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Cornell Hotel and Restaurant
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DOI: 10.1177/0010880402435011
2002 43: 119Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly Cathy A. Enz and Masako S. Taylor
The Safety and Security of U.S. Hotels A Post-September-11 Report
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OCTOBER 2002 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly 119
HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
© 2002, CORNELL UNIVERSITY
A mong the many outcomes of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, is a renewed interest in the safety and security of hotels. This has always been an im-
portant issue, but it has become a top-of-the-mind matter for hotel guests and managers alike. For one thing, experts have warned that hotels themselves may become targets of terror- ism.1 In response to those concerns, some hotel operators have created new security procedures, such as conducting more detailed background checks on their employees. Hilton Ho- tels now requires customers to show a photo ID on check in, for instance, while Starwood Hotels and Resorts has raised
The Safety and Security of U.S. Hotels
A Post-September-11 Report
BY CATHY A. ENZ AND MASAKO S. TAYLOR
security standards in its parking garages.2 Industry experts have added their advice to the discussion by urging hotel operators to revise and update their safety and security plans for provid- ing a safe environment for guests.
Safety and security standards are made up of two major elements: (1) physical-safety attributes and (2) organizational systems and plans to ensure safe operation. This report fo- cuses chiefly on the first element, physical attributes, which includes the installation of specialized equipment and the provision of materials and information outlining safety and security procedures. The second element, organizational sys- tems and plans, includes employing and training safety and
U.S. hotels have a reasonably solid panoply of safety and security equipment—but there also are surprising gaps.
1 For example, see: Hotel Security Report, Vol. 19, No. 11 (October 2001), p. 1.
2 Ruthanne Terrero, “Hotels Step up Security: Prepare for Future Events by Training Employees,” Hotel Business, October 21–November 6, 2001, p. 15.
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120 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly OCTOBER 2002
The continuous flow of people in and out of
a hotel poses a longstanding challenge to the
property’s security and the guests’ safety.
security personnel, and establishing plans and procedures relating to safety and security issues.
Before we turn to our main topic, physical- safety and -security attributes, we touch on changes in hotels’ organizational systems and plans. To examine that aspect of safety, we con- ducted a study of general managers’ post- September-11 activities, investigating the degree to which they had altered their organizational sys- tems and plans.3 As a part of a larger survey to gain insights into hotel operators’ reactions to September 11, we asked hotel operators whether
they had reevaluated security procedures, made changes to their procedures, tightened security for guests, or added security staff. In contrast to media reports that hotels had enhanced their safety and security measures, our own study (con- ducted one month after September 11) revealed that over one-third of general managers surveyed had done nothing to alter their security proce- dures, and 25 percent had done nothing to tighten security for their guests. As we discuss below, this finding, though potentially disturb- ing, may be due to the possibility that many ho- tels already have reasonably complete security procedures in place.
The results, shown in Exhibit 1, revealed that GMs were not doing a large amount of reevalua- tion of their security procedures (only 29 per- cent indicated they had done a great deal), and even fewer were substantially changing their pro- cedures (only 12 percent reported making a great deal of change). When it came to adding em- ployees, about 70 percent of the GMs responded that they had made no additions to their secu- rity staff. While the overall picture would sug-
gest that little effort was devoted to rethinking safety and security, some hotels reported making a great deal of change. For example, luxury hotels, upscale hotels, convention and con- ference hotels, and airport hotels added security employees and either reevaluated or changed their procedures.
Already in place. While the data from our post-September-11 survey show considerable variations in U.S. hotels’ responses, what they do not reveal is the degree to which hotels had installed safety and security equipment before the terrorist attack. It is possible, for instance, that many hotels had already made considerable in- vestments in safety and security features (in ad- dition to any policies and procedures they may have developed). To explore the question of safety and security features in U.S. hotels, we devised a safety index and a security index, and then ex- amined how hotels scored on those indexes. Our purpose was to quantify the physical-safety and -security features in hotels and compare hotels by price segment, location, hotel type, age, and property size. This article details our findings.
Elements of Hotel Safety and Security The continuous flow of people in and out of a hotel poses a longstanding challenge to the property’s security and to the safety of the people in that hotel. Given the semi-public nature of hotel buildings, it is difficult to distinguish among guests, legitimate visitors, and people who are potential threats. In preserving customer-service standards, moreover, hoteliers may find it awk- ward to lock the doors at certain times or to re- quire identification for entry to the building. Indeed, maintaining the highest possible stan- dards of safety may stand in conflict with pre- serving hotels’ hospitable and welcoming im- age—creating potentially negative effects on customer service. While the lack of safety and security standards can be a liability, security that is too strict (or obtrusive) may ruin customers’ service experiences. Customers may say that they prefer hotels with high standards of safety and security, but at the same time they may be irri- tated when such standards cause inconvenience. As a consequence, hotel operators need to strike a sensitive balance between safety and accessible, friendly service.
3 For a discussion of this study and its findings regarding GMs’ attitudes and actions, see: Masako S. Taylor and Cathy A. Enz, “Voices from the Field,” Cornell Hotel and Restau- rant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 7–20.
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
EXHIBIT 1
Percentage of hotel GMs who implemented selected security strategies after September 11
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0 Not at all Not much A great deal
Reevaluated security procedures
Changed security procedures
Tightened security
Added safety and security staff
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122 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly OCTOBER 2002
Twin concepts. While the words “safety” and “security” are commonly used interchangeably, the two concepts differ in their focus. Safety in- volves protecting employees and customers within the hotel property from potential injury or death. Safety issues deal with the effects of accidents, hazardous materials, and fire, for ex- ample.4 In addition to the safety issues we just
mentioned, hotel security goes beyond protect- ing employees and guests and is also concerned with preserving guests’ possessions and the prop- erty itself. Security issues involve such matters as theft and violent crime. Indeed, some experts include safety as a category of security issues.5
We follow the experts’ lead in that regard and treat safety as a particular form of security that focuses on the protection of guests from injuries (whether from accidents or criminal activity).
EXHIBIT 2
Safety and security indexes
Physical Feature Weighting Physical Feature Weighting
Sprinklers 0.30 Electronic locks 0.40
Smoke detectors 0.25 Interior corridors 0.20
Safety materials 0.20 Security cameras 0.20
Safety videos 0.15 Safety materials 0.10
Security cameras 0.10 Safety videos 0.10
Safety Index Security Index
Note: To obtain a score, each weighted item is multiplied by 1 if the feature is present and 0 if the feature is absent. The resulting scores are summed and multiplied by 100 for a final index score. For example, a property with sprinklers and smoke detectors would have a safety-index score of 55 (out of a possible 100). See Exhibit 11 on page 136 for an example of how to use the indexes.
4 See: Dan M. Bowers, “Security Fundamentals for the Safety Engineer,” December 2001, pp. 31–33; and Raymond C. Ellis, Jr., and David M. Stipanuk, Security and Loss Prevention Management (East Lansing, MI: Educational Institute of the AH&MA, 1999). 5 Ellis and Stipanuk, op. cit.
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In conducting our study, we distinguish hotels’ safety attributes (e.g., sprinklers, smoke detectors, and guest-safety instructions) from se- curity features (e.g., electronic locks and interior corridors). We devised two indexes, one measur- ing safety amenities and the other assessing secu- rity equipment. We realize that an inventory of various physical-safety and security features is by no means exhaustive. (For example, appropriate lighting is an important safety feature that is not a part of our index and, in fact, is often over- looked.6 Other omitted safety features include fire extinguishers, accident-prevention and warn- ing signs, and glass protection, to name a few.) Moreover, the mere presence of such equipment as electronic locks and security cameras does not guarantee guests’ security in the absence of per- sonnel who are well trained to implement a fully developed emergency plan. On the other hand, a hotel would be hard pressed to implement an effective security plan in the absence of appro- priate security equipment.
The Indexes To develop the indexes of physical standards of hotel safety and security (shown in Exhibit 2), we drew from the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s 2001 Lodging Survey prepared by RealTime Hotel Reports.7 This annual survey is distributed to general managers throughout the United States. All hotels in the United States, whether members of AH&LA or not, were given the opportunity to participate in the survey, and the four-page survey was distributed to 38,002 properties. The final sample was representative of the population of U.S. hotels in geographic dispersion, but underrepresented small hotels (i.e., those with fewer than 75 rooms). Of the 7,923 hotels that responded to the lodging sur- vey, a total of 2,123 hotels were included in this investigation—only those that responded to the
survey by answering all safety and security ques- tions and did not leave any blanks.
Respondents were asked to indicate whether their hotel has specific safety and security fea- tures (among other amenities), including elec- tronic locks, sprinklers, smoke detectors, safety materials, safety videos, interior corridors, and security cameras.
Because some features are more important than others to a hotel’s safety and security, we weighted each feature on its relative importance to hotel safety or security, based on our consul- tations with hospitality-industry property- management experts. For example, we accorded greater weight in the safety index to sprinklers and smoke detectors than to safety-instruction materials, such as in-room safety videos. In the security index, electronic locks received the great- est weight, while security cameras and interior
6 An old, but authoritative discussion of the principles of security lighting can be found in: Abe H. Feder, “Lighting for Security,” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1 (May 1972), pp. 13–21.
