The elastic mobility of business elites – Negotiating the ‘Home’ and ‘Away’ continuum

Introduction

A growing body of research has highlighted the social costs of transnational lifestyles and the role of various technologies of communication in sustaining senses of belonging (see, for example, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2014; Jung, 2013; King-O’Riain, 2015; Moores and Metykova, 2010; Ryan et al., 2015; Uy-Tioco, 2007; Wilding, 2006). Building upon this line of research, this study seeks to provide an in-depth view of the existential dilemmas that pertain to life on the move among a transnationally mobile fraction of citizens. Drawing upon interviews with members of the corporate business elite of Sweden, we shed light on the push-and-pull processes that characterize the efforts to combine family life with a career in transnational business. We pay particular attention to how various media practices function to balance private/professional life in a transnational context.

In such explorations, we seek to move beyond what Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010) refer to as globalization theory’s flow speak, which tends to overemphasize the annulment of distance in times of transnational connectivity (see also Tomlinson, 1994). In ‘flow speak’, life-worlds have become deterritorialized (Giddens, 1991), and the possibility of mediated connectivity across nations invites participation in global culture (Poster, 2008), creating a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae in Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010), in which people undertake ‘footloose’ (p. 485) mobility (McHugh, 2000: 79–80). Following the arguments of Bude and Dürrschmidt, we argue that in order to understand the lived realities of individuals whose lifestyles include significant amounts of mobility, we need to juxtapose the specific traits of leading a transnationally mobile life with persisting questions of localized belonging and sedentariness (cf. Christensen and Jansson, 2015; Elliot and Urry, 2010).

By moving out of flow speak and into the study of the actual experiences and lifestyles of the mobile elites – undoubtedly one of the most ‘flowing’ class fractions there are – we allow ourselves to debunk some taken for granted notions that are rife in globalization theory. Such notions include the idea that mobile elites are the ‘cosmopolitans’ of our times, flowing frictionlessly between borders and cultures, and that various tools for mediated connectivity are deployed as means to stay connected and be in touch with ‘the world’.

In trying to explain how a privileged fraction of citizens navigate between the categories of home and away, between opportunity and obligation, and the ways in which they maintain their mobile lifestyles, we arrive at the concept of elastic mobility. This concept is meant to point to the constant symbolic and material movements that occur in lives that are simultaneously localized and globalized – lives that are marked by various ‘stretches’ and ‘pull-backs’ along the ‘home’ and ‘away’ continuum.

The article is structured into four sections. First, we delineate the theoretical starting-point for the study of mobile lifestyles from a ‘contra-flow speak’ vantage point. Then, we account for the interview data that we draw upon, and subsequently we provide an analysis of our interview material. This is followed by a discussion on the elastic character of the life of the mobile elite.

Localizing mobile lifestyles

Contemporary flow speak, prevalent across scholarly and popular concerns with ‘the global’, produces a visionary image of a cosmopolitan society supported by increased symbolic and material connectivity. Because of its preoccupation with the spatial expansion of social life, much of globalization theory has ‘lost track of the idea of “limits”’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010) and as a result ‘access to global space then implies first of all a multiplication of options’ that fosters the vision of ‘“omnipresence” and “all-at-onceness”’ (p. 483).

Such a focus constructs both symbolic, or mediated, and corporeal forms of mobility as moments at which individuals become more in tune with the world and come to cultivate an expanded mode of reference, or a cosmopolitan outlook. In this sense, Hannerz (1990) argues that the ‘implosive power’ of the media meant that people in the Post-Cold war era of satellite television became ‘a little more cosmopolitan’ (p. 249). Giddens (1991) contends that our ‘phenomenal worlds’, that is, the taken for granted orientations that guide us in everyday life, or what phenomenologists refer to as the natural attitude, are now truly global. Relatedly, for Szerszynski and Urry (2006), television has ‘transformed our little worlds’ (p. 116) because of the ‘imaginative travel’ they afford. Rantanen (2005), in turn, asks about the possibility of a mass-mediated cosmopolitanism (p. 122) and Sobré-Denton (2015) argues that the Internet constitutes a milieu in which a ‘virtual cosmopolitanism’ can thrive. In relation to such accounts, the critique of flow speak implies asking whether many scholars have been too quick to posit that what the media ‘does’ in times of globalization is to provide people with the ‘skills and predispositions to develop a cosmopolitan outlook’ (Yilmaz and Trandafoiu, 2014: 4).

