upon the retirement of Prof. Reichel, a tribute by Prof. Natan Uriely, Department of Hotel and Tourism Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Introduction:
When offered to present a portrait of Prof. Arie Reichel, my first reaction was that “it is too close for comfort.” Twenty-four years ago, Reichel was the person who recruited me to the university and the department, where I still work. He became a colleague and friend with whom I collaborated on many research projects, celebrated personal achievements, and on several occasions “crossed stormy waters” together in our academic lives. I thought that I might not be removed far enough to paint an objective portrait of him, that I might skip an achievement he considers to be important, or stress another accomplishment that he regards as marginal. Worse, I might write another boring paper, this time about an interesting person. Although I was aware of the risks, I could not resist the opportunity to pay a tribute to someone who deserves it. I hope the following sketch of Arie Reichel’s biography and his contribution to the study of tourism in general and to Israeli academia in particular will disprove my initial concerns.
Personal Background
Arie Reichel was born in Kfar Saba, Israel (1950), and spent his childhood and adolescence in Kfar Maas, a small village near Tel Aviv. After three years of military service (1968–1971), he began his academic education at Tel Aviv University, where he earned a BA degree in sociology and social anthropology (1971–1974), and continued for a graduate degree at the School of Management. His interest in tourism was sparked when he was a graduate student at Tel Aviv University, by his encounter with Prof. Abraham Pizam, who became his mentor and eventually his close colleague. As a young student with academic aspirations, Reichel wanted a campus job, and Pizam was looking for a research assistant. This random match became a life-changing event for Reichel. Without completing his graduate studies at Tel Aviv University, he followed his mentor to the University of Massachusetts, US, to pursue his doctoral studies, where he received strong foundations in management, with further specialization in tourism management (1976–1980). After graduation, he served as Assistant Professor of management at New York University, US (1979–1984), and also taught a course in tourism planning and development at The New School for Social Research (1982–1984). Living in Manhattan in the early 1980s was exciting for the young scholar, who found himself at what he used to call “the center of the world.” Yet, on one of his visits to Israel he realized how difficult it was for his ageing parents to be so far away from their son, and felt that his long sojourn abroad might soon become irreversible. He therefore accepted an offer from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), where he ended up spending most of his academic career (1984–2019). In subsequent years, he became increasingly interested and active in the field of tourism and hospitality research, which was at that time a somewhat obscure but challenging and relatively intimate field. Tourism became the main area of research for Reichel from 1994 onward, when he founded the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management at BGU.
Style of academic work
Consistent with the mentor-follower academic models, Reichel often stressed the need for intensive teamwork when articulating a research problem, formulating a research design, collect-ing data, and conducting the rest of the scientific process. In Israel, this style of academic work has the additional value of ensuring that graduate students and young researchers emulate the particular style of English language used in writing research papers. Under his leadership, team-work has been a key element in the organizational culture of our department, and an effective way to undertake research projects indented for publication in leading journals. Working together, in pairs or triads, for long hours, in our small offices, and arguing about the correct interpretation of findings or the appropriate words to use, has resulted in effective brainstorming and a personal form of association that contains elements of pleasurable sociability.
Equipped with knowledge, experience, and an open mind, Reichel was a principal actor in these teamwork sessions. His mentorship was mostly evident in his ability to synthesize and guide the ideas of research students and young scholars in the direction of publishable research papers. As founder and the first c hairperson o f t he d epartment, he deserves the credit for the brain-storming style of teamwork established at the BGU Hotel and Tourism Department. He was also the knowledgeable researcher to be approached when deciding which journal is appropriate for a certain paper, and the experienced scholar who taught his young colleagues the practice of revisions, including how to handle rejections.
Streams of research
Arie Reichel is a versatile researcher who writes about a range of topics, mainly in the field of tourism scholarship. He draws on concepts and theories from different areas of knowledge, including marketing, strategic management, sociology, and social psychology, and his studies apply both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The following account of the topics he studied over the years is not complete, but it covers the core of his research agenda.
One stream of research that Reichel conducted over the course of decades is the study of residents’ attitudes towards tourists and tourism, a topic that has recently took centre stage in public attention, with the emerging interest in the concept of over-tourism (Seraphin, Sheeran, & Pilato, 2018). Note that this “hot” topic recycles ideas from early tourism studies, in which the problem of carrying capacity and its effect on locals at tourist destinations have already been recognized (Butler, 1980; Pizam, 1978). The importance of residents’ attitudes for the success of tourism and the wellbeing of locals was first introduced to Reichel by his mentor, Abraham Pizam, when he arrived at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in the late 1970s. Residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, had mixed feelings towards tourists (Pizam, Neumann, & Reichel, 1978). On one hand, the tourists were a main source of income and were clearly welcome, but on the other, some residents felt that they would prefer to be elsewhere during the high season. Ambivalent and diverse attitudes towards tourists and tourism have been observed in other locations as well, where Reichel and colleagues conducted research, including the city of Nazareth (Israeli, Uriely, & Reichel, 2002; Uriely, Israeli, & Reichel, 2002, 2003) and the Sinai Peninsula (Uriely, Maoz, & Reichel, 2009).
Yet, Reichel suspected that when “community” was treated as a unified entity that ostensibly stood against the development of tourism, especially in developing countries, it often reflected a paternalistic ideology rather than a rigorous empirical approach. Reichel’s call for a balanced perspective and empirical research was evident in his
studies of tourism development, where in
addition to local residents, attention was paid to other stakeholders, including consumers, entrepreneurs from the private sector, and governmental agencies (Haber & Reichel, 2005; Reichel & Haber, 2005; Reichel & Uriely, 2003; Reichel, Uriely, & Shani, 2008).
