Jobs and tasks as a starting point for work automation research

Abstract

As automation technology has proliferated in tourism through robots, chatbots and kiosks, research on work automation has also increased, leading to concerns about the impact of automation technologies on employment. However, research has generally ignored the tasks performed in each job. This issue has been highlighted in the literature as an explanation for why the expected impact of automation technology on job losses has not occurred. This study focuses on the case of sun and beach hotels and provides the distribution of employment across jobs, and the tasks of the most common jobs in these hotels. We suggest that this detailed information is needed to improve the rigour of research on work automation.