INFORMATIONAL CONTEXT: the hospitality phenomenon

This is an interdisciplinary study involving Information Science and Tourism fields, which aims to describe the lodging facilities' context and their particularities, enabling to shape the hospitality phenomenon in Brazil as an information field. The research adopted a descriptive approach aiming to identify the characteristics related to the hospitality phenomenon in the process of production, communication and use of information. In its social approach, the characterization of the lodging facilities' context made evident the information field and, largely, showed the nature of information to which involved people are regularly exposed. The study identified two groups of elements that constitute this context -stakeholders and contextual factors - which surround, interact and shape each other while the information is produced, shared and used, setting up a relational, dynamic and socially constructed environment.