7 The Lodging Survey was funded by the American Hotel and Lodging Foundation and the data were collected by RealTime Hotel Reports, now a part of Smith Travel Research.
8 To determine how important the weightings were to our study results, we ran the analyses with indexes composed of equally weighted safety and security items. The pattern of results was the same as that found when the features were given weights according to their importance. With the equally weighted features significant differences were found for price segments, location type, hotel type, size, and age of the properties. We also combined the two indexes into one with equal weights for all features and again found a similar pattern of results.
We accorded the highest weights to electronic locks, sprinklers, and smoke detectors, while also considering inte- rior corridors and security cameras.
corridors earned lower weights. As shown in Ex- hibit 2, we set the range of both weighted in- dexes from 0 (no physical safety or security fea- tures reported) to 100 (all of the safety and security features are present).8
The average safety-index score for our sample is 66.4 (with a standard deviation of 19.9), while the average security-index score is 59.6 (with a standard deviation of 29.4). These numbers sug- gest that U.S. hotels score generally higher on physical-safety attributes than they do on secu-
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124 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly OCTOBER 2002
EXHIBIT 3
Safety Index
1st 2nd 3rd 4th Minimum Maximum Standard
Quartile Quartile Quartile Quartile Score Score Mean Deviation
All Hotels 7.1% 18.8% 39.1% 34.9% 0 100 66.4 19.9
Price Segments
Luxury 1.6% 1.6% 26.2% 70.6% 25 100 81.8 11.3 Upscale 0.0% 5.1% 36.2% 58.7% 45 100 79.1 11.3 Midprice, full service 2.0% 24.8% 45.7% 27.6% 20 100 65.4 17.7 Midprice, limited service 0.0% 3.3% 45.5% 51.2% 35 100 77.6 10.9 Economy 4.6% 18.6% 41.4% 35.4% 25 100 66.1 18.6 Extended Stay 1.6% 2.4% 38.1% 57.9% 25 100 78.4 12
Location Type
Urban 5.9% 15.9% 33.1% 45.1% 0 100 69.0 20.1 Suburban 5.5% 12.7% 42.5% 39.3% 0 100 69.8 18.5 Airport 1.6% 3.9% 36.7% 57.8% 25 100 77.4 13.4 Highway 7.5% 20.9% 43.3% 28.3% 25 100 63.2 19.3 Resort 10.1% 29.4% 38.7% 21.9% 0 100 61.2 20.5
Hotel Type
All Suite 3.0% 4.3% 39.6% 53.2% 25 100 75.9 14.7 B&B, Small Inn 13.7% 26.6% 46.0% 13.7% 0 85 58.2 20.3 Convention* 2.5% 11.3% 44.8% 41.4% 20 100 73.0 16.7 Extended Stay 10.3% 10.3% 40.2% 39.3% 25 100 68.4 20.5 Motel 12.6% 29.4% 40.1% 17.9% 0 100 56.6 19.8 Villa, Condo 9.1% 48.5% 28.8% 13.6% 25 85 55.3 18.2 Standard 1.5% 12.6% 38.0% 47.9% 25 100 73.4 16.1
Hotel Size (rooms)
20 to 39 23.9% 40.8% 29.1% 6.2% 0 90 47.7 18.5 40 to 74 9.9% 21.2% 42.0% 26.8% 0 100 63.0 20.3 75 to 149 2.9% 15.7% 42.7% 38.7% 25 100 69.3 17.7 150 to 249 0.7% 12.2% 41.0% 46.2% 25 100 74.0 15.1 250 or more 1.9% 3.8% 29.8% 64.4% 20 100 78.8 14.0
Hotel Age (years)
Less than 7 0.7% 3.6% 38.1% 57.6% 20 100 78.5 11.6 7 to 14 4.2% 11.7% 41.0% 43.1% 0 100 71.7 17.8 15 to 21 4.1% 23.2% 41.6% 31.1% 25 100 65.6 18.6 22 to 28 12.1% 29.3% 38.5% 20.1% 25 100 57.9 20.1 29 or more 14.0% 28.6% 37.3% 20.1% 0 100 57.3 20.9
* Includes conference centers. Note: Quartile ranges for both indexes are: First quartile, 0–25; second quartile, 26–50; third quartile, 51–75; fourth quartile, 76–100.
Descriptive data for safety and security indexes (continues on the next page)
Exhibit continues on next page
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
Security Index
1st 2nd 3rd 4th Minimum Maximum Standard
Quartile Quartile Quartile Quartile Score Score Mean Deviation
All Hotels 16.0% 22.9% 29.1% 32.0% 0 100 59.6 29.4
Price Segments
Luxury 0.8% 11.9% 24.6% 62.7% 10 100 79.2 18.2 Upscale 2.2% 5.8% 32.6% 59.4% 10 100 78.7 17.2 Midprice full 1.6% 18.9% 48.4% 31.1% 0 100 71 16.8 Midprice limited 0.0% 10.4% 41.7% 47.9% 30 100 76.4 16 Economy 7.4% 21.1% 35.4% 36.0% 0 100 66.4 24.4 Extended Stay 2.4% 15.1% 42.1% 40.5% 10 100 72.9 18.1
Location Type
Urban 10.5% 21.3% 27.9% 40.2% 0 100 65.0 27.8 Suburban 11.2% 18.0% 31.7% 39.1% 0 100 65.3 27.5 Airport 2.3% 7.0% 33.6% 57.0% 10 100 78.4 16.9 Highway 13.6% 25.2% 34.1% 27.2% 0 100 59.2 27.8 Resort 30.2% 31.0% 22.3% 16.6% 0 100 45.7 30.6
Hotel Type
All Suite 6.0% 17.4% 30.2% 46.4% 0 100 70.5 24.0 B&B/Small Inn 34.5% 43.2% 13.7% 8.6% 0 90 36.1 26.1 Convention* 5.9% 15.3% 38.9% 39.9% 0 100 70.0 23.5 Extended Stay 16.8% 29.0% 31.8% 22.4% 0 100 56.0 28.3 Motel 26.0% 28.4% 28.4% 17.3% 0 100 48.2 30.4 Villa/Condo 54.5% 31.8% 9.1% 4.5% 0 90 28.0 25.4 Standard 3.6% 15.8% 32.0% 48.6% 0 100 73.2 21.3
Hotel Size (rooms)
20 to 39 52.9% 36.7% 6.2% 4.2% 0 90 25.5 23.3 40 to 74 21.8% 25.9% 28.1% 24.2% 0 100 53.4 30.5 75 to 149 6.6% 20.7% 35.5% 37.2% 0 100 67.3 24.1 150 to 249 3.5% 18.1% 38.9% 39.6% 10 100 71.5 20.2 250 or more 3.4% 12.0% 25.5% 59.1% 0 100 76.5 21.4
Hotel Age (years)
Less than 7 2.2% 10.6% 33.8% 53.3% 0 100 76.4 18.5 7 to 14 8.8% 26.9% 27.9% 36.4% 0 100 64.0 26.7 15 to 21 11.9% 28.3% 31.1% 28.7% 0 100 59.7 27.5 22 to 28 21.8% 21.3% 34.5% 22.4% 0 100 54.3 30.1 29 or more 28.9% 29.2% 23.9% 18.0% 0 100 46.6 30.9
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126 Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly OCTOBER 2002
EXHIBIT 4
Mean safety and security scores by price segment
Luxury Upscale Midprice, Midprice, Economy Extended
full limited stay
service service
Safety index Security index
82 79 79 79 65 71 78 76 66 66 78 73
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
rity features. The standard deviations also show that there is greater variation across hotels’ secu- rity scores than in their safety scores. In addition to the means and standard deviations, the range of index scores from the minimum to the maxi- mum are provided in Exhibit 3 (previous pages). That exhibit breaks the index scores into four quartiles and provides the frequency distribution of scores in each quartile. These are provided for the overall indexes, but are also broken down by price segment, location, hotel type, property size, and age.
As the frequencies in Exhibit 3 show, a large percentage of hotels scored high on both indexes.9
More than one-third of the hotels earned a score of 76 or higher on the safety index (35 percent) and not quite one-third did so on the security index (32 percent). On the other hand, substan- tially more hotels scored low on security than they did on safety. Under 10 percent of the hotels scored lower than 25 on the safety index, in con- trast to the 16 percent that scored lower than 25 on the security index and the 14 percent that scored 10 or less on that scale. To determine which hotel types are characterized by high or low safety and security features, we examined several different categories separately.
Categorical Differences Exhibit 4 shows the overall safety and security scores for each hotel segment. Our survey revealed that the highest safety and security scores are for luxury and upscale hotels. It is not surprising that high-price hotels contain more of the safety and security features than hotels in other price seg- ments. What is surprising is that these hotels are less likely than others to have what we consider to be the most important single safety feature— sprinklers (57.2 percent in luxury and 60.3 per- cent in upscale, compared to approximately 70 percent in economy and extended-stay hotels).
