Abstract
This study sets out to provide an understanding of internationally mobile elites from a perspective that takes into account the social costs that come with being away from localized, everyday life. We show that mobile elites are often reluctant travellers and employ Bude and Dürrschmidt’s notion of ‘transclusion’ to understand the often-unrecognized ambivalence of mobile lifestyles. One way of coping with the existential dilemma of being away is to stay connected with family and friends through technologies of communication, which are deployed by the mobile elite under the regime of what Tomlinson calls ‘technologies of the hearth’. We arrive at the concept of ‘elastic mobility’, which highlights central push-and-pull processes in mobile lifestyles. The concept forwards a perspective on the social consequences of globalization that goes beyond contemporary ‘flow speak’.
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.
Transclusion: the opportunities and obligations of mobile life patterns
The highly skilled professionals interviewed in this study know how to pack a suitcase efficiently, navigate to the right terminal at the airport, get connected to the hotel wi-fi, behave in different cultural work contexts or get around in world metropoles. Thanks to years of routinized mobility, they are ‘fluent’ in travelling. Feelings of being familiar with the world are voiced by many of our respondents, and some even refer to themselves ‘world-citizens’. Frank, a Senior vice president in his 60s, refers to Europe as his own ‘backyard’, and Angelica, a CEO in her 50s, describes how frequent travelling makes her ‘feel at home’ in most places that she visits.
Some of the respondents, including Frank and Angelica, are also particularly appreciative of their mobile lifestyles and express various degrees of passion and excitement when talking about their current life situation in general and their life as mobile subjects in particular. Interestingly enough, the respondents who express the highest degrees of enthusiasm about the mobile lifestyle that comes with their transnational career have been brought up in highly mobile families (cf. Weenink, 2008). Anders, for example, today a CEO in his mid-30s, was born in Sweden, but grew up in Africa where his father worked for SIDA for 2 years. At the age of 8 years, he moved with his family from Sweden to Switzerland, and at the age of 15 years, the family moved to New Zealand, where they stayed for 5.5 years. Today, after several years of living abroad as a student and adult, Anders lives in the United Kingdom with his fiancé. He describes how living abroad as a child has nurtured his interest in other cultures and claims he likes to ‘actually travel’ as opposed to just ‘transporting’ himself from one place to another. The difference, as he explains, lies in the will to actually interact with other people – locals – and not simply other business professionals.
The footloose (McHugh, 2000: 79–80), free-flowing or place-transcending, lifestyles that our respondents – in some cases, fondly – describe could certainly be taken as a token of the ease by which at least privileged groups move across the globe today. However, our data also prompt us to recognize the more sedentary aspects of mobile life patterns, and more specifically the significance of home and close relationships in our respondents’ lives. The ‘tyranny of distance’ (Ley, 2004: 157) and the ‘emotional costs and affective loss’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 491) that tend to accompany travelling is a recurring theme in our interview data. This theme, however, is multifaceted and includes negative feelings towards going to work at far-away places as well as going away from family members. Hence, the ambivalences that highly mobile subjects potentially experience when moving around in the ‘translocal landscape of opportunity and obligation’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 488), and at which the notion of transclusion points, need recognition.
The structuring power of time
Ultimately, our data bring insights into the kinds of (self-)negotiations that are enforced by the fact that ‘we only have this life to live’ (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 484). Time comes across as a powerful structuring force that obliges our respondents, and their loved ones, to plan their everyday lives so that the demands of both professional and private life can be met. The ambitions of our respondents to perform well as top-level professionals, husbands/wives/partners at the same time, and, for most of our respondents, as parents, make their global lives inescapably anchored in the local home, where the everyday obligations of family life need to be balanced against the demands of professional life. For many of our respondents, life quality seems to be about finding a proper balance between work-time and family-time. Most respondents, however, declare that they ‘love to work’ and that they spend more time working than being with the family. Yet, despite the fact that most respondents are keen on pursuing or maintaining top-level, transnational careers, our data are rich in expressions of loyalty towards home and family. When asked for how long she could envision being away from the family to work abroad, 50-year old Monika replies as follows:
I would not want to go away for more than two weeks. That would feel like too long. More out of concern for the children. […] They are older now, but all phases are important when it comes to being present. Now it is important to know about things. Things can happen really quickly and be more dramatic in the teens compared to when the children were younger. (Monika, Manager)
When asked the same question, John, 40 years old and Head of business development, expresses similar concerns in regards to the children and the family as a whole: ‘I would not be able to go away from the family for three weeks. I would do it if I had to but it would not feel good’.
