Clusters and pipelines, commuters and nomads: Business travel in the Irish software industry

For many managers and professionals today, to work is to travel. Business travel is now so interwoven with doing business that its apparent continued growth is a matter of common sense. Yet paradoxically, these same business travellers are also intensive users of communication technology (phone fax, e-mail, etc), many will use web based technologies to locate information and even do business, while some will use information technologies to work together with colleagues in distant physical locations. However, the “mobility turn” in sociology and geography has not led to exploration of business travel within economic sociology or even management studies. We argue that rather than taking the growth of travel for granted, a sociology of business travel should explore those factors that make business more or less travel-intensive. The paper is based on research on the role of business travel within the Irish software industry. The software industry has been a key part of the recent success of the Irish economy. While the growth of the Irish economy has been largely driven by Foreign Direct Investment, software is unusual in that it contains not only a large foreign-owned sector but a strong and export-oriented indigenous sector (O’Riain, 2004). While its product is increasingly “weightless” and can be transmitted and mediated through virtual technology, and while those working in the sector are extremely “IT aware”, the sector is one of the most travel intensive sectors of the Irish economy. The literature on innovation stresses the importance of physical proximity for high technology areas such as software production. We show how such proximity is important, but for different reasons, for both the indigenous and the foreign-owed sectors of the industry. While such permanent proximity has been much discussed in the literature, there is little empirical exploration of its converse, namely the need for temporary proximity, although Bathelt et al (2004) suggest that such clusters are linked by “pipelines” of communication which are in particular important for innovation. Using interviews with a sample of software managers and professionals, we show that business travel in the software industry involves more than simply the connection of clusters. We develop a typology of forms of business travellers from regular “commuters” between clusters to “nomads” who move travel to and from a shifting range of destinations and who have become almost virtual workers. We show also how these different forms of travel involve different relations between permanent and temporary proximity.