Abstract
This article provides a Bourdieusian analysis of the mediatized lifeworlds of so-called elite cosmopolitans. Based on interviews with Nordic expatriates employed by United Nations organizations in Geneva, the study looks at how the increasing dependence on new media influences the field of United Nations organizations and the trajectories of cosmopolitan subjects. Theoretically, the analysis builds on two key concepts: communicational doxa, which establishes a link between Bourdieu’s field theory and critical mediatization theory; and cosmopolitan capital, understood as a sub-form of cultural capital. The findings suggest that mediatization alters the social conditions for accumulating cosmopolitan capital. However, the appropriation and mastery of new media do not hold any symbolic value as such, but tend to expand the possibilities for making investments in the field without altering its overarching logic. It is also shown that new professional media habits are often interwoven with private communication and the emotional needs associated with highly mobile family lives, thus underlining the indirect nature of mediatization in this context.
Keywords
Introduction
Analyses of mediatization should critically assess how the proliferation of media in everyday life leads to various forms of social and material dependence (alongside more liberating aspects like growing opportunities for connectedness, creativity and information sharing). Such questions may direct our attention towards disadvantaged groups and the ways in which power geometries are reproduced via the socially biased control over the means and skills of communication. But we should also consider the social and existential costs that media dependence actualizes among privileged groups in relation to their social trajectories (Bude and Dürrschmidt, 2010). For example, the ubiquitous nature of contemporary media contributes to the normalization of ‘flexible work’, enabling white-collar professionals to invest more of their time and energy into their careers while being able to entertain family life and close relations. This new flexibility, which has often been celebrated as emancipatory for women, also incorporates considerable elements of stress and anxiety due to the fact that intimate relations have to be either managed at a distance or placed in the background of professional tasks (Gregg, 2008, 2011).
Such everyday sacrifices stand in sharp contrast to the mythologized view of the networked frequent flyer as the archetype of global status and prestige. One may suggest that it is precisely among such hyper-mobile groups, among ‘the globals’ (Elliott and Urry, 2010) or ‘elite cosmopolitans’ (Igarashi and Saito, 2014), we should search for the most accentuated expressions of contemporary mediatization and its ambiguities. However, whereas the role of media has been studied in relation to various forms of mobility and migration (e.g. Elliott and Urry, 2010; Licoppe, 2004; Madianou and Miller, 2012), strikingly little research has analysed the significance of media in shaping and defining privileged international careers.
Against this background, the present article provides an inside view and a critical analysis of the mediatized lifeworlds and social trajectories of highly skilled expatriates of Nordic background working for the United Nations (UN) and associated organizations in Geneva, Switzerland. The study is based on 13 qualitative interviews conducted in Geneva during 2014 and explores the mechanisms of this transnational field at large, paying particular attention to women’s trajectories and experiences. All interviewees can be seen as ‘elite cosmopolitans’ (Igarashi and Saito, 2014), meaning that they have lived and worked at different places in the world during their professional careers and uphold a distinctive set of cosmopolitan values.
The article weaves together two much-discussed problem areas. First, it relates to current debates on the status of cosmopolitan capital as a sub-form of cultural capital, corresponding to a particular transnational field (e.g. Bühlmann et al., 2013; Igarashi and Saito, 2014; Weenink, 2008). The study is framed by a Bourdieusian terminology and approach to social fields, trajectories and lifestyles. UN organizations are taken as institutional agents within a social field that legitimates and consecrates cosmopolitan values and practices as capital. The first part of the analysis thus provides a general view of how social agents with this field construct their social and geographical trajectories. The analysis concerns especially how they think about ‘eliteness’, that is, what it takes to reach status positions within the field, and what ambiguities they experience in relation to their own careers.
Second, the article introduces a Bourdieusian view of mediatization in order to unveil how the social field of UN organizations normalizes certain modes of communication and media use and, conversely, how broader patterns of everyday media dependence influence the field. This part of the article looks at how agents within the field come to experience certain media properties and skills as indispensable to their work. The analysis pays particular attention to how new media dependences, that is, mediatization, affect the balance between professional performance and close social relations.