The social costs involved in being away from home and family are made explicit by all of our respondents, although the variation in the answers to the question of for how long our respondents could imagine being away from home and family ranges from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Typically though, the respondents seem to compensate for social costs by working as efficiently as possible while abroad, either for their own sake (to shorten the period of longing) or out of concern for the family (to be able to share the burden of household work). Extended working days during the business travels seem to be the norm, and personal exhaustion caused by early taxi travels to airports or late working-nights at the hotel is the price paid by most respondents for wanting to minimize the amount of time spent away from home. An extremely compacted business journey is depicted by 50-year-old Angelica:
I have travelled to Sao Paolo for one day to give a presentation and then gone back immediately after. And the flight is 16 hours! So, I got off the plane, had the afternoon and the night, gave my presentation in the morning and then went straight to the airport afterwards. (Angelica, CEO)
Despite the relative effortlessness with which people can travel today, several respondents also express that they would rather not travel for work abroad at all, had they been able to choose for themselves. Not only do our respondents dislike being away from home and family, they also show various degrees of aversion towards the kind of work environments that they have to go to. The tiresome routines of business travelling, including ‘the bad food and messy environments’ of airports, are brought up by several respondents when asked about their attitudes towards travelling. The 40-year-old Magnus is possibly the most reluctant traveller that we interviewed for this study. When asked about how he feels about going on business journeys, he replies as follows:
Traveling is something that is solely negative. […] You don’t get to see anything, you’re in a damn hotel room, and typically […] you’re located in some industrial area. Like, you’re in a conference room. Or, you are at some hotel for the conference and then there’s dinner at some nice restaurant. That’s all you get to see basically, the dinner. And then it is usually work anyways, so it gives you nothing. (Magnus, Manager)
Other respondents are less drastically dismissive when answering the same question, yet still express similar feelings of discomfort and boredom with the rhythmicity that comes with routinized travelling (including recurring check ins, check outs and security controls at the airport) and the dull sites of many business meetings (such as airport hotels or business campuses at the outskirts of cities). Bengt, for instance, testifies about the ‘totally unglamorous’ aspects of travelling for work abroad: ‘People think that I’ve seen the world, but I’ve only seen the airports. It is absolutely unglamorous’.
The meaning of the home-place
Even the respondents who claim that they enjoy the travelling per se indicate that home gains a special meaning when one has to be away from it a lot. The 50-year-old Mats is seemingly one of the most passionate travellers among our respondents, and yet he treasures the quiet life at home:
[…] what happens when you travel as much as I do is that you become very fond of home. Ah, it’s so good to be at home and you like to stroll around in the garden and do a little bit of this and that. It suddenly becomes very important. But I mean, traveling becomes somewhat two-sided. I think you get fonder of home than those who do not travel, I think. (Mats, CEO)
While both affect and obligations seem to tie our travelling subjects to home, our data also imply that their mobile lifestyle is ultimately rendered possible by the fact that immobile family members take care of everyday duties while our respondents are physically absent. Some respondents explicitly explain that their own career, and the mobile lifestyle that comes with it, would have been much harder – even impossible – to accomplish had their spouses had similar professional ambitions. The traditional gender roles that seem to underpin the transnational careers of many of our respondents are hard to ignore. The situation described by Bengt, an Executive vice president in his 60s, is illuminating. Bengt’s travelling habits are typical of most of our respondents and involve frequent travels to affiliated companies as well as to various board appointments in the United States and several European countries. His wife works as a teacher in Stockholm and does not travel for work abroad at all. Bengt is aware of the, as he says, ‘gender-biased’, character of his family situation, but has difficulties imagining that things could be any different:
She [Bengt’s wife] has no career ambitions what so ever, but has always been a reliable person who has taken much greater responsibility for our home. […] Two persons working as much as I have over the years, it simply would not have worked, at home. Not with kids and the kind of family structure that I would want anyway; when you have time for your children and sort of make time for them. (Bengt, Excecutive Vice President)
To make everyday life work, Bengt and his wife coordinate their calendars regularly. A similar account is given by 40-year-old John, who travels slightly less than Bengt, yet still needs to coordinate his travels to facilitate everyday life back home:
I consult my wife a lot before I book things. My wife’s job does not include travelling. We synchronize our activities by checking our calendars and go through all of our meetings. We plan in advance and she writes a note about who picks up and leaves the children at preschool certain days. Then she does the same thing, and if she can’t and I’m not at home, then we have to ask her mother or mine or someone else to give us a hand. (John, Head of Business Development)
In households where both parents hold top positions and travel a lot, the daily, necessary, arrangements of family affairs become even more challenging to make. Such is the situation for Carl and Monika, who both are in their late 50s, work in top managerial positions at their respective companies and leave home for work abroad on a more or less regular basis. Carl describes the creativity by which they have had to plan their everyday life at home, especially when their children where younger: ‘Well, we have made arrangements with even and odd weeks, and that way we’ve been able to plan ahead. It’s sort of like when you’ve got children and are divorced’.
