Governing the tourist host: courtesy, service labour and destination-making in Singapore

This article traces how courtesy moved from a civic ideal into the everyday organisation of tourist-facing service work in Singapore between 1971 and 1985. Tourism did not create Singapore’s politics of courtesy. Road-safety campaigns, public rhetoric, and airline promotion had already connected good conduct to urban order and national representation. From the late 1970s, however, the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board and a wider circle of hotels, unions, training bodies, and transport organisations increasingly tied courteous behaviour to destination reputation and repeat visitation. Government records, newspapers, advertisements, and industry materials reveal a sequence from dispersed antecedents in the early 1970s, through the STPB’s tourist-courtesy campaign in 1978 and its national expansion in 1979, to workplace initiatives involving training, awards, staff performances, service standards, and employee assessment in the early 1980s. By placing service labour at the centre of destination-making, the article shows that Singapore’s tourism image depended not only on infrastructure and promotion but also on attempts to organise the encounters through which visitors experienced the city.