The concept of mediatization has been accused of being media-centric, too imprecise and often casually applied in empirical analyses (see, for example, Deacon and Stanyer, 2014). 1 It should therefore be stated that the current study employs mediatization as a critical and non-media-centric approach (see Hepp et al., 2015; Jansson, 2013), which is then conceptualized through Bourdieu’s (1977 [1972], 1983) theory of social fields. It means that mediatization is understood as a long-term meta-process (Krotz, 2007) marked by the dialectical interplay between extended opportunities for mediation, that is, the transmission or sharing of various symbolic content, and escalating forces of media dependence (Jansson, 2015a; Jansson, 2015b). To the extent that agents and institutions get accustomed to growing liberties of media use (everything from the immediacy of online transactions to intimacies at a distance), they also find themselves developing technological, economical and social entanglements that in various respects restrict their autonomy. We can thus only speak of mediatization in cases where media are thoroughly integrated in cultural environments as part of what Bourdieu calls ‘practical sense’, that is, when they are seen as more or less indispensable for maintaining regular activities within a certain sector of social life (typically a social field). This article introduces communicational doxa as an intermediary concept for analysing how such areas of practical sense evolve through the interplay between mediatization and social fields.
The article starts out with a presentation of the empirical study and research context. After that, the two problem areas are theorized and analysed in two separate sections. The Geneva interviews illuminate how the normalization of new media largely occurs indirectly, through non-formalized processes, ultimately altering the conditions for acquiring cosmopolitan capital. At the same time, however, the basic logic of the field remains intact, implying that the appropriation and mastery of various media resources do not attain any symbolic value as such. The article ends with a concluding discussion of the main findings.
The Geneva study
This article is an outcome of the research project (Kinetic Élites: The Mediatization of Social Belonging and Close Relationships in Mobile Class Fractions, funded by the Swedish Research Council). The aim of the project is to unveil the significance of media in general and new media in particular for maintaining social bonds with friends, family and other close relations under conditions of high mobility. It means that the project studies mobile class fractions within the dominant classes, that is, agents occupying or aspiring for status positions within their fields and whose occupations necessitate spending much time on the move or staying longer periods abroad (with or without accompanying family members). Qualitative fieldwork has been carried out in three social fields: the academic field, the field of corporate business and the field of international politics, development and diplomacy (the latter largely delimited to UN organizations). Even though the prime focus is on close relationships, the data also cover questions related to the field as such in order to estimate whether and how the logics of particular fields also affect private life and what difference the media make in such processes.
The present article draws on findings from the study of UN employees, based on interviews, discussions and observations conducted in Geneva by the author during two periods of fieldwork: 5 weeks in May–June 2014 and 1 week in October 2014. The data include interviews with 13 highly skilled Scandinavian expatriates currently or until recently employed by international organizations based in Geneva – the International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency), Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT) and Global Fund. The latter two organizations are not part of the UN system.
A majority of the informants are women aged between 30 and 50 years (11 informants), but the total age-span ranges from approximately 30 to 60+ years. The dominance of female interviewees was originally due to the snowballing sampling, which implied that women tended to recommend other women to be interviewed. During the course of the fieldwork, however, the question of what it takes for a woman to have a career within this field also emerged as a specifically interesting angle to study. The celebratory attitude to new media as an emancipatory force for professional women, as mentioned in the introduction, can be observed in many of the interviews. At the same time, the longstanding patriarchal structures of the UN exercise a strong pressure in terms of adaptability and willingness to make sacrifices for the organization and its cause. Public data about the gender balance among UN employees in professional and higher categories show that the share of women decreases the higher the positions get. In 2013, the total proportion of women within the UN system was 42 percent, while there were less than 30 percent women in the highest categories. However, the share of women is continuously growing, and in organizations such as the ILO, the gender balance is relatively even. 2
All interviews were conducted on-site in Geneva, in most cases at the interviewee’s work place, except for one interview that was conducted via Skype. The interview recordings are between 50 and 120 minutes long (75 minutes on average). In this article, all informants are anonymized and the names of their organizations are in most cases deliberately left out. The interviewees are to be seen as agents within the particular ‘sub-field of UN organizations’. This should be considered a tentative definition, and the exact limits of such a field cannot be delineated based on the current material. Still, as will be shown, the UN sector plays a key role in legitimizing the value of certain competences and skills as well as certain types of (international) backgrounds and trajectories within the wider field of international politics, development and diplomacy.