Technologies of the hearth: connecting homewards
If extremely efficient business travels appear as one typical way of compensating for the social costs and affective losses that mobility causes, mediated connectivity appears as another, crucial, way of dealing with the same. The relevance of Tomlinson’s (2008) understanding of the media as ‘technologies of the hearth’ – as tools for connectivity not only to the world out there but also to home – becomes obvious when listening to what our respondents have to say about their use of media technologies while working abroad. Without exception, our respondents talk about their smartphones and laptops as the key tools for staying in touch with their family members back home. Text messaging, emailing and video calling (e.g. via Skype) stand out as key communication activities, albeit other forms of communication also take place, such as ordinary phone calls, social media interactions (e.g. on Facebook) and chatting. Through these and other forms of mediated communication, ‘the space between home and away’ becomes, as King-O’Riain (2015) has it, a ‘transconnective space’ (p. 260), in which various forms of virtual co-presence are accomplished.
As we now turn to our second key theme of this study, we shall pay particular attention to some of the ways in which media technologies are used to maintain ‘mediated’ (Madianou and Miller, 2012: 140) or ‘connected’ (Licoppe, 2004: 136) relationships across physical distance. More specifically, we wish here to highlight three forms of connectivity that we see evidence of in our data, and which might help broaden our understanding of how and why media technologies can be used to achieve co-presence among temporarily dispersed family members. Presented below are the – admittingly overlapping – categories of affective, surveillant and instrumental connectivity.
Affective connectivity
Emotional aspects of transnational communication have previously been acknowledged in studies of, for example, long-distance parenting (e.g. Madianou and Miller, 2012; Uy-Tioco, 2007) and other close relationships (e.g. Ryan et al., 2015). In this study, what could be termed affective connectivity surfaces in the interviews mainly as our respondents describe how they ‘long for’ their husband/wife/partner or children while on the move and how they try to create (a sense of) co-presence despite of great temporal or geographical distances.
Notably, a couple of the respondents voice some innovative ways of compensating for the lack of physical intimacy. Mats, for example, describes how the use of certain mobile phone applications, and games specifically, affords him and his wife to engage in common activities even when hundreds of miles away from one another:
I play quite a lot of games, since I have a lot of travelling time. So then I play for example Quizzkampen, Candy Crush or Wordfeud. And then there is a chat function in those, and so me and my wife we can play against each other. And that makes us feel as though we are close to each other. That we might both fall into sleep soon and then we chat with each other. (Mats, CEO)
Relatedly, Angelica is fond of the idea of ‘Skype dinners’ and currently tries to ‘persuade’ her husband to test this mediated form of everyday intimacy. The idea is to connect via video call on Skype while eating the same meal. Although they have not tried out this kind of arrangement yet, Angelica believes that such an activity would create valuable intimacy and a sense of closeness between her and her equally mobile husband.