That said, luxury hotels and upscale hotels are more likely than other hotel segments to possess all of the physical-security features on our list. Luxury hotels are the most likely to have four of
the five security features: namely, electronic locks (68.3 percent), security cameras (69.8 percent), safety materials (99.2 percent), and safety videos (9.5 percent). Upscale hotels also tend to have the full array of security features. Although up- scale hotels are not as likely as luxury hotels to have electronic locks (63.0 percent) or security cameras (59.4 percent), they are more likely to have interior corridors (92.8 percent). Midprice
hotels without food and beverage facilities (i.e., limited service) scored high on the security in- dex, primarily because of the high percentage of hotels that feature electronic locks (78.8 percent) and interior corridors (88.6 percent).
Economy hotels and midprice hotels with food and beverage (i.e., full service) generally have lower safety scores than do hotels in other seg- ments (again, see Exhibit 4). Although those two segments have higher percentages of hotels with sprinklers than high-price hotels, economy and full-service midmarket hotels are less likely than others to have the full array of physical-safety features on our list. Still, the full-service midprice hotels are more likely to have sprinklers (65.4 percent) than are luxury or upscale hotels and are just as likely to have in-room safety materials (87.4 percent). However, the midprice proper- ties frequently are not equipped with security cameras (49.6 percent) or safety videos (2.0 per- cent). Similarly, economy hotels are the most likely of all segments to have sprinklers (67.1 percent) and just as likely as high-price hotels to have security cameras (59.4 percent). Again, though, safety videos are almost never available in economy hotels for in-room instruction (0.6 percent).
Our examination of managers’ reactions to- ward safety and security issues after the Septem- ber 11 events, in concert with this work on physi- cal features of hotels, reveals that the hotels which we found to be safer and more secure in their
Despite a high percentage with sprinklers, economy hotels and full-service midprice hotels generally have lower safety scores than do hotels in other segments.
9 The intercorrelation between the two indexes is r = .63, indicating a meaningful relationship between the indexes but not such an excessive conceptual overlap as to necessi- tate combining the indexes into a single measure.
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EXHIBIT 5
Extent of GMs’ security reevaluation by segment
5 (Yes, a lot)
4 (Yes, often)
3 (Somewhat)
2 (Not much)
1 (Not at all)
3.5 3.5 2.9 3.0 2.7 2.8 3.0 2.9 3.5 2.7 2.1
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physical attributes were also the hotels where managers proactively responded to the terrorist attacks by making changes to their safety and security policies. Exhibit 5 shows that managers at luxury and upscale hotels, in particular, reevalu- ated their safety and security strategies, while the management of hotels in the economy, full- service midprice, and extended-stay segments did little reassessment after September 11.
In summary, hotels in the high-price segments of the lodging industry are most likely to possess a full array of physical safety and security fea- tures, with the highest safety and security scores occurring in the luxury and upscale segments.
However, it is important to note that the most- essential safety and security features are also widely available in the limited-service hotels that we studied. Indeed, midprice limited-service properties scored better on both indexes than did their full-service counterparts.
We believe that one reason for the strong showing of limited-service properties is that many midprice limited-service properties have been built relatively recently. However, to determine whether price-segment differences are really due to the intervening variable of hotel age in some segments we conducted analyses on segment dif- ferences controlling for hotel age. Our results
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
EXHIBIT 6
Mean safety and security scores by age of hotel
Under 7 7 to 14 15 to 21 22 to 28 29 or more
Years since construction
Safety index Security index
79 76 72 64 66 60 58 54 57 47
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
reveal that significant differences in safety and security do exist across segments when taking into consideration the influence of hotel age. We now turn to an examination of safety and security fea- tures for hotels according to the age of the prop- erty. As we discuss subsequently, we also wanted to determine whether a property’s geographic location made a difference in its safety and secu- rity score.
Age of Hotel Recently built hotels generally have higher safety and security scores than do old properties. The percentage of hotels with electronic locks, sprin-
klers, and interior corridors declines dramatically with property age (see Exhibit 6). Almost all of the hotels built in the last seven years (92 per- cent) have electronic locks, compared to 51 per- cent of the hotels built more than 29 years ago. Similar patterns can be observed for such fea- tures as safety materials and security cameras, al- beit to a lesser degree. For example, 95 percent of the hotels built in the last seven years have in- room safety materials, compared to 80 percent of the hotels that are more than 29 years old. (It goes without saying that retrofitting old hotels with safety materials is easier and less expensive than adding, say, sprinklers or interior corridors.)
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Location and Region The extent to which a hotel has safety and secu- rity features depends heavily on its location type (see Exhibit 7). Airport hotels earned the high- est safety scores (77) and security scores (78). Moreover, airport hotels were more likely than other properties to be equipped with the entire list of safety and security features. Virtually all airport hotels are equipped with electronic locks (95.3 percent) and safety materials (96.9 percent). General managers in airport hotels were also most aggressive in reevaluating safety and secu- rity procedures after September 11 (again, see Ex- hibit 5).
The resort anomaly. The picture is mixed among hotels of other types, although resorts came out particularly low on both scales. Resort hotels had the lowest average safety index (61) and security index (46) of all. The reason that resorts as a group scored so low is that so many of them lack a key safety feature—that is, sprin- klers—and a key security feature—namely, elec- tronic locks. Just 52.5 percent of the resorts we surveyed had sprinklers and a similar percent- age, 52.9 percent, reported having electronic locks. Resorts were also weak on interior corri- dors (46.5 percent) and security cameras (62.5 percent). That security-camera percentage for
EXHIBIT 7
Mean safety and security scores by type of location
Urban Suburban Airport Highway Resort
Safety index Security index
69 65 70 65 77 78 63 59 61 46
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
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EXHIBIT 8
Mean safety and security scores by geographic region
New Middle South East East West West Mountain Pacific
England Atlantic Atlantic North South North South
Central Central Central Central
Safety index Security index
65 55 79 6565 60 68 64 70 68 70 67 65 63 68 66 66 59 67 58
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
resort hotels is as many as 30 points lower than the percentage for hotels in other locations.
These results do not necessarily mean that re- sorts are cavalier about guest safety and security. Instead, one must examine the characteristics of one set of hotels compared to other property types. It is interesting to see, for instance, that urban hotels did not score as high on safety and security as did suburban hotels. Hotels located on highways and those classified as resorts also scored low compared to those in other locations. The customers at airport hotels, as an example, are most likely focused on getting a convenient and secure rest—perhaps during an impromptu
hotel stay. On the other hand, customers at re- sorts may be in reasonably safe locations—often gated and remote. Instead of convenience, resort guests may well be focused more on their own relaxation and the property’s aesthetics and am- bience. The relatively low percentage of resort hotels with electronic locks, security cameras, and interior corridors may indicate that those features are less important to a guest than they would be in an airport or urban location
Geography. Another approach to analysis by hotel location is to explore whether safety and security vary among hotels in different geographic regions. As shown in Exhibit 8, the quick re-
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EXHIBIT 9
Mean safety and security scores by hotel type
Safety index Security index
76 71 58 36 73 70 68 56 57 48 55 28 73 73
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 All Suite B&B or Conference or Extended Motel Villa or Standard
Small Convention Stay Condo
Inn Center
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
sponse to this issue is that we found little sub- stantial variation in safety and security scores by region. A comparison of safety scores for hotels in different parts of the United States indicates no significant differences from one region to an- other. The similar safety scores across regions may be due to brand standardization and consistency of safety features of hotels throughout the coun- try. The role of governmental entities in regulat- ing safety and security equipment does not ap- pear to influence hotels’ decisions to provide specific features. With the exception of local fire codes, hotel operators’ decisions regarding secu- rity equipment (e.g., locks and security cameras) appear to be governed by franchise requirements, while requisite safety equipment is also deter- mined by corporate standards (and in some cases building codes). The modest geographic varia- tion that exists does not appear to be attribut- able to local legislative factors, given the general absence of legislation and the efforts of corpora- tions to devise and impose their own standards.
Despite the overall similarities, however, we did find some differences on security-index scores among geographic areas (again, see Exhibit 8). The highest average security indexes are found in hotels located in the east-north-central region (with a mean index of 68) and east-south- central region (67). These scores are primarily due to the high percentage of hotels in those re- gions with interior corridors (81.9 percent in the east-north-central region and 65.2 percent in the east- south-central region) compared to hotels in other regions.
New England hotels have below-average safety-index scores and the lowest security-index scores of all geographic areas. These findings are attributable to the low incidence of electronic locks (54.5 percent), security cameras (35.6 per- cent), and safety materials (78.8 percent) in this region’s hotels. Such low scores may be explained in part by the high ratio of small hotels in the region. Approximately 20 percent of New England hotels are small inns or bed and break- fasts. Looking at the other coast, hotels in the Pacific region were the least likely to have inte- rior corridors (51.4 percent) and less likely to have sprinklers (57.9 percent) than hotels in the other regions, contributing to the low scores for Pa- cific properties.
