Introduction

With people's growing desire to be healthy, fit and environmentally sensitive, wellness is becoming increasingly popular as a concept. This constitutes a motivation for a certain type of tourism: health and wellness tourism (HWT). In Hungary, spas represent an important element of this sector, which has been rapidly expanding to serve a (Western) European market. Professionally organised spas are based on trans-sectoral employment and – ideally – employees have experience in both the health and tourism sectors and have tourism and management competencies. No standardised occupational profile exists in the sector, however, and there is a lack of data on employees’ professional backgrounds. The as yet ‘free-floating’ HWT sector thus provides an exciting opportunity to investigate how cross-mobility may translate into the rise of a new professional project.

This chapter explores the patterns of movement, the strategies of employees’ mobility and career pathways in the HWT sector. The analysis is based on material from an exploratory study and includes various human, organisational and social factors that either enable or hinder career development. I combine approaches from the sociology of professions and sociology of work with career studies, arguing that the professionalisation of an occupational field determines the career possibilities of employees. While the emerging HWT sector cannot provide well-defined organisational career pathways, it may offer employees more freedom in managing their careers and lives.

I start with some theoretical considerations and move on to present a theoretical and methodological approach applied to the study of the HWT sector. This is followed by empirical findings on professional competencies and career moves in this sector, especially emphasising individual demands on professional ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’ and ‘work/life balance’. The conclusion attempts to understand the meaning of being a professional in a fluid occupational field.

Professionals, ‘entreployees’ and careers – theoretical connections

Within the emerging HWT sector the workforce crosses the boundary between an occupation and a profession, and explores its own mobility paths and career options (see Ladkin and Riley, 1994, 1996; Ladkin et al, 2002). It may therefore be a fruitful approach to connect different theoretical approaches. According to Hughes (1958), an occupation implies a set of social relationships that provides a form of social identity.