In an article for Human Resource Management Journal last year entitled `New approaches to HRM in the UK hotel industry’ Kim Hoque (1999) claims to discern new directions for human resource management in hotels. Specifically, he questioned the hospitality industry’ s image as a poor employer, suggesting that in recent years there had been enlightened developments in the application of HRM to the sector. Thus on page 74 he wrote: `It seems that, as managers have accepted the importance of service quality, they have also taken on board the need to ® nd new ways of employing their staff. Much of the evidence portraying the hotel industry as backward and unstrategic dates back to the 1980s. Such conventional stereotypes must now be viewed as increasingly dated, at least where larger hotel establishments are concerned’ . The purpose of this short comment is to suggest that there are stylistic, methodological and contextual issues associated with Hoque’s claims that demand both a cautious response and some circumspection in the treatment of his conclusions. In respect of stylistic issues, Hoque very much gives the impression that he wants to have his cake and eat it. His report comprises two principal elements in a clear state of tension. The first is an empirical study, the results treated with proper caution, that purports to lend support to his thesis as applied to a very small part of the hotel sector (some 230 larger hotels averaging 125 employees per unit compared to an industry `standard’ of 80 per cent of establishments employing fewer than 25 people). The second elemen t is what we can only describe as a `nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ tendency encouraging the view that the results of his survey have wider application to the hospitality sector. Thus, we have the very determined statement cited above that casts doubt on ’1980s evidence’ topped off with a rather significant caveat concerning larger hotels . Indeed , this tendency can be counterpointed to the recent findings of the Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) `Britain at work’ which suggests that the hotel and catering sector provided the worst employers in the UK. Elsewhere in Hoque’s article (page 65), empirical studies by Price (1994) and Lucas (1995, 1996) highly critical of the hotel industry’ s HRM failings, are contrasted to the `potential’ and `scope’ for HRM in the hotel industry revealed by `normative’ writers on the quality of HRM in the sector. Here some dozen references are marshalled in support of the thesis. However, in his eager selectivity, Hoque chooses to ignore other empirical and synergistic commentaries that support the positions of Price and Lucas and, moreover, constitute the dominant critical tradition in understanding employee and industrial relations in the hospitality sector (see for example Wood, 1997). It may be an obvious semantic point, but Hoque’s article is misnamed and there is a need for a clearer signal that Hoque is describing a small and unrepresentative area of the hotel industry. We accept that selectivity is always necessary both to support a clear argument and advance a personal interpretative position, and that established analytic traditions are fair game. In Hoque’s case, however, the effective dismissal of what constitutes the dominant research tradition in this ® eld of enquiry and, more importantly, the single largest body of consistent evidence pertaining to employment in hotels and catering, seems more a matter of not wanting to believe the evidence rather than replacing it with something better.