Hotel Types We found that safety and security scores varied according to hotel type. All-suite hotels, confer- ence and convention hotels, and standard full- service hotels were the specific hotel types that scored among the highest on the safety and se- curity indexes, as Exhibit 9 reveals. These hotel types were most likely to possess a full array of safety and security features. However, we found differences among those three hotel types based on whether they featured sprinklers, electronic locks, or interior corridors. All-suite hotels, for instance, are the most likely to have sprinklers (86 percent), while standard hotels constitute the highest percentage of hotels with electronic locks (86.7 percent) and interior corridors (83.7 percent).
Motels as a class have the lowest safety and security scores. In particular, we found that few motels have sprinklers (37.9 percent) or interior
All-suite hotels, conference and convention hotels, and standard full-service hotels had high scores on the safety and security indexes.
corridors (39.9 percent). In marked contrast, convention and conference hotels not only score high on the safety and security indexes but were active in reevaluating their safety and security procedures after the terrorist attacks.
Condos and B&Bs. Also scoring low on se- curity features were condos (and villas) and small inns (including B&Bs). Again, few of these types of accommodation have electronic locks (28.8 percent for condos and 30.2 percent for small inns) or security cameras (18.2 percent for con- dos and 23.7 percent for small inns). In addi- tion, only 39.4 percent of villas and condos sur- veyed have sprinklers. As is the case with resorts, however, these findings may be attributable to the markets that condos and small inns serve. B&Bs and small inns, for example, focus on pro- viding the experience of a home away from home, and the aesthetics and ambience of the proper- ties might be harmed by obvious or excessive at- tention to security. Along that line, to attract vacationers, the operators of villas and condos may feel that they differentiate themselves from
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traditional hotel products by avoiding common amenities (such as electronic locks and security cameras). In short, their low safety scores may reflect a conscious decision to signal the guest that these specialized accommodations constitute a distinct product that requires only modest safety measures by their very nature.
Hotel Size Matters Large hotels generally have more safety and se- curity equipment than do hotels with few rooms, as Exhibit 10 shows. The features included in the indexes are more likely to be installed in large
hotels than in small hotels, with the exception of safety videos. In particular, we found a substan- tial difference in the safety and security scores of hotels with fewer than 40 rooms and those in all other size categories. Electronic locks are installed in 88 percent of the hotels with 250 or more rooms, for instance, compared to 19.4 percent of hotels with fewer than 40 rooms. The con- trast also carries over to moderate-size hotels. The percentage of hotels with 40 to 74 rooms that have electronic locks (62.3 percent) is three times greater than that 19.4-percent figure for small hotels. The same can be said for sprinklers and security cameras.
Hotels with the Most Safety and Security Equipment When we combine the profiles of hotels by size, type, and location, it appears that large luxury hotels located in urban areas have significantly higher safety- and security-index scores than do other hotels. The age of luxury hotels did not affect the degree of physical safety or security that they offered, despite the general tendency of new hotels to rack up high scores. The fact that luxury hotels have consistently high physical-safety and -security scores for both new and old properties may be attributed to frequent renovations and investments that allow managers to update safety
and security equipment in those properties. Up- scale hotels also score high on our safety and se- curity indexes—particularly large, new airport hotels. Unlike luxury hotels, the age of upscale hotels does make a difference in a hotel’s score, with new hotels featuring more safety and secu- rity equipment than found in old ones. In sum- mary, large, urban, luxury hotels and new, large, upscale airport hotels are the hotels carrying the highest safety and security scores.
Among the hotel types that have room for improvement, old resort and small economy motels tend to offer the least safety and security equipment. Aside from the age and size of these properties, motels that are in resort locations (safety index of 51 and security index of 35) and in urban locations (safety index of 54 and secu- rity index of 47) have significantly lower average safety and security indexes than do motels in other locations. Because urban locations have a disproportionately high number of old proper- ties, the low index scores associated with urban motels may be a function of age more than of location. Finally, resort-area motels offer the least desirable combination of safety and secu- rity features.
Conclusion Our safety and security indexes offer a prelimi- nary glimpse of the equipment installed by the U.S. lodging industry to protect guests and em- ployees and to provide a secure environment. While the indexes focus on the existence of vari- ous features and not on the effectiveness of their use, our coincident study of GMs’ reactions to security concerns offers some insight into how managers are reevaluating their safety procedures (or are not doing so).
We found four characteristics that distin- guished high-scoring hotels from low-scoring properties, namely, price segment, location, num- ber of rooms, and age. On balance, luxury and upscale hotels, airport and urban hotels, large properties, and new hotels are most likely to maintain a high level of safety and security ameni- ties. In contrast, old, small, economy, and resort motels are the properties least likely to provide the safety and security features that we studied.
We encourage general managers to review their own properties on the physical features we used
On balance, luxury and upscale hotels, airport and urban hotels, large properties, and new hotels are most likely to maintain a high level of safety and security amenities.
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HOTEL SAFETY AND SECURITY HOTEL MANAGEMENT
to create our indexes. Using the weightings noted in Exhibit 2 and the data provided in Exhibit 3, it is possible to calculate your own safety and se- curity score and then compare your hotel’s in- dexes to those of other hotels in your hotel type, price segment, age category, location, and room size. The example in Exhibit 11 (overleaf ) shows a calculation of the safety index for a hypotheti- cal upscale hotel. While we would not advocate that the indexes that we have created are defini- tive indicators of safety and security, they do of- fer a point for contrast and comparison. (Again, we emphasize that hotels offer many other safety features in addition to those we studied.)
EXHIBIT 10
Mean safety and security scores by size of property
20 to 39 40 to 74 75 to 149 150 to 249 250+
Number of rooms
48 25 63 53 69 67 74 72 79 76
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Safety index Security index
The scores on the indexes alone do not tell the full story, however. Safety and security equip- ment is useful only to the extent that a hotel also has a complete plan for its use, maintenance, and upgrade. The fact that some hotels score high on the indexes does not guarantee that they are physically safe and secure, since those hotels must also have appropriate management policies. With careful policy implementation, on the other hand, low-scoring hotels could, in fact, be safe and se- cure. What the indexes show is only the equip- ment that a given set of hotels may bring to bear in conjunction with a set of safety and security policies.
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We note again, however, that the hotels in categories that earned high scores on physical features (e.g., airport hotels) were also those cat- egories where the managers were most actively reevaluating their procedures after the terrorist attacks. This may suggest that managers whose hotels are not well equipped may not be in a position to alter or upgrade their emergency plans. Alternatively, the confluence of equipment and planning may suggest that high-scoring hotels expressly consider it their mission to provide their customers with a safe and secure environment.
The events of September 11 have focused many Americans’ attention on their security when traveling. Likewise, many sectors of the hotel industry are also giving greater scrutiny to safety, with revised check-in policies and enhanced lobby security. Nevertheless, the actual effects of a given set of safety and security policies and equipment is not clear. While some operators are reviewing policies and procedures, others may be reluctant to disturb their existing protocols because of the risk of destroying their property’s ambience. For economy hotels in particular, the challenge of balancing the needs of price-sensitive customers and the desires of profit-focused owners with needed safety enhancements is not easily resolved.
For all hoteliers, the challenge lies in making careful choices that provide appropriate standards for safety while not interfering with the hospitality and service levels that customers have come to expect. As crucial as physical-safety and -security features are for protecting customers and securing their possessions, hospitable service is also essential to customers’ satisfaction. While the airlines, for example, have no choice but to in- convenience customers with careful and some- times intrusive security procedures, hoteliers gen- erally wish neither to compromise basic security standards nor interfere with their service concept. We believe that the traveling public should be appreciative that so many hotels have equipped their physical facilities with essential safety and security features—even though many of those fea- tures are not required by any building code. We hope that this preliminary study will help both operators and the general public to have a better understanding of the scope and profile of safe and secure hotels in America. �
EXHIBIT 11
Sample safety index for a hypothetical upscale hotel
Feature Weighting × Present (1), Absent (0) = Subtotal
Sprinklers 0.30 × 1 = 0.30
Smoke detectors 0.25 × 1 = 0.25
Safety materials 0.20 × 0 = .00
Safety videos 0.15 × 0 = .00
Security cameras 0.10 × 1 = 0.10
Score .65
Safety Index
The hypothetical upscale hotel has sprinklers, smoke detectors, and
security cameras, but not safety materials or safety videos. Thus, its
score is .65, which is multiplied by 100, for an index of 65. For a com-
parison, the mean safety index for upscale hotels is 78.2, as shown in
Exhibit 4 (page 126).
© 2002, Cornell University.