Understanding social trajectories within the field of UN organizations
In order to understand the role of mediatization within the mobile world of UN professionals, we must first of all describe the logics of the field. It means that we need to specify what resources and symbolic markers are at stake among agents who want to gain power and status within the field (see Bourdieu, 1983). It should be stated immediately that the current material does not allow for any exact descriptions of the boundaries or dynamics of the field, especially not in a statistical sense. Still, the working hypothesis that will be sustained throughout the present article is that the system of UN organizations constitutes the epicentre of a ‘field of international politics, development and diplomacy’ where the formalized goal is to achieve, or produce, cosmopolitan forms of social change and where agents to a great extent operate within a shared job market.
As shown in previous research (e.g. Eriksson Baaz, 2005; Jansson, 2009, 2011), it is expected from international professionals within these sectors that they move between different organizations and different geographical stationings during their careers. Many UN organizations maintain formal mobility and/or rotation policies, meaning that employees are either forced or encouraged to move between different locations on a regular basis in order to achieve a fully fledged understanding of the global field of operations. These specific conditions also generate distinctive social trajectories, understood as ‘constructed biographies’ (see Bourdieu, 1983: 346n), where the accumulation of capital is closely tied to particular modes and sequences of global mobility. The flip side of this distinctiveness, however, is that agents may find it difficult to translate their international experiences into equally qualified jobs in their countries of origin, in case they would like to return. As one of the Geneva interviewees put it, I think there is age discrimination in Sweden. I’m not sure if it’s about to change but I’ve read horrifying articles in Swedish newspapers about 41-year-olds being wasted in the job market. I don’t think it’s like that here [in Geneva]. […] Especially in communications it seems like experience is less important than having 5,000 followers on Twitter, that’s how it feels … And there are very few jobs where international experience is important [in Sweden]. (Matilda (information officer))
It is thus reasonable to argue that the field of international politics, development and diplomacy is deeply saturated by a particular form of capital – what some researchers have identified as cosmopolitan capital (Bühlmann et al., 2013; Igarashi and Saito, 2014; Kennedy, 2009; Weenink, 2008). The following sub-sections provide a theoretical view of what cosmopolitan capital means and analyse how it comes to expression in the Geneva study.
Cosmopolitan capital
The word cosmopolitanism tends to evoke mixed feelings. Sometimes, it is associated with visionary ideals of global openness, hospitality and mutual recognition between different social and cultural groups. At other times, it is used as a label of culturally and economically privileged groups who can engage in frictionless international mobility. The reason for this paradox is that cosmopolitan values are socially stratified. Cosmopolitanism is empirically associated with higher levels of education and relatively mobile and urban life forms (see, for example, Lindell, 2014; Mau et al., 2008; Pichler, 2008). It means that there are privileged groups in society (at least in the European context) that are good at expressing cosmopolitan values (in terms of hospitality, cultural openness and so forth) and thus classify certain associated skills and lifestyle practices as distinctively cosmopolitan (see, for example, Elliot, 2014).
Under particular circumstances, cosmopolitanism is thus turned into a social asset, a form of capital. The current article advances a Bourdieusian understanding of cosmopolitan capital as a sub-form of cultural capital. The Bourdieusian approach (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1977 [1972], 1983) implicates that there is a particular social field where this form of capital is at stake and where particular institutions of legitimation ensure the value of certain properties and skills. The purchase of such an approach is that it allows for sociological analyses of how cosmopolitanism within certain realms of society come to surface as a desirable outlook associated with certain lifestyles.
