Existing research in hospitality literature has studied hospitality vis-à-vis the host-guest spectrum, focusing on either the practice of hospitality in different service encounters or hospitality outcomes such as customer expectations and satisfaction. While existing studies are predicated on the assumption that satisfactory experience is achieved through the enactment of ‘hospitality’, what it means to be hospitable, though, remains a poorly defined concept in the scholarship. Drawing on the ‘hospitality as culture’ perspective, this research aims to understand the culture of hospitality in the alternative healthcare of chiropractic. Guided by constructivist grounded theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with eleven chiropractors and ten patients in Malaysia. Our findings reveal three mechanisms that help chiropractors understand hospitality as a culture: negotiating, internalizing, and enacting.

现有的款待文献研究已经研究了款待与主人-客人之间的关系，侧重于不同服务遭遇中的款待实践或顾客期望和满意度等款待结果。虽然现有的研究基于这样的假设，即令人满意的体验是通过“好客”的制定获得的，但好客的含义在学术界仍然是一个定义不明确的概念。借鉴“好客文化”的观点，本研究旨在了解脊椎按摩疗法替代医疗保健中的好客文化。在建构主义扎根理论的指导下，我们对马来西亚的 11 名脊椎按摩师和 10 名患者进行了深入访谈。