Cathy A. Enz, Ph.D., is the Lewis G. Schaeneman, Jr., Professor of Innovation and Dynamic Management at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, where she is also the executive director of the Center for Hospitality Research ([email protected]), and where Masako S. Taylor, MMH, is a Ph.D. candidate ([email protected]). The authors gratefully acknowledge the assis- tance of Brian Ferguson of Smith Travel Research in providing access to this comprehensive database collected by RealTime Hotel reports prior to its acquisi- tion by Smith Travel Research.
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The ANNALS of the American Academy
http://ann.sagepub.com/content/642/1/228 The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0002716212438198
2012 642: 228The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Brandon Berry Possessions
Reflections of Self from Missing Things: How People Move On from Losing
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228 ANNALS, AAPSS, 642, July, 2012
When people fail to locate a personal belonging, it often evokes disturbing reflections of self that they will seek to overcome. While ethnomethodology once manufactured breaches in the taken-for-granted order to reveal the implicit rules of social life, this article explores how people try to recover from such breaches occurring naturally in their material environment. Drawing on a database of about five hundred cases of naturally occurring losses collected through several ethnographic techniques, this article demonstrates how people get back to life as usual through four unique paths. Through each, individuals resolve or avoid the disturbances caused when their taken-for-granted sense of what objects are immediately available to them breaks down.
Keywords: self; memory; material culture; loss; social psychology; ethnography
When attempts to locate an object fail, they offer insights into social psychology. After realizing that an object has gone missing, indi- viduals are often troubled by unsettling reflec- tions of self. They can no longer count on the practical and emotional enhancements of self that the object affords or, more disturbingly, rely on their customary sense of competency in managing their possessions. As they try to find the missing object, individuals also search for ways to escape or forestall these forms of dis- quiet, sometimes preserving or restoring their sense of self by relinquishing the effort to find the object.
Every response, from apathetic resignation to endless searching, involves a folk theory of what has actually been lost and an informal
Brandon Berry is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work is in the naturalistic social psychology of memory, material objects, aging, loss, and the self.
NOTE: I thank Jack Katz, Eli Anderson, Noriko Milman, Bob Emerson, and the Yale ethnography group for their support and useful criticisms of a previous draft.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716212438198
Reflections of Self from
Missing Things: How People
Move On from Losing
Possessions
By BRANDON BERRY
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REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 229
experiment in what it takes to resist or defuse the negative reflections of self that the loss threatens to generate. Through strategic maneuvering, individuals find ways to avert the tumult aroused by the loss, though each comes with its own pitfalls and sacrifices. Recovering the lost object does not necessarily bring reso- lution, and sometimes the situation is resolved without finding the object at all.
This study analyzes four different ways in which individuals overcome the challenges posed by losing such personal possessions as a cell phone, a set of keys, a wedding ring, or a purse or wallet and manage the uncomfortable reflections of self that are provoked by the discovery of their loss.
Moving On from Breaches in the Taken-for-Granted
Sociologists have documented what happens when the tacit, taken-for-granted order of social life comes under threat, but few have examined how people move on from these unsettled states. In his effort to tease out the underlying rules of sociality, Harold Garfinkel (1967) set up “breaching experiments” to examine how violations of the accustomed order evoke moral responses in their perceived vic- tims. He reported the awkwardness that individuals feel when someone enters an elevator and stands facing the “wrong” way. He showed that some people become angry when their tic-tac-toe competitor erases their mark and substitutes his or her own. He identified the upset unsuspecting families experience when one of their members suddenly exhibits amnesia and ignores the familial bond, treating the home as a hotel. Garfinkel was interested in the underlying rules of social interaction that become visible when they are violated, and he did not explore, in any great detail, what people do after they notice that the social order has been disturbed.
These experiments provide some clues, however, that individuals experiencing a breach in the orderliness of social interaction may take remedial actions that alleviate frustration and calm anger. In an experiment in which subjects were led to believe they were participating in a study of a novel kind of counseling, for instance, each was paired with a person who was portrayed as a counselor-in- training. The person posing as the counseling trainee responded to the subject’s genuine questions with random “yes” and “no” answers, giving them what at times amounted to contradictory advice. Although some subjects expressed con- fusion and frustration over the apparent contradictions, many tried to make sense of the answers, and some actually reached such an understanding despite the randomness of the responses they received. In making some kind of sense from the counselor’s answers, subjects typically moved toward a resolution of their initial confusion and dismay.
Shifting from experimentation into naturally occurring social life, Melvin Pollner (1974) described the paths a person charged with a traffic violation and a police officer take when they meet in traffic court to maintain a largely taken- for-granted sense that they do in fact share a world in common despite their
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230 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
disagreement over what happened on the street. Rather than perceiving a breach in their assumption of a shared reality, they transform the ontological challenge, the struggle over whose account is true, into a moral one. In a variety of ways, each levels a claim about why the other, due to some kind of defect in their power of observation or honesty in reporting it, must be unable to tell the court what “really” happened. Pollner’s study shows how individuals attempt to restore an untroubled sense of intersubjectivity when flirting with its breach.
Following in this tradition of work, this project focuses on the effort to move on from challenges to individuals’ taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment that arise from losing track of a material object. In documenting how individuals seek to recover the sense of untroubled possession in the face of their discovery that their mastery of objects may in fact be tenuous or illusory, it shows the ways commonplace material things elicit particular kinds of self- consciousness. It shows that individuals’ sense of self is dynamically intertwined with how their possessions are arranged around them. Losing personal belong- ings creates a breach in their expectations, and their responses to this predica- ment suggest that a resolution may form through an effort to retrieve the lost object, even if it is unsuccessful.
Methods
Part of a larger investigation into the nature of property loss, this study is based on just over five hundred cases of people losing everyday items. The data come from four distinct collection strategies pursued from 2006 to 2008 in Los Angeles and several other cities. First, I observed forty-four naturally occurring losses in public places, eavesdropping on and sometimes speaking with folks at the booths, offices, and service counters that handle inquiries about lost and found objects at airports, malls, grocery stores, coffee shops, farmers markets, festivals, sporting events, museums, concerts, and similar venues.
The second strategy involved soliciting and receiving 397 first-person narra- tives of recent and vivid experiences of property loss. Four-fifths came from people who had posted a solicitation on a lost-and-found Web site such as craigslist.com and lostandfound.com. About one out of four responded to my request for a step-by-step description of the event. These narratives averaged two and a half single-spaced pages in length, and about half of the informants responded to follow-up questions whereby I tried to clarify murky descriptions and patch incomplete narratives. In an effort to obtain the whole story, I requested updates from a third of all informants either three months, one year, or two years later.
I also completed forty-four face-to-face interviews with people who had recently lost something. Participants were selected either through a snowball sampling procedure or a chance meeting. During these open-ended, semistruc- tured interviews, I asked my informants to describe the details of a recent
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experience in which they had lost an object from beginning to end. Typically, these interviews lasted 10 to 20 minutes and were recorded as jottings in situ.
Fourth, I had twenty undergraduate students keep a journal of their every- day losses and related experiences over the course of a month. These “lost things journals” were an attempt to get at the personal experiences of loss that people would otherwise not reveal to others because the events were trivial, fleeting, or embarrassing. On average, each student reported about ten losses within the one-month period. The study’s findings derive from the technique of analytic induction as described by Charles C. Ragin (1994) and Howard S. Becker (1998).
Ways of Moving On
In contrast to Garfinkel’s experiments, which were about how unsuspecting people respond to having the rug pulled out from under them, this study is about how people regain their balance and move on. It reports how individuals evade the social-psychological obstacles aroused by losing personal belongings. I found that they pursued one of four paths: (1) moving on without searching for the lost object, (2) resolving the problem by successfully recovering the lost object, (3) moving on despite failing to find it, and (4) moving on by replacing it.
Typically, the paths toward moving on from property loss are paved with obsta- cles deriving from one of three dimensions of self-reflection: how individuals see themselves in light of having lost personal possessions; how individuals imagine
FIGuRE 1 Ways of Moving On
Loss Discovery
Search
Recovery (2) Failure (3)
Replacement (4)
No Search (1)
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232 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
others see them; and how individuals experience their world without the sym- bolic and/or practical scaffolding conferred by the lost object.
Moving on without searching
To find closure without searching is the shortest path, and often the first to emerge after discovering a loss. It affirms that one’s current course of conduct is greater than the value of potentially recovering the missing object. Allegiance to one’s ongoing path and resistance to the effort that searching entails moves an individual on in one of two ways: either to deny that the object is permanently lost and imagine that it will reappear on its own or to embrace the idea that the object has been lost irretrievably.
The first route emerges when, realizing that a possession has unexpectedly disappeared, individuals avoid a sense of loss and the damning reflections of self it evokes by denying that anything is threateningly absent. They believe, and at times hope, that the thing is probably around the house, the office, the car, or wherever, but at the moment is hidden from them for some reason. They might still want the item, and can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future when they will really need it, but they decide to allow the item to reveal itself naturally. They go on with life as usual, suppressing anxieties that might compel them to search for it immediately and betting that it will turn up in the course of their normal routine. They go on with a sense that the object is not at risk of becoming even more thoroughly concealed or, worse, permanently lost.
