Restaurant Chains in China : The Dilemma of Standardisation versus Authenticity

This book explores the paradox of the hospitality industry: customers demand not only personal and innovative tourism products and services, but also cost-effective ones. Enterprises have the option to meet the former demand by offering authentic products and services while the latter could be achieved through standardization. Although it seems ideal to combine both concepts, they seemingly contradict each other leading to suppliers facing an authenticity-standardization paradox. The authors identify, analyze, and provide solutions for this authenticity-standardization paradox based on a series of case studies of restaurants in China. This book will be of interest to scholars, business owners, and consultants. Guojun Zeng is Professor and Director of the Department of Hospitality Management, School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University. He has authored and coauthored publications in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, Journal of China Tourism Research, China Geographical Science, and many other journals. Henk J. de Vries is Associate Professor of Standardisation at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Guest researcher at the Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands. Frank M. Go passed away in 2017. He was Professor of Event and Tourism Marketing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He was ranked among the top 40 scholars in the world for academic leadership in tourism research, as measured by the number of articles published in eight journals in the field between 1985 and 2004