Explaining social sustainability practices of hotels using a multi-theoretical approach: A narrative inquiry

The theorization of social sustainability practices (SSPs) has remained underdeveloped compared to its environmental and economic counterparts, and studies on firm-specific factors that enable SSPs are even more scanty. This study provides a theoretical explanation to SSPs of hotels. In so doing, the study facilitates the growth of social sustainability theory as well as practice in the hospitality industry. Through narrative interviews with purposively constituted focus groups, comprising of directors, top managers, supervisor and lower-end staff of a 5-star hotel in Uganda, the authors developed a story highlighting the hotel’s lived experiences, regarding SSPs while emphasizing the context, actions, outcomes and lessons. The story revealed stakeholder value co-creation, complex adaptive leadership and knowledge-based dynamic capabilities as essential enablers of SSPs. The findings suggest that SSPs are explained by a nuanced interplay of stakeholder theory, complexity leadership theory and dynamic capabilities view, a novel stride in theorizing SSPs in hospitality context. Implications for managers as well as researchers are discussed.