The absence does not point to a failing in the person because they feel that chaotic forces have descended upon them temporarily. They point to conditions that make it difficult to find something: the fact that their house is a bit messy or that they are engaged in a consuming project at work and cannot keep proper track of things. Maneesh, a 30-year-old graduate student in economics living in San Diego, preserved a sense of self-efficacy in his management of objects. After briefly looking around for his misplaced laundry room key and feeling mildly frustrated, Maneesh decided, “No big deal, I’ll just wait until the key pops up on its own. The place is a mess; it’s around here somewhere.” He noted that he would rather wear “slightly soiled clothes” than spend his time searching for a “needle in a haystack,” especially since he was sure that the key would show up eventually. By avoiding a search in this way, individuals maintain a self that is independent from the absent object. Putting off the search affirms the idea that who they really are is not affected by the object’s absence. Maneesh put off searching for the key for a week, effectively saying that not having the key and, by extension, being unable to wash his clothes did not unsettle him enough to require immediate action.
Another way to put off a search and to hold on to the sense that one’s self has not been fundamentally affected is by understanding that internally derived chaotic forces, such as feeling tired or having consumed too much alcohol, are temporarily getting in the way. Katie, a 21-year-old student in Boulder, decided
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REFLECTIONS OF SELF FROM MISSING THINGS 233
not to look for her keys until the next morning since she has trouble finding things when she is “beyond buzzed,” as she put it. That she cannot readily find something is not a sign of anything deficient about her abilities; rather, she had other things going on at the moment.
Moving on derives from the individual’s sense that the thing will reappear eventually, that in the normal course of life it will serendipitously reveal itself—a belief that suggests a kind of metaphysical connection between self and object that will make a difference once the chaotic forces pass. Individuals demonstrate this sensibility when they redirect their initial concern about an absence and set- tle on a strategy of serendipity. When Renee realized she had not seen her Kodak digital camera for a suspiciously long time after returning from a ski trip, she reasoned, “My ski jacket has an inner coat and outer shell, each with pockets. My ski pants also have pockets. Then there is the question of whether it was in the boot bag, my purse, my carry-on backpack, or a pocket in my suitcase. Then I wondered if it had fallen out of a bag and was in my brother’s car or had slipped under the bed. With so many places where it could be stashed, I truly believed it would just show up without me having to look for it.”
If and when the thing reemerges on its own, individuals get a double reward. The loss or gap is plugged and their hunch is confirmed. The latter can also con- vey a supportive emotional sense that the universe is conspiring in their favor. But when the absent object does not reappear or is not forgotten, individuals reevaluate the object’s absence and reconsider whether life without it is okay or they need to begin a recovery effort.
When seeing the absence as unthreatening does not appear compelling, indi- viduals shift to the second method of moving on without searching: accepting a sense that the self is powerless to retrieve the object as a safeguard against a sense of self enmeshed in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. Sensing one’s impo- tence in the face of possibly surmountable obstacles feels humbling but also freeing compared to the imagined alternative of a self mired in a difficult recov- ery effort with no guaranteed exit strategy.
People discover the impotent self as an attractive identity project through cost-benefit analysis, either reflectively or through a gut feeling. They weigh the value of the object against the imagined effort that searching for it requires. Sometimes this calculation depends on their schedule, whether they have time to suspend belief in its unrecoverability and check things out. For instance, when Pedro, a 24-year-old living in Boston and working for an educational non- profit, was out running, he noticed his watch was missing and momentarily ran in place as he considered its value and the cost of a recovery effort. In the end, he chose to search for it. “I check my watch . . . to see how I’m doing . . . and it’s not there. Fuck! I think back . . . that must have been the sound I heard. Shit, now I’m going to be late for my date, I’ve got to run all the way back to where it fell . . . and it’s a nice watch, sitting right there on the sidewalk. I’d be lucky if it was still there. After moping for about 10 seconds, I turn around and run back.”
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Through other calculations, the loss emerges as such an unwanted burden that people immediately try to forget about it, angling their whole disposition against making any effort to recover it. When Hassan, a 25-year-old Brooklyn filmmaker, discovered that his half-rimmed glasses were missing, he was straining to find his iPod, cell phone, and cigarettes—what he calls his “various metro-centricities”— in the diminished light of a setting sun. When he realized that his glasses were missing, he instantly deduced what likely happened to them. “I had a lot of walk- ing ahead of me, as I was walking from Chelsea to union Square. I was feeling particularly good, as I had just dropped off a movie I’d been working on to be sent to Sundance. I stopped at a crosswalk and took off my blazer and slung it over my canvas shoulder bag. The top end of the jacket was hanging upside- down, behind me, over the bag. It was in the following 10 minutes of walking that I must have lost my glasses.” Though Hassan knew he could return to that loca- tion, he was not motivated to do so. “I had some time to kill. But I took it more as a sign that perhaps it was never meant to be. I could just picture myself, my head down as I walked, retracing my steps, scanning the ground through crowds of rush-hour on-foot commuters, bumping into grumpy, self-righteous suits. And then either (A) not finding them, or, even worse, (B) finding them broken. No thanks. So I went to union Square and ate some Thai.” For Hassan, resigning himself to a life without his glasses felt easy. He noted that, having found them just recently after they had been missing for four years, the loss seemed less a chance occurrence and more the fate of those particular glasses. From his point of view, he’s simply not meant to have them.
While some draw on their troubling history with the current and other lost objects, others sense a host of circumstances pacifying their motivation to search. When Amy, a 25-year-old teacher living in Boston, realized she had dropped her keys, “it was later in the evening and I had no energy to make the 20-minute and two big hills bike trip back in the dark to search out the keys along my route. I actually had duplicates of my important keys, which made things easier. This was probably the reason I didn’t ever go back to search the route for my keys. I fig- ured if they were there, I probably wouldn’t see them, being under a car along the road or they were already crushed by city traffic.” In deciding not to try to recover a mislaid object, some people are convinced that any effort to retrieve it would be futile, pacified not by the insignificance of the item but rather by the opposite. Nick, a 26-year-old business consultant living in San Francisco, dropped his wallet during the “annual Bay to Breakers event, at which thousands of people run or walk a designated route in San Francisco from one body of water to another. I recognized that any one of thousands of people could have found my wallet, so it didn’t seem useful to do a physical search of the park route.” By cast- ing the lost object as unrecoverable, individuals continue on their path.
Individuals who move on after losing an object without searching may either evade a sense of a threatening absence by seeing the missing possession as likely to return on its own or embrace a sense of their own impotence to recover it. But if they are unable to sidestep their loss, individuals may invest in a search effort.
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Moving on by recovering the lost object
There is no guarantee that finding the lost object will bring immediate closure. Individuals must transcend the experience of loss for the object’s recovery to move them on. They must believe that the thing that has returned is essentially the same thing that disappeared, despite recovering it from what they perceive to be polluted hands or in a different working order. They must believe that the loss was somewhat of a fluke and they are not at an ongoing risk of losing the object again because of its extreme delicacy. They cannot remain baffled by the mysterious route through which it ended up in a particular location or passed through someone else’s hands. They must also overcome any sense of embarrass- ment about not recovering it sooner, or overlooking what in hindsight appear as tell-tale signs of its now-obvious hiding place.
Individuals reach a firm resolution through recovery when the object is recov- ered from a location that suggests it was reasonably mislaid and reasonably not looked for there, even when the initial vanishing was baffling. When JJ, a per- sonal chef in her 40s living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lost two rings, the mysterious circumstances overwhelmed her. “I was absolutely confident that I had put them where I always do. Not having done that has shaken me horribly. I feel completely distracted and crazy. I wander from room to room in our tiny apartment, looking over and over again in places I have looked so many times before.” When she happened upon the rings by chance some days later, the recovery provided the clues she needed to defuse her anxiety. Like the abrupt resolution to an ancient Greek tragedy, the thing plays the part of deus ex machina, resolving the otherwise inexplicable problem with its sudden reemer- gence. She reported,
I have a few aprons, which live on a hook in the kitchen. I checked the pockets over and over in my search to find my rings, but yesterday when I was straightening up a cup- board I found one that had been misplaced with my dish towels, which I use all the time. In grabbing at them, usually in a hurry to get at something hot, or to wipe my hands and keep cooking, this wandering apron had been pushed to the very back of the bunch. When I found it yesterday I hung it back on its hook. Later when I was making dinner I grabbed for an apron and it was at the top of the pile. While I was doing all of my evening tasks I heard something in the pocket. I reached in, thinking “maybe . . . ?” but sure I was going to pull out two dimes, or buttons, or anything but my rings, as I had so many times before. And then there they were, in my hand, and I had to look at them for a good 15 seconds to be sure.
In other cases, rather than defusing inexplicable details of its vanishing, the successful recovery unearths them, transforming the loss of the object into a loss of reasonable expectations. When Crystal, a mother in her early 40s living in Washington, D.C., lost her wallet, for several days she scoured all the places she thought it could be, but when “six little skateboard dudes” showed up at her house with the soggy wallet she was baffled. The missing details gnawed at her as she tried to fashion a reasonable explanation.