Another stream of research conducted by Reichel concerns tourist behaviour, mainly from the perspective of marketing and consumer behaviour. His studies about tourists’ risk perception (Fuchs & Reichel, 2006; Fuchs & Reichel, 2011; Reichel, Fuchs, & Uriely, 2007, 2009) received considerable attention and initiated enlightening discussions about the definition and measure-ment of such concepts as “perceived risk” and “worries” (Larsen, Brun, & Øgaard, 2009; Wolf, Larsen, & Ogaard, 2019). His studies in this line of research were based on the notion of tourists as risk-averse consumers, and stressed the multidimensionality of tourists’ perceived risks. To gain a wider understanding of risk-related behaviour by tourists, Reichel and colleagues shifted attention away from risk-averse to voluntary risk-taking by tourists, when visiting destinations exposed to terror in Sinai (Fuchs, Uriely, Reichel, & Maoz, 2013; Uriely, Maoz, & Reichel, 2007), undertaking health tourism at volatile destinations (Fuchs & Reichel, 2010), and participating in Scuba diving (Fuchs, Reichel, & Shani, 2016). These studies shed light on behaviours and rationalizations of tourists who either seek or ignore various aspects of risk.
Reichel’s inclination to examine tourist behaviour from the perspective of consumer behaviour is also evident in a series of studies about particular segments, including backpackers (Reichel et al., 2007, 2009), visitors at heritage attractions (Biran, Poria, & Reichel, 2006; Poria, Biran, & Reichel, 2009; Poria, Reichel, & Biran, 2006b; Reichel et al., 2007), and tourists with disabilities, such as the movement-challenged, blind, and obese (Poria, Reichel, & Brandt, 2009, 2010, 2011). The studies about the handicapped tourists turned the spotlight on a population that was discriminated against, and suggested relatively simple means to alleviate existing difficulties. Sensitivity and empathy to the needs of marginalized people and peripheral regions is evident in Reichel’s research as well as in his administrative activity within the academic sphere and beyond it.
Academic entrepreneurship and leadership
Reichel founded the first Department of Hotel and Tourism Management in Israel (1994). The accreditation of a previously non-existent bachelor’s degree, followed by master’s and Ph.D. degrees, in the area of hospitality and tourism management attests to the field coming of age as an independent academic domain in Israel. The success of the program at BGU and its accreditation prompted a surge in similar programs across Israel. Reichel understood the academic arena, and promoted the vision that the department at BGU should be the flagship of tourism research in Israel. Although there are highly skilled, world-renowned scholars of tourism at various academic institutions and programs in Israel, only the BGU department was able to achieve a high ranking, among the top 20 universities worldwide, in research contribution to the field (Li & Xu, 2014).
The success of the BGU Hotel and Tourism Department was attained in a two-stage process implemented by Reichel. In the first stage, he recruited scholars, like myself, who began their academic careers in other disciplines, and had some sort of connection to tourism or hospitality research. In my case, it was a year of post-doctoral scholarship at the Sociology and Anthropology Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I met Erik Cohen, who kindled my curiosity for the sociology of tourism. Under the guidance of Arie Reichel, I shifted the focus of my research towards tourism, mainly, but not only, from a sociological perspective. Other colleagues, such as Aviad Israeli, had a similar experience. In the second stage, Reichel invested resources in developing a generation of scholars who specialize in tourism already in their undergraduate or graduate degree – often referred to in the department as the “T generation.” Promising students from the department and other related units at BGU, such as Yaniv Poria, Yaniv Belhassen, Amir Shani, and Galia Fuchs, were sent to Ph.D. and post-doctoral programs at leading tourism and hospitality departments worldwide, and returned as highly-skilled faculty members to the Hotel and Tourism Department. I daresay that for all of us, the initially recruited faculty and members of the T-generation, meeting Reichel was a life-changing event. He was the entrepreneur who provided us with a platform for pursuing an academic career in the area of tourism and hospitality research, the influential administrator who assisted in advancing our academic promotions, and the senior faculty member who guided us in organizational citizenship at BGU.
Reichel eventually founded and became the Dean of the Eilat campus of BGU (2001–2004), an extension of the main hotel and tourism program. Located in a popular Israeli tourist destination on the Red Sea, the Eilat extension supplies the local hospitality and tourism industry with educated young employees, and offers an excellent location for research. Equally important for Reichel, the Eilat campus serves the academic needs of local residents in a distant peripheral town, with limited access to higher education. A similar vision, in which welfare is considered to be as important as profit, guided Reichel in other entrepreneurial activities and administrative positions, such as being a member of a group that founded the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at BGU, and serving as Dean of the Faculty for two terms (2005–2011). Reichel’s period as Dean was the golden age for departments that are often located at the fringes of business schools, such as Management of Health Systems, Public Policy and Administration, and Hotel and Tourism Management.
Conclusion
The above-portrayal of Arie Reichel reveals a pioneer in Israeli academic life. Reichel founded the first and leading academic department of tourism and hospitality in Israel, created the first and only university-level campus in the peripheral tourist destination of Eilat, and initiated the School of Business and Management at BGU. Under his leadership as chairperson or dean, these academic units emphasized the importance of diversity and empathy towards marginalized people and regions. His exceptional entrepreneurship and intensive involvement in academic administration were not carried out at the expense of research activity. As a busy chairperson and later as dean, he always found the time and invested the effort to advance his research agenda, which produced many highly-quoted papers in top-tier academic journals. As noted above, he collaborated intensively with students and young colleagues for whom he served officially or informally as a mentor. Reichel’s ability to empower his colleagues appears to be the most important feature of his academic leadership.
