communication (%)	Financing   Insurance  Real Estate &  Business (%)	Community,  Social and   Personal   Services (%)	Construction (%)
1	2004	24.9	13.4	14.3	6.1
2	2005	25.7	13.5	14.2	6.6
3	2006	26.3	13.8	13.9	7
4	2007	27.1	14.3	13.4	7.2
5	2008	28	14.6	13.1	7.2
6	2009	28.6	14.8	13.9	7.3

b. Various Components of Service Sector contributing to GDP

Table 1: Growth Rate of GDP, Share of Service Sector along with the Detailed  Components and Per Capita Income

It  can   be   observed   from   Table   1a   that,   for   the   periods of 2004–2009, the national GDP varies from 5.9% to 9.7%.   The growth in the GDP is mainly attributed to the rise in the share of contribution of service sector accounting to almost 60% in all these years. The breakup of major constituents of service sector namely trade, hotels, finance, community  services and construction are presented in Table 1b, to investigate which  components of the service sector have contributed to the accelerated overall growth in compounding the rise in GDP.

Table  1b  shows  that  trade,  hotel  and  allied  components  are contributing almost double of that from other constituents in the service sector, namely  finance, personal service and real estate amounting to  around  30%.  Other  marginal  components  whose contribution is less than 5% are not included in Table 1b, which accounts for the observed difference of the total share of 100%. This in turn has given the scope and advancement of growth in hotels and restaurants to a marketing  proposition by creating tourism infrastructure as opined by David Weaver (2002). A visual impact of the growth in the trade and hotel sectors against the growth in GDP is shown in Figure 1 for comparison.