While Angelica talks about mediated connectivity and Skype especially as a way to compensate for the emotional costs that come with physical absence, she simultaneously calls into question the affective grounds for keeping in touch with family members:
How much of it is actually about desire? You asked about longing for someone, but I think control or anxiety or insecurity are important motivators – not only desire. It may seem provocative to say so, but I think it is more common to keep in touch a lot because of a need to feel in control or safe rather than actually wanting some quality time over the telephone. Because you do not get that. (Angelica, CEO)
Other parts of our data support the notion that knowing what other family members ‘are up to’ is important, which brings us to the second, and interrelated, form of connectivity that our data point at.
Surveillant connectivity
What we here label surveillant connectivity is ultimately affect-based too, yet surfaces especially as our respondents speak about connectivity as something that is expected rather than longed for. Madianou and Miller (2012) detect feelings of ‘control’ in their analyses of long-distant children–parent relationships. In our study, the topic of control emerges primarily as our respondents talk about obligations; for example, the felt obligation to inform their families that they arrived safely to their final destination. Such communication, as one respondent has it, is particularly important if the travelling partner is off to an area of the world that is perceived as ‘dangerous’ (e.g. due to an ongoing conflict).
Oskar and Kristin are married, and both are in their 50s. Oskar travels for business abroad on a regular basis, while Kristin’s work demands no transnational travelling at all. They both indicate that control is an important driver of mediated connectivity, and when asked what they expect from one another, in terms of contact, they reply:
I do think that Kristin expects me to give her a call in the evening. Then it might just be a short exchange. Some nights it might just be a text message, if you don’t have the time to talk. It’s no problem to send a quick text message. (Oskar, Senior salesman) That’s how it has always been, so I would be worried if I heard nothing. One would expect some sort of contact; I’ve gotten used to that. (Kristin, Student)
The need to ‘know’ seems to run in two directions however. John, for example, speaks of his own interest in making sure that everything is alright back home:
You cannot really know for sure how things are at home; if the children got into bed alright or if she feels sad or tired. In those cases, it feels kind of good to get a text message that says that everything is peaceful.
Instrumental connectivity
In line with what was concluded in relation to our first theme, on transclusion (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010: 488), the daily managing of everyday life when at least one member of the household is away for work abroad necessitates, in most cases, careful planning among family members. What arguably could be called instrumental connectivity thus crystallizes as the third form of mediated connectivity that our data make relevant. One admittedly extreme yet telling scenario is depicted by 50-year old Carl, who remembers one particular phone call from one of his teenage sons:
It is we who call them [the children]. They don’t call us, unless there’s something particular that they want to know. Like when they asked me, while I was in India, where their sneakers are! They have no respect whatsoever for the fact that I’m in India. (Carl, Senior salesman)
Other respondents testify about similar cases of ‘phone parenting’ (Madianou and Miller, 2012), where the main objective is to sort out some kind of practical issue related to child care. However, as voiced by 40-year-old John, practical arrangements beyond parenting tend to call for attention during the business travels as well:
Suddenly, we need to plan a trip and send links or collect money for somebody’s birthday present. The more practical stuff ends up in the e-mail conversations […]. Bills from home that you need to take a look at and know about also end up in the e-mail inbox. (John, Head of Business Development)
Arguably, all three kinds of connectivity identified here create feelings of co-presence and potentially emotional bonding. As Licoppe and Smoreda (2005) suggest, ‘simply keeping in touch may be more important than what is said when one actually gets in touch’ (p. 5). Also, the media are referred to by more than one respondent as a prerequisite for living the kind of mobile life that our respondents do. However, before concluding this section, we wish to point out that not all respondents are frequent in their contacts with home and family. The difficulties of handling communication across different time zones, the high costs of certain forms of media use (e.g. transnational mobile phone calls) and busy working schedules are mentioned as the reasons for not keeping in touch as often as one would like, or feel obliged to. Furthermore, and aside from the more logistical problems of maintaining connectivity, a few of the respondents – typically the younger mothers – also claim they avoid using Skype or other audiovisual communication technologies to interact with their small children at home because of the difficulties involved with gaining and keeping the children’s attention during a conversation.
In the next and concluding section, we return to the ambivalences of the transnational business elite and discuss them in relation to the notion of ‘elastic mobility’.
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.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank André Jansson, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and John Tomlinson, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The presented study was funded by The Swedish Research Council, 2012-2015, and part of the research project ‘Kinetic Élites: The Mediatization of Social Belonging and Close Relationships among Mobile Class Fractions’ (ID: B0185501).