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Business travel as institutionalised practice: reconceptualising the production of mobility dilemmas by James Faulconbridge (Lancaster University) in The Geography of Business Travel session and the RGS conference 2013.
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James Faulconbridge
Lancaster University
Business travel as institutionalised practice: reconceptualising the production of
mobility dilemmas
Context – the taken for granted-ness of business travel
The failed ICT-revolution Barclaycard Business Travel Survey:
1996-2006 – 32% increase in business travel Average executive surveyed travels 600 miles a month Over 50% say recession has not reduced travel – too
important
Mobile lives (Elliott and Urry, 2010)
The co-operative ecology of virtual and
embodied mobility (Haynes, 2010; Faulconbridge et al., 2009)
Yet reasons for reducing business travel well recognised: The cost to business - travel related and lost time (Bray, 2008;
Salt and Wood, 2012)
Risk and business continuity – the volcanic ash crisis (Budd et al., 2011)
Social costs – work/life balance, stress, familial responsibilities (Espino et al., 2002; Middleton, 2008)
Carbon: 3.5bn business trips by air globally for business each year (World Bank, 2012)
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UKResidentsoverseas visitsby airforbusiness
Visits tothe UKby airforbusiness
InwardFDI toUK
• Yes, functional need could explain the relationship...
• But other ‘forces’ also at work… exemplified by disconnect between views on effects of recession and stats
• Mobility cultures embedded in work practices matter and are actively sustained, impeding transitions to less mobile lives
• Travel not so much a decision, more a taken-for-granted way of being, practiced to conform to expectations and norms
• Business travel as a practice
Business travel as a practice
Practices as common normalised ways of being/doing “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and
sayings. Examples are cooking practices, voting practices, industrial practices, recreational practices, and correctional practices” (Schatzki, 1996: 89)
The fundamental ‘stuff’ of life Key is that many practitioners recognise way of doing as
legitimate and normal (Shove, 2003) - Showering & laundering: common values, technologies and hence
ways of doing
Result is practitioners that perform a practice unconsciously: its just a normal part of everyday life
The inter-locking components of a normal practice:
• Meaning: practices are associated with and driven by particular mental maps, emotions, and understandings of legitimate ways of being (Reckwitz, 2002).
• Competency: participating in a practice requires, first, knowledge of how to complete the required actions associated with a way of doing a task (Reckwitz, 2002) and, second, knowledge of how to legitimately engage in the practice (Shove and Pantzar, 2007).
• Materials: the availability of particular objects, knowledge about how to use them (Shove and Pantzar, 2005), and the way objects become intimately tied to meanings (e.g., the car to convenience and comfort – see Warde, 2005) means materials are closely related to the emergence and decay of practices.
So how did business travel become a practice? The case of aeromobility
Aeromobility: a two stage history
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Visits to the UK by air for business
1. Foundations: 1960-1980 2. Consolidating a market: 1980-2000 Post 2000s normality
Foundations: 1960-1980
The airline industry: the making of a technical system
The jet engine (from 300 to 500 mph; enhanced long-haul comfort and capability)
But... Technology alone is not enough
Producing cultures of executive aeromobility was crucial
The shift from road and rail to air: placing a value on time (United Airlines in 1960s says anyone paid more than $1/hr should fly as cost efficient)
Making business travel distinctive:
“I you want a man to do a first-class job, give him a first-class ticket. Economy class travel looks like sound company policy. On paper. In practice, just how sound is it? Think of what you’re asking your man to do. Make decisions that could affect the future of your company. Decisions that rely on clear thinking. He’ll need to be rested and relaxed as possible. Ready to do into action as soon as he reaches his destination. And that’s how first class will get him there. More relaxed because he’s travelling in greater space and comfort. More rested because there are few people and fewer disturbances. And, psychologically, that first class ticket does a lot for his image and yours. It tells him you think he’s the best man for the job. So give him a first class ticket. And he’ll do a first class job”.