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I asked the boys where they found my wallet and they said “near the sewer across the street.” Apparently one of the boys lodged his skateboard in the sewer and while getting it out he noticed my wallet lying in a puddle of water. Right across the street from my house? How did it get there? I told them where I had thought I lost it, which was several miles away, and they couldn’t believe where they found it either. The location where it was found raised more questions than answers. Had I lost it in the driveway? If so, how did it get across the street and down a ways? I recalled the recent forecast, thinking, it hadn’t rained recently. I thought maybe the person who found it came by my house but saw me at home and didn’t want to get in trouble for taking the $100 so they threw it across the street, thinking that would be good enough for me to find it. . . . I still want to know the full story of where my wallet had been. As if it had been on an adventure without me and I was entitled to know every detail. The wallet had a life of its own.
These puzzling recoveries compel individuals to hunt down explanations that abide by the laws of physics that do not allow things to disappear and reappear willy-nilly.
If it is not mysterious forces and their baffling reflections of self that recoveries alternately pacify and excite, recoveries regularly evoke reflections of self as care- less or otherwise incompetent that must be dealt with in moving on. When indi- viduals recover a lost possession from a place they have already looked or know they should have looked, resolution comes by dealing with these apparent short- comings in their investigative measures. When Nicki, a 24-year-old social worker living in Toronto, lost her wallet somewhere in the city, she searched exhaustively but failed to recover it. In a last-ditch effort, she called the local transportation authority’s lost-and-found office, which informed her that it had been turned in several days earlier. “It is difficult to describe the mix of emotions I felt then, but it was a mix of relief, joy, and embarrassment that I hadn’t just called that number in the first place.”
A successful recovery also fails to grant an immediate sense of resolution when individuals perceive themselves as having cried wolf. When individuals get others involved in recovering a lost object and then they themselves find it somewhere obvious, resolution comes by dealing with how they suspect others will see them in light of the recovery. After Randi, a 25-year-old living in San Diego, lost her driver’s license—or “drinking permit,” as she calls it—and ransacked her whole house, she came up empty-handed and decided to make the dreaded trip to the DMV for a replacement. After expressing her irritation with the ordeal to her housemates and asking them to check a few places for her, she stumbled onto the card in what seemed an obvious location. “There it was, sitting right underneath [my] jeans. I was happy and irritated. I was going to the DMV and everyone knew it. I was half tempted to tell them I went anyway. But that seemed like too much effort and I just explained that I’m mildly retarded and it was exactly where I had thought it had been.”
While individuals are cooling out unsavory reflections of self as they search for an object, they must also resist other lines of closure. Finding closure through recovery means doing whatever it takes to maintain the belief that success is pos- sible and repressing the impulse to give up. In some cases, that means resisting
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getting a replacement because that seems like an admission of defeat. When Nicholas, a 24-year-old writer and musician living in San Francisco, lost his spiral notebook full of creative ideas for stories and songs, he reports, “I did no writing for the entire week. I had nothing to write in. I couldn’t find the strength to buy a new notebook because that would mean admitting the old ones were truly lost. If I started a new one now, I’d have to commit to it, and I wasn’t ready for that because I hadn’t finished the old ones. So I tried to busy myself with other work and pretend it didn’t matter, but the loss was slowly sinking in. I refused to believe yet that they were gone for good.”
A successful recovery of the serendipitous sort may fail to bring individuals to closure, not because of its unsettling revelations, but because they have already found some kind of peace with the object’s absence. For instance, after Emmanuel, a 27-year-old web developer living in Denver, lost a journal, he slowly made peace with its absence and then, several years later, happened upon it in his martial arts studio. “It was a very nice thing to find my [journal] finally, but I had spent the last couple of years starting a new one and trying to redo all of the writing I had lost, that it didn’t make such an impact to find it again. It was fun to flip through and review my old writing, but that was about it.” He expressed surprise and happiness about its return, but conceded that he was not freed from any unresolved feelings.
When individuals move toward closure after recovering a lost object, they work to control the forces that threaten to keep them in a state of loss. But when recovery does not seem immediately forthcoming, individuals may find a kind of closure through failure. As with successful recoveries, individuals must overcome a set of recurring challenges to self for failure to take them back “home.”
Moving on by abandoning a failed search
While there is no guarantee that a successful recovery will automatically bring a sense of closure to individuals who have lost something, with the right condi- tions in place an unsuccessful effort will. People recurrently move toward closure without having found a lost object by developing a sense that they have put in a “good effort,” that they have done what any reasonable person could do in such a situation and do not have to bear the burden of a guilty conscience. As the unsuccessful search can theoretically go on as long as someone lives, at some point the strategy to find the thing turns into a strategy for getting over the effort to find the thing. As all search projects start a narrative thread that implies an ending, individuals sense that doing something to try to find the thing prepares them to give up trying to find it.
Through such resolution-producing, yet failed recovery work, individuals dis- cover a reflection of themselves as careful and thorough, as people who, though they occasionally lose something, are still deserving of nice things. When Michael, a 31-year-old Broadway actor living in New York City, lost his engage- ment ring after he “carelessly” placed it in a shoe before taking the field at a
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softball game, he felt “very guilty” for losing such a “treasured item.” After thor- oughly, but unsuccessfully, searching the dugout and field with a metal detector purchased from Radio Shack the next day, he felt a sense of resolution, but his fiancée, Eva, did not. “Eventually we decided to quit [looking], convinced that we’d done everything we could. If there was a ring there still we would have found it. I felt a sense of closure after the extensive search, but Eva began to get upset. She’d really thought that we’d find it with the metal detector and was now mad at me for being careless with the ring. There were definitely better places to store it than a shoe, and it probably would have been just fine on my finger anyway.”
Though the “good effort” path to resolution is not something individuals regu- larly cite as a strategy guiding their treatment of a loss, in some search situations people know full well that it will let them sleep at night. Anna, a 28-year-old graduate student at Emory university, reported, “I figured if the hat was gone, I could deal with it if I knew that we checked every possible place I had been that night.”
The sense of having put in a “good effort” also emerges when a search effort must end prematurely because of what individuals sense to be legitimate obsta- cles. For instance, when individuals imagine that the lost object could be almost anywhere and any effort appears futile, they may cite needle-in-a-haystack cir- cumstances as an insurmountable obstacle that effectively excuses them from further effort. Vicky, a 27-year-old manager at a company in New York City, conveys this sentiment after coming to multiple dead ends in her search for her bracelet.
Clearly the bracelet is so gone. Maybe it fell off in the first restaurant or the second, maybe it got swept up unnoticed or maybe a waiter found it, maybe it tumbled off while I was walking and some passerby caught the light gleaming off the gold and picked it up in a most lucky turn of events for him, maybe it fell off into the subway tracks. . . . The possibilities are endless, far too endless, and after a week of contemplating every con- ceivable way I could have lost it, as though I could at least reconstruct the exact moment of loss, I am done.
While some, like Vicky, find closure through what they perceive to be insur- mountable practical obstacles to a search, others end unsuccessful searches and relinquish the possibility of recovery to leave an unsettling image of self behind. While looking around the dance floor of a crowded nightclub, Andrea, a 21-year- old art student in New York City, worried about what others thought of her as she and several others tried to track down her errant cell phone.
[My friend] had gone the extra mile: she’d recruited the help of the bouncer. They were busy bobbing between the crowd, peeking around the high-heels and trainers with his trusty mini-torch. That made me incredibly embarrassed. . . . Losing my cell phone was one thing, but looking like “that girl” is another. You know that girl. You don’t want to be that girl. That drunken, idiot who loses her cell phone in a bar. . . . But I didn’t say any- thing besides “thank you very much anyway” when they returned empty-handed.
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Andrea’s embarrassment pushed her toward closure by forbidding her from searching further for her cell phone.
While catching a reflection of themselves as “uncool” prompts some to aban- don their search, others end their effort by catching an unsettling reflection of themselves when they meet people with relative expertise in lost property. A few days after Lizzie, a 41-year-old journalist living in Santa Barbara, lost her gold ring “somewhere around town,” she tried the local pawn shop, “but those guys seemed amused that I’d think I could find my ring there. One said if my ring was stolen, it was in Mexico getting new documents and that the gold had probably been reduced down by now. I felt a little naive in front of those guys at the thought that I could just walk in there and find it.”
Beyond the social pressures to give up, search efforts also come to an excusa- ble end when people run into access issues deriving from the seemingly circui- tous lost and found procedures of a place of business or public institution. Rather than feeling guilt for stopping a search prematurely, losing parties feel frustrated by a sense of impotence in the face of greater powers. For instance, when Javier, a student at the New School, believed he had left his violin on a commuter train, he encountered difficulty with the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA’s) lost- and-found office. “I call MTA to see what their policies are about lost and found items. After trying the number many times over . . . I manage to get hold of someone only to discover that you must wait 7 to 10 business days before you should call them. They do not get daily updates. As absurd as this seems I could do nothing short of traveling from station to station along the route asking every- one in the ticket booths if something had been returned.”
