Flying around the globe and bringing business back home

For many managers and professional today, to work is to travel. The variety of purposes and functions that travel enables for business encompasses almost every dimension of business and management and is therefore a very complex feature of business practice. 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. Why then the need for physical travel? Rather than taking the growth of travel for granted, a sociology of business travel could explore those factors that make business more or less travel-intensive. Just as some forms of economic growth are more energy-intensive than others, just as some cities (with the same overall income levels) are more car dependent than others (Wickham, forthcoming), so some forms of business are presumably more travel-intensive than others. A few years ago such a question would have been ‘academic’, but today there is increasing awareness of the negative environmental consequences of hyper-mobility, and in particular of the contribution of air travel to global warming. Against this background, the research project from which this paper derives examines business travel from two separate angles. Firstly, we ask about the factors that generate business travel, and secondly we explore the consequences of business travel for travellers’ identity and relationship with their non-work lives. This paper is based on preliminary work for the first of these two topics. The first part of the paper examines the economic and spatial structure of the global economy. The growth of dynamic global cities, ICT clusters and global production networks as well as the network organisation all make long-distance communication more important. The second part of the paper examines the role of physical travel within this. We explore the extent to which physical travel and electronic communication are complementary or substitutes, and document the growth of business travel. Finally, we sketch how these issues all emerge through the importance of business travel for the Irish software sector. The Irish software industry was identified for research because of the interesting paradox that while its product is “weightless” and can be transmitted and mediated through virtual technology, the sector seems to be very travel intensive. The paper ends with some initial conclusions and directions for further research.