Similar flow speak discourses are prevalent also in relation to corporeal mobility. Here, ‘ports, docks factories, storage areas, garages and roads’ are understood as ‘types of cosmopolitan agents’ since they enable global mobility (Skrbis and Woodward, 2013: 60). There is, Skrbis and Woodward (2013) continue, ‘something curiously cosmopolitan about seeing the world from above’ (p. 62). The figure of the cosmopolitan, in short, is often positioned in terms of his or her purported mobility (Hannerz, 1990; Skrbis et al., 2013).

The analytical preoccupation with the question on what we might call an expanded spatial experience risks belittling ‘the cultural thickness of everyday territoriality’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 482). As recently concluded also by Ryan et al. (2015), ‘apparent ease of mobility and long-distance communication may lead to an underestimation of the ongoing salience of place and emplacement, even for relatively affluent, highly skilled migrants’ (p. 199). What is often ignored is that a mobile lifestyle entails a complex set of relations to home. What is put into brackets is the fact that life trajectories are predominately maintained and negotiated in relation to the various structures of everyday, localized (family) life (as indicated by Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010) and Elliot and Urry (2010), respectively). In order to generate a richer perspective of social life in times of transnational interconnection, we argue for an understanding of mobile lifestyles from a position that departs from the reductionisms of ‘flow speak’, and reinstates the notions of locality, ‘life-conduct’ and ‘home-coming’ into the analytic focus (see, for example, Christensen and Jansson, 2015: ch 5; Dürrschmidt, 2013; Savage et al., 2005).

Following Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010), we seek to understand mobile ‘life-conducts’ (p. 484) from a perspective that takes into account the ways in which patterns of transnational mobility fit with the obligations of everyday life. It implies recognizing that a life on the move entails movement from something – namely, the home and the family; from the tasks and obligations of localized social life that still occupies a crucial position in the life of the individual away from home. The concept of transclusion, which is deployed by Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010) in order to problematize globalization theory’s focus on transcending the local, helps us get to the core of the often-unrecognized ambivalence of mobile life patterns. Transclusion points to ‘the precarious balancing of opening and closure in a translocal landscape of opportunity and obligation’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 488). The concept leads us to acknowledge that:

mobility has its social costs despite the dramatically improved technical infrastructure of long distance travel. And that seems to apply even to those who are normally celebrated and celebrating themselves as the ‘masters of the universe’. (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 486)

Thus, we take transclusion to mean the process of opening/closure of opportunity and obligation that occurs as individuals move between home and away, between the local and the global. As such, our approach involves understanding that being ‘on the move’ is not the exclusive aspect of a mobile lifestyle. In the course of a life trajectory, even members of the ‘globally mobile elite’ experience periods of sedentariness (Christensen and Jansson, 2015; Elliot and Urry, 2010). Furthermore, transnational mobility must also be understood in relation to an individual’s often persisting feeling of belonging to a particular locale – the home – and the existential dilemmas involved with being away from that locale.