While Javier moved toward closure after hitting a seemingly insuperable bureaucratic obstacle, others bring their recovery efforts to an excusable, though begrudging, end when they uncover signs that the item was stolen and is virtually irretrievable. Faced with this conviction, individuals may give up. Pat, a 48-year- old freelance graphic artist living in Berkeley, reconstructed how she had lost a piece of jewelry: “After I dropped off my daughter I stopped at a gas station . . . and got out of the car forgetting the ring on its chain was on my lap. That is how it happened. The ring simply fell off my lap when I got out of the car. I am pretty sure I will never see that ring again. I noticed at that time that on the ground at the gas station was a little tiny zip-lock bag used for the distribution of metham- phetamine or crack cocaine. I just know that some junkie took my ring.” Convinced that any recovery attempt was hopeless, Pat treated the object as stolen.
In addition to ending a search because of a sense of impotence and to avoid disconcerting reflections of self, individuals stop searching because they do not want the loss to burden those around them. When Mike, a 33-year-old pastor at Valley Christian Fellowship in Northern California, lost the receipt to his church’s projector, he enlisted his staff to help locate it so they could take a tax write-off. “They were all completely invested for an hour. And I could’ve looked for another hour or two easily but I quit because I didn’t want the staff bothered by it
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anymore. If I was looking, I know they would have demanded to help. But . . . I didn’t want to burden them with it.”
When individuals reach a sense of closure through a failed search effort, they often see the lost object as having purely sentimental value, something that can- not be replaced. But when individuals reach a sense of failure without a sense of resolution, they often try to get on with life by replacing it.
Moving on by replacing the thing
Replacing a lost item is no guarantee that individuals will overcome the bur- dens of having lost it. If they turn to a replacement too early, individuals feel wasteful, as if they are just throwing one thing away and picking up another. If they replace something with what turns out to be an inadequate substitute, the loss continues to bother them. By trying to replace something that has irreplace- able value, individuals sense the ineffectiveness of their efforts.
When Rob, an American software engineer on a business trip in London, lost the wedding ring he had worn for 20 years, he put in an exhaustive search before deciding to replace it with an exact replica made by a jeweler in London. But the replacement never quite felt right, and he continued to make phone inquiries to lost-and-found offices around London. He noted, “I wear that one now, but it is not the same. I still make efforts, no matter how futile, to find it.” Jackie, a realtor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, replaced her nearly 30-year-old charm bracelet, hoping that it would assuage her feelings of loss. But after duplicating some of the original charms, she begrudgingly conceded that the “meaning is not there.” For some, the shortcomings of the replacement will spur another round of searching.
While some discover that their lost objects have irreplaceable value by actually replacing them and then feeling the inadequacies of the substitutes, others sense right away that the lost object cannot be satisfactorily replaced. When Laura, an adjunct professor of graphic design at a southern university, lost a memory chip from her camera filled with hundreds of “artsy” photos documenting her and her son’s trip through Germany and France, she scoffed at someone’s suggestion that she could replace them. “Someone said I could just collect some pictures off the Internet or gather some pictures of those who accompanied me on the trip. But, bottom line: they are someone else’s memories. Not mine.”
Those who replace lost objects may find that does little to resolve a sentimen- tal loss or to repair negative images of self derived from losing something, espe- cially when their competency is already suspect. When JP, a 28-year-old aspiring comedian living in Boston, lost his cell phone, he had difficulty finding the humor in the situation. Having recently told his disapproving family that he was going to pursue a career in comedy, he felt that telling them he had lost his only means of communication seemed like “evidence that I was not in fact a creative person trying to pursue a dream, but an immature fuck-up with delusions of grandeur who couldn’t keep things in his pocket.” Several days after the loss, JP checked a
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few more places and began considering a replacement. What he found most dis- turbing was the damage to his sense of credibility. “It seems really strange to me, because at the same time I recognize how inconsequential [the loss] is. I can buy a new phone, probably a nicer one, and try to keep in mind that one piece of plastic and circuits is easily replaced by another. But there’s a nagging feeling that by losing the phone, the status symbol, the lifeline, that I’ve somehow taken a step backwards from being a responsible adult.”
Chloe, a former corporate analyst in Manhattan, also knows that a replace- ment will not repair the damage caused by a loss that signals incompetence. She had just moved to Maui to “take a break from my high-pressure work history” when she lost her new employers’ keys. She had presented herself to them as a highly skilled organizer who had “a reputation for knowing where things are, why they are there, and where they will go next . . . and for being supremely qualified not only to keep track of things, but to determine if they are really needed to begin with.” When she had to contact her employers while they were away and enlist their help in finding spare keys or replacing them, she felt humiliated about messing up the very task that she claimed was her strong suit. Soon Chloe deduced why the mishap had occurred and concluded that the problem could be resolved only by quitting her job.
Let me tell you, I felt bitch-slapped by the great goddess Karma. I don’t know what offended her more, my arrogance about how far beneath me this job is, or my lack of concern about honesty in the reporting of my work hours. But either way, I was severely reprimanded. Therefore, this story has not one but two morals, and both are horribly clichéd. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, and honesty is the best policy. Did I take these morals to heart? Well, in a manner of speaking. As far as the honesty goes, I shorted my hours for the second week to make up for what I had overcharged the first week. With regard to the “any job” moral, I decided that this was not a job worth doing, and gave my notice well in advance of my actual date of resignation, so as not to leave them in the lurch. And immediately felt better about the entire situation.
under circumstances like those JP and Chloe encountered, replacing the lost object cannot repair the damage caused by the loss.
For others, replacement soothes a glaring absence or restores a taken-for- granted and comforting intertwining of self with thing. When Gina, an executive of a Fortune 500 company living in New York City, lost her ankle bracelet while “drinking and gallivanting across the city,” feeling its absence stirred her from sleep and irked her for the next five days. “It was strange getting dressed . . . put- ting on my shoes especially, without the anklet there. . . . I hardly ever really noticed it, but suddenly my ankle felt very naked without it. Its absence was so obvious. At the jewelry store where my parents bought the original gift I bought a replacement . . . five days after it disappeared, which at least got rid of that naked ankle feeling and gave me something to fidget with in all the odd ways I had never consciously realized.”
Replacing a lost object works only when the replacement does not act as a reminder of the loss. Ryan, a 21-year-old college student living in Minnesota, lost
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his much-loved jacket. “Two days later, after giving up hope of finding the jacket, I ordered the exact same $150 jacket from Cabela’s, even though it was going to be a stress on my finances, because I knew that I enjoyed that jacket so much that if I were to get another of less quality and value I would always think of the one that I lost and how much better it was.” Individuals may move toward closure if the replacement puts the lost item in a less attractive light, however. When Marcy, a 51-year-old pediatrician living in New York City, begrudgingly began the process of replacing her lost camera, she found its loss much easier to accept. “I learned that it was an old model and was shown the new lighter, higher-pixel replacement. Funny that the camera I had loved which took amazing pictures in sunlight now seemed a bit obsolete!”
Conclusion
Despite the uniqueness of individuals’ responses to losing personal belong- ings, people always move on by overcoming recurring challenges that are intrinsic to the path they take. Sometimes moving on entails pacifying unset- tling feelings or sidestepping them altogether. If and when these feelings develop, they do so by portraying the self in a deficient light, leaving individuals to revive a sense of an adequate self. But what it takes to get them back to a more settled place is often not entirely known by individuals at the outset. Every loss presents itself as a kind of riddle through which losing parties come to see, through subsequent steps and even stumblings, a route for getting back to life as usual.
When first realizing a loss, individuals feel or logically deduce whether they must embark on a recovery effort or can calmly put their concerns aside and back away. When they choose to invest effort in searching, they may learn that success is not enough to enable them to move on. The reemergence of the thing must be pacifying, not a damning commentary on self. Yet counterintuitively, failure to recover the object may provide an escape from the burdens of loss, provided that individuals feel they have made a genuine effort. When all else fails, replacement solves the practical deficits created by the object’s sudden absence, but leaves one in the lurch when its powers derive from its provenance.
Each way of moving on constitutes a different way of imagining the relation- ship of self and thing. Moving on without the thing, whether by sidestepping a sense of loss entirely or through a failed search, becomes an effort to disassociate self from thing and reimagine an adequate life despite its absence. Moving on with the successfully recovered thing becomes an effort to ignore or disarm the continued existence of troubling forces that could cause the loss once again. Moving on with a replacement becomes an effort to lose oneself once again in the thing while pacifying a sense that the connection is artificial. To move on from a breach in one’s taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment is to play with a notion of where the self ends and the world begins.
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References
Becker, Howard S. 1998. Tricks of the trade. Chicago, IL: university of Chicago Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pollner, Melvin. 1974. Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (1): 35–54. Ragin, Charles C. 1994. Constructing social research: The unity and diversity of method. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
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