Mobile Lives
Exploring work-related mobility; commuting, working-on-the-move, business travel and short term expatriation.
The Research
For many professionals and managers today, to work is to travel. Yet for such people, electronic communication is also routine. Mass air travel is increasingly recognised as an environmental problem. Why then is business air travel so ubiquitous?
These issues are the starting point of Mobile Lives. The core of the project is a study of business air travel in the Irish software industry using semi-structured interviews with software workers and managers. Conceptually the project links mobility studies, cluster research (especially ‘proximity studies’ and innovation studies) with the more conventional study of work and employment. We show that business travel in the industry is essential to the creation of ‘temporary proximity’ which is especially important in innovative sectors of the economy such as software; we suggest that air travel has been essential for the Irish software industry to be ‘born global’; we challenge the simplistic division between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’ in the lives of software workers. This focus on mobility is also relevant to the ERC’s work on migration.
The research project was initially funded under the PRTLI at TCD’s Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS). Further information on the PRTLI programme at the IIIS can be found on the relevant IIIS web page.
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Publications, reports and conference papers
James Wickham and Alessandra Vecchi, ‘Local firms and global reach: Business air travel and the Irish software cluster’, European Planning Studies vol 16 no 5 (2008): 693-710.
James Wickham and Alessandra Vecchi, ‘Getting on the plane and falling out of society: Business air travel and the end of work/life balance?’ Work Employment & Society Conference, Aberdeen 12-14 September 2007 also at 24th EGOS Colloquium Amsterdam The Netherlands 10-12 July 2008.
Alessandra Vecchi and James Wickham, ‘Clusters and pipelines, commuters and nomads: Business travel in the Irish software industry’ (with Alessandra Vecchi) Fifth Proximity Conference, Bordeaux, 29 June 2006; also American Association of Geographers Conference, San Francisco, 18 April 2007. On line version posted 16 November 2006 as GaWC Research Bulletin no. 212 at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb212.html.
James Wickham and Alessandra Vecchi, ‘Travelling and connecting, messaging and meeting: Business travel, information technology and the virtual organisation’ 22nd EGOS Colloquium, Bergen Norway, 8 July 2006.
Paul Haynes, Alessandra Vecchi, and James Wickham (2005) 'Flying around the globe and bringing business back home', presented at 7th European Sociological Association conference, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland, 9-12 September 2005 (PDF, FlyingGlobe.pdf, 391KB)
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