This perspective suggests that our understanding of the appropriations of various tools for mediated connectivity of the mobile elite must be broadened. As such, we need to move away from globalization theory’s tendency to construct the media solely as ‘technologies of the cosmos’ (Tomlinson, 2008) – as technological gateways to the wider world (as explored above). In acknowledging the persisting relevancy of locality for globally mobile people, it becomes evident that various affordances of connectivity cannot be understood as exclusively expanding spatial experience ‘outwardly’. In contrast, it might in fact prove more fruitful to posit that Skype, Facebook, email, newspapers, text messaging and so on are deployed by these people in ways that help them maintain and structure life back home, which they are physically disconnected from (as shown by, for example, Jung, 2013; King-O’Riain, 2015; Moores and Metykova, 2010; Ryan et al., 2015; Uy-Tioco, 2007; Wilding, 2006). Phenomena such as ‘mobile phone parenting’ (the maintenance of caring family relations via telephone; see Madianou and Miller, 2012), ‘emotional streaming’ (emotional interaction over distance through webcams; see King-O’Riain, 2015: 257) and ‘connected presence’ (the multiplication of encounters and contacts through mediations and artefacts, for example, SMS or e-mail; see Licoppe, 2004: 19; Licoppe and Smoreda, 2005: 5) are indicative of the role of media for maintaining long-distance relationships. The media, in this sense, are appropriated under the regime of technologies of the hearth, as ‘imperfect instruments by which people try, in conditions of mundane deterritorialization, to maintain something of the security of cultural location-of fixity in a culture of flow’ (Tomlinson, 2008: 68).

Our approach to understanding the life patterns of the corporate business elites revolves around the two key concepts discussed above: transclusion and technologies of the hearth. These concepts allow us to move beyond the rhetoric of flow speak in order to account for crucial ambivalences between ‘the local’ and the global that in fact characterize the lived experiences of those with mobile lifestyles (Elliot and Urry, 2010: 73). Ultimately, they permit an understanding of mobile lives that emphasizes the tensions between home and away that are engendered in both symbolic and material forms of connectivity. Before addressing the question posed in this study – how mobile elites navigate between home and away in times of global connectivity – we provide a description of our data.

Method and material

The presented study rests upon qualitative interview data with respondents who occupy status positions in the realm of corporate business and whose occupations demand a lot of work-related travelling. While the concept of ‘elite’ is a contested one (Savage and Williams, 2008), the fact that our respondents hold top positions in the organizations that they work for makes it is reasonable to argue that they belong to ‘those groups that hold or exercise domination within a society or within a particular area of social life’, which is how Scott (2008) defines elite (p. 32). Our respondents can thus be claimed to belong to a growing, and increasingly transnational (Bühlmann et al., 2013), corporate business elite.

As other scholars have also noted, research on elites has been relatively absent over the last three decades, compared to the situation in the 1970s when ‘there was a substantial body of literature on this topic, especially concerning economic elites’ (Scott, 2008: 27). In this study, again, the focus on highly mobile elites allows us to challenge the argumentation within flow speak on some of the most ‘free-floating’ of ‘global’ subjects.

Questions were posed that provide insight into the everyday lives of these elites, with a particular focus on their everyday media use and experiences of mediated connectivity with physically absent friends and family members. In addition, questions were asked that aimed to generate a deeper understanding of our respondents’ social background (e.g. what their parents do/did for a living, degrees of mobility during childhood) as well as of their attitudes to their current life situations (e.g. to travelling per se, to combining family life with a professional career).

The respondents were found through a snowball sampling procedure, where a few initial contacts provided us with suggested names of additional respondents. In total, 13 respondents – five female and eight men – were interviewed. Nine of the respondents were interviewed individually and four as couples. In one of the couple interviews, both participants can count as corporate business elites, whereas in the other only the male respondent holds a professional top position. The interviews were conducted between June 2014 and March 2015, and most of them took place at the respondent’s regular or temporary working place. Three of the interviews were conducted via Skype (due to the fact that the respondents, at the time of the interview, were off to work at far-away destinations), and the couple interviews were carried out in the respondents’ homes. The interview recordings are between 45 and 110 minutes long (70 minutes on average).

The respondents’ names in the article are fictive, and professional titles have deliberately been made generic in order not to reveal too much of the respondents’ identities. For the same reason, the names of the organizations that our respondents work for have intentionally been left out. However, all organizations are large-scale, private corporations, hence their transnational character. Important to note is that although a rather wide scope of industrial sectors is covered by the data, the requirements and conditions under which our respondents work, and travel especially, are remarkably similar. All but three respondents live with their families in Sweden and travel abroad on a regular basis (several times each month). The three respondents living abroad at the time of the study – in England, Switzerland and the United States – travel to other countries for work too, and in much the same way as the rest of the interviewees.

