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.

1. James Faulconbridge
Lancaster University
Business travel as institutionalised practice:
reconceptualising the production of
mobility dilemmas

2. 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)

3. 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)

4. 0
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PercentagechangeinFDI
Percentagechangefrom1980inaeromobility(numberofvisits)
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UK
Residen
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oversea
s visits
by air
for
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Visits to
the UK
by air
for
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Inward
FDI to
UK
• 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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)

12. 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

13. 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

14.  The image of the business traveller
 Status symbols
 Glamorising life on the move

15. 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

16. 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