A large part of vocational education and training (VET) concerns socialising the students into the occupation and for them to become part of the vocational culture (Colley et al. 2003). Within the hospitality industry, the interaction with the guest is central. Consequently, in the two Swedish upper secondary school vocational programmes that train for the hospitality industry, the Hotel and Tourism Programme and the Restaurant and Food Programme, a significant part of the training concerns interaction with guests. However, some important issues relating to interaction are insufficiently covered. In many hotel and restaurant workplaces, the employees perceive sexual harassment by guests as part of the job and vocational culture (Bråten 2019; Svensson 2020; Zampoukos et al. 2020). Despite this, the educational programmes do not always cover the issue (Hedlin & Klope 2022).

The fact that the issue of sexual harassment by guests is not always dealt with, or is dealt with inadequately, means that the students neither learn to deal with nor understand sexual harassment. This, in turn, may mean that the students use their “common sense” and often repeated discourses to understand, for example, how it can happen that a guest subjects a student or employee to sexual harassment.

The purpose of this study is to contribute knowledge about how VET students training for occupations in the hospitality industry, talk about why some guests subjects staff to sexual harassment and how we can understand these explanations from a discourse theoretical perspective.

Discourse analysis is both a theory and a method. It is useful for studying how explanations can be linked to notions that are more comprehensive. A definition of discourse is that it is a specific way of understanding and talking about the world, a way that is based on certain premises and, thus, has certain consequences. (Bakhtin 1999; Laclau & Mouffe 2001). Jørgensen and Phillips (2000) define discourse as a socially constructed system of meanings that could have been different. The way we see the world is always clearly dependent on the time and culture we live in. We need some order to be able to orientate ourselves, but at the same time, the social could have been constructed differently. The premise that things could have been constructed in other ways, however, does not mean that the social can be shaped in any way in a given situation, since there is great inertia in the social construction.

In Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) discourse theory, the constitutive dimension of language is central. They start from the post-structuralist assumption that language is characterised by a fundamental instability, which means that concepts and discourses cannot be fixed once and for all. Although there is a physical and highly tangible reality, the question of how we should understand it is a matter of social constructions. Laclau and Mouffe talk about discursive battles where different ways of describing reality or explaining an event are opposed to each other. Thus, the discourses are to be understood as competing ways of describing reality. The discourses that gain ground are in opposition to other discourses, which constitute reality in other ways, and which threaten to undermine the established discourses. Certain discourses can be relatively stable at certain historical times. There are matters that are not questioned, but it is always temporary. Even if a particular discourse can gain a hegemonic position and be considered self-evident in a certain society at a certain time, it will be challenged by other discourses sooner or later (Laclau & Mouffe 2001).

The empirical material consists of focus group interviews with upper secondary school students training to work in the hospitality industry. Before the students agreed to participate, they received both oral and written information about the purpose and design of the study. It was emphasised that participation was voluntary, and that each participant would also be free to cancel participation without explanation and without consequences. Furthermore, the informants were told that the project would lead to research that would be published and the empirical material was to be anonymised prior to publication (Vetenskapsrådet 2017). Twenty-two focus group interviews were conducted, and 2–8 students participated in each group. The use of focus groups is a data collection method where the researcher has a slightly different and more passive role compared to traditional group interviews. The intention is to get richer data by encouraging interaction between the informants in the focus group. The participants are given the opportunity to gain multiple perspectives by hearing other participants' ideas, and by interacting with each other they are given the opportunity to reflect, develop their reasoning and, thus, articulate thoughts that may be difficult to elicit in other types of interviews (Caldeborg 2018; Wibeck 2010). The participants attended either the Hotel and Tourism Programme or the Restaurant Management and Food Programme. They were in the third and final year of their education. Their ages ranged between 18and 20 years. Thus, the students were of legal age, and, in addition to the practicum included in the education programmes, most of them had employment in the form of weekend and summer jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry. 52 of the participants were women and 17 were men. None of them defined themselves in any other way. A total of 69 students were interviewed.

When the VET students in this study talk about the guests who subject staff to sexual harassment, they express six different lines of thinking that explain why the guests act in this way. One explanation is that it is a generational issue, something that in turn can be linked to a Discourse of modernity. Another explanation is that it is an information issue, which can be seen as part of what we call a Communication discourse. A third explanation is that it is about personality, which can be interpreted as an argument within the Discourse of psychology. A fourth explanation is that the guest's sexual harassment is a matter of alcohol influence, which we see as part of a Disclaimer discourse. Fifth, the students believe that sexual harassment is a matter of the male nature, a reasoning that we associate with a Gender binary discourse. The sixth explanation is that it is about guests taking advantage of their status, which can be understood as an explanation within a Discourse of power.

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