Results of analysis

In this section, we approach our respondents’ narratives about pursuing a career in transnational contexts, balancing private/professional life in different phases of life, and using media to connect homewards; all the while trying to stay attentive to tensions between the global and the local. This implies that we put the concepts of transclusion and technologies of the hearth to work on our empirical data. Both concepts help us understand important aspects of the ‘elastic’ character of our respondents’ lifestyles, as they maintain and advance their transnational careers while, at the same time, attempting to take responsibility for home and family. The notion of elastic mobility is further elaborated in our concluding section.

On the elasticity of mobile lifestyles

This study has been an attempt to move beyond the tendency in the study of globalization and mobility to put the focus on spatial expansions of frames of reference and of social life in general (as discussed by Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010). Our vantage point has been one that keeps track of time and the life trajectory (including family related obligations) as key structuring forces for social agents who lead transnationally mobile working lives (see also Elliot and Urry, 2010; Savage et al., 2005). Thus, we seek to build upon previous researches that share similar premises by way of analysing the mediated family relationship of transnationally mobile business elites in Sweden. Our study results in the metaphor of elastic mobility, since the symbolic and material connectivity studied here can be seen as patterns involving various stretches and pull-backs along the continuum of home and away. The contribution to previous research lies in unearthing such ‘elasticity’ among the highly mobile business elites, who are otherwise commonly thought of as leading ‘cosmopolitan’ lives spared of obligations tied to home and locality.

Our interview data show that the members of the corporate business elite are often reluctant travellers. It is evident that pursuing a career in transnational business comes with certain social costs. While indeed enjoying their work, it comes with the existential anxieties involved in being away from home and the obligations of everyday life. Elements of sedentariness and a longing for local fixity remain strong among our respondents – mobility is often reduced over the course of their planned life trajectories. Here it must be added that our respondents are predominately male, and that their mobility relies on having their wives or partners undertaking chores at home. The mobile life that we have described is thus highly gendered, and further studies should detail the dynamics of gender relations of the lifestyles described here.

A way of coping with the dilemmas of being away is to stay connected with family and friends via technologies of communication. Our findings support Tomlinson’s (2008) argument that tools for instantaneous connectivity across distances constitute instruments that people rely on in order to maintain existential fixity while being caught up in a ‘culture of flow’ (p. 68). The forms of connectivity that we have identified speak towards the notion of technologies of the hearth. The existential dilemmas described suggest that we need to debunk the common preconception of the global ethos of the transnationally mobile elites. Additionally, the ‘unglamorous’ or ‘boring’ flights and taxi rides to hotels and conference centres arguably put limits on the notion that the privileged and well-travelled would lead frictionless ‘cosmopolitan’ lives. Few respondents ascribe any value to travelling in itself. But at the same time, they indicate a comfort in moving about in various transnational settings and they do possess the skills to navigate in these contexts. We wish to emphasize that mobility, or privilege, does not automatically result in any deeper global commitments and concerns.

Rather, these points highlight the elastic character of mobile lifestyles. The elites researched here are fully immersed in ‘the precarious balancing of opening and closure in a translocal landscape’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010), and however global (p. 488) lives they may live, they still tend to be ‘pulled back’ to a home to which they remain attached. Some elites ‘stretch’ the bonds to home more than others by going away for longer periods of time and to more remote places. For these individuals, technologies of communication seem to play a particularly important role for creating, maintaining and manifesting, the bonds between away and home.

We need to ask, in line with Tomlinson (1994), whether mobile lifestyles engender world-spanning ‘phenomenal worlds’ (p. 153). Giddens’ (1991) verdict was that ‘although everyone lives a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global’ (p. 187). The notion of elastic mobility which has emerged in this study suggests the opposite, namely that although the mobile elites live a global life, their phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly local.