1970s British Overseas Airways Corporation Advert
Globalisation and neoliberalism New economic discourses and practices
Lassez-faire state roll-back: Tokyo round of GATT in 1979 removed US$300
billion of tariffs
Thatcher and Reagan roll-back the state and privatise
A new discourse (with governmental effects): free markets and the encouragement of trade
The result: New International Divisions of labour, a race to
globalise, and a new role for the mobile executive to manage spatially stretched activities
2. Consolidating a market
New systems of provision facilitating and responding to new economic practices
The internet: facilitating global trade and thus encouraging not reducing mobility (mobility allies – Haynes, 2010)
Mobiles (smart phones especially) and the laptop: allowing work on the move and maximising productivity
The supporting system of provision
Industry Role
International airport and business hotel chains (in the 1990s
especially)
Provision of meeting and work spaces for mobile executive
Corporate travel management companies and in-house travel
management departments (as part of Human Resources)
Translating an executive’s list of destinations into a series of
flight codes that minimise travel time and maximise work time,
a series of hotel bookings that ensure spaces for work and
consistent standards of service, and visas that ensure problem-
free international border crossing
Executive intelligence services Magazines and websites (e.g., Business Traveller) as well as
guides (e.g., The survivors guide to business travel (Collis,
2000). All designed to provide the executive with the skills
needed to effectively manage their mobility and minimise
personal (stress, work-life balance) and corporate costs
(expense, travel time)
The effects of the making of a practice
The institutionalisation of executive aeromobility as a way of business life is a result of not a single trend, event or act but is a result of the hanging together of a series of cultural, economic and technological developments
Element of
practice
Factors generating executive aeromobility as practice Contribution to the compulsion of aeromobility
Meaning
Airlines: their role in defining the economic rationality of
aeromobility and the status of aeromobility vis-à-vis the
identity of the executive
Neoliberalism: the need to seek-out new markets which
are at a distance to headquarters
Mobility markers: corporate discourses about the
aeromobile executive as successful, ripe for promotion
and a profit generator
Air is the right way for executives to travel
Aeromobility becomes essential to fulfil new cultures of
corporate spatial expansion
Demonstrating aeromobility (e.g., days on the road; elite
status on frequent flyer programmes) is essential for career
success; e.g. – 69% of workers believe not travelling
enough will jeopardise career chances (Espino et al., 2002)
Clients come to expect executives providing goods and
services to be mobile and visit them in-situ
Competency
Knowledge about how to become and minimise the costs
of aeromobility gained from:
Colleagues in the workplace who share knowledge
Publications that provide intelligence about dos and
don’ts
Employer training about being mobile and in-house
travel support departments
Certain acceptable ways of being mobile develop, with
common ways of acting and using systems of provision
becoming associated with legitimate (cost effective,
culturally normalised) aeromobility practice.
The ‘right’ airline loyalty card as symbolic of career success
Materials
Airlines: providing executive aeromobility infrastructures
(from the business class cabin to the executive lounge
and geographically expansive network coverage)
Communication technologies: allies allowing the
coordination of the spatially dispersed business that
aeromobility is associated with
Aeromobility made possible, economically viable with
materials designed to produce/meet particular logics of
executive travel
Spatially distributed business and hyper-mobile executives
made efficient and negative impacts (e.g., lack of
coordination of subsidiaries; working time lost on the move)
overcome
The image of the business traveller
Status symbols
Glamorising life on the move
Conclusions
The ‘hanging togethers’ that generate business travel as a practice mean business travel grows not just because of what it allows people to do – the functional compulsions perspective – but because it is ingrained in business life
Hence why the ICT revolution never happened: its contradicts a normalised way of doing business
So what?
If we are serious about reducing the impact of business travel, on the environment and social lives, then:
Driving greater use of technology requires more than just ICT provision
The meaning and logic of travel has to be changed – something that requires social reform (travel as illegitimate; immobility as a sign of effectiveness and success) The dilemma of balancing economic demand for better travel infrastructures
against what constrained mobility may do to drive transitions
Virtual systems need to be constructed like mobile systems were constructed - new meanings, competencies as well as material systems of provision so that not travelling is the normal and legitimate thing Investments in practice formation like those made to move executives onto
planes needed to move them into virtual meeting rooms