The meaning of cosmopolitan capital has been discussed in a number of recent texts (see Bühlmann et al., 2013; Igarashi and Saito, 2014; Kennedy, 2009). While there are variations among these analyses as to how cosmopolitanism is integrated with Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, there are also common denominators. Above all, cosmopolitan capital is seen as entailing certain embodied dispositions and competences that reproduce cosmopolitanism as an ethical outlook. Key elements of cosmopolitan capital are language skills and the ability to deal with cultural differences in an open and sociable manner (see, for example, Delanty, 2009: Ch. 2; Glick Schiller et al., 2011; Hannerz, 1990). Furthermore, there are certain institutions of legitimation that reproduce the value of cosmopolitan dispositions and competences within a given social field. Such institutions are typically found within the educational system and among international organizations and firms. Previous research shows that cosmopolitan capital, especially in the objectified form of international degrees and career paths, has become increasingly valuable within the corporate sector (e.g. Bühlmann et al., 2012; Carroll, 2009). Still, the epicentre of cosmopolitan capital can be found in those sectors of society where cosmopolitan dispositions and skills are seen as the key resource and measure of success, rather than subordinate to other forms of capital.
The kind of formal mobility policies and ethical principles that distinguish the UN system implies that UN professionals are required to accumulate cosmopolitan capital in order to reach more prestigious positions within the field. Agents in this field thus become elite cosmopolitans almost by default. However, as we will see, it is not without making sacrifices.
Tactics and ambiguities of cosmopolitan elite trajectories
Within the field of UN organizations, there seems to be a mutually confirmative relationship between the habitus of social agents and the logic of the field. Only one informant stated that she had ended up in this type of organization by coincidence (head-hunted because of her managerial experience). All others pointed to deliberate, long-time educational investments aimed at reaching this type of international position, combined with outspoken ambitions to ‘make a difference in the world’. Their ethos thus coincides both with the cosmopolitan objectives of the UN system and the mobility policies that mark out these organizations. There are some variations between individual organizations, however. Whereas for instance the UNHCR applies a strict rotation policy, obliging their employees to move between different country offices and headquarters every second year, the ILO maintains more flexible regulations. Still, mobility in general and international field experiences in particular remain vital across the field as a precondition for ascending trajectories: There doesn’t have to be such a written policy, but there can be an internal pressure that one should also work in the field. One gets greater legitimacy if … yes, in one’s profession if one has been out in the field. If one works with policy issues for example, it’s quite important. (Tina (technical officer))
Tina also explains that the question of legitimacy becomes particularly obvious in cases where higher managers without international field experience are recruited to the organization. These managers have to work harder in order to gain respect. Another consequence of more open-ended mobility policies is that personnel sometimes refrain from moving on after they have reached the Geneva headquarters, anxious of getting stuck in a less comfortable place, that is, in a developing country where family life is more complicated. In organizations that apply formal rotation policies, by contrast, there is no choice but to move, and what counts is the type of stationings the agent takes up during his or her professional trajectory. In such contexts, field experience becomes even more important, and as one informant put it, ‘the tougher stationings one can get, the better’.
Accordingly, the accumulation of cosmopolitan capital is difficult to combine with family life, especially if there is to be equality between partners. To certain places and on certain missions, it is not even possible to bring accompanying family members. The women in the sample are either singles, single parents or living together with a man who is willing to take the main responsibility for the family rather than having a career. Dorthe is in her 30s and works for a UN organization in Geneva after having spent 6 years in different transitional countries. She was previously in a relationship but found it difficult to make it work given the demands of her professional life. Her story reveals that the rotation policy imposes a certain rhythm for making life decisions and coping with social and existential ambiguities. Ultimately, it becomes a question of whether to accept the rules of the game or choose another career:
Right now it’s a period when I don’t know exactly what will happen, if I’m going home [to Denmark] or if I will continue, or what will happen. […]
How do you feel about the rotation policy?
As an organization, I can understand why they do it. It’s a good thing, it’s so easy to sit in the headquarter and forget what we are actually working for, so in that respect it really makes sense. […] But in relation to other parts of life it’s really a challenge. You need to have a rather flexible family life. Not everybody has that. And it creates a certain imbalance between men and women.
Is it more difficult to be a woman in this situation? What is your experience?
Mmm … I think at least, if you look at our statistics it’s easy to see that there are more women who don’t have children in [this organization] and there are more women who are divorced, and it may have something to do with the culture of [this organization] but also with the world we live in and other structural factors. And in some places where we work one cannot bring one’s family, so there are many people who travel back and forth.
The UN system thus produces global mobility not only when agents move from one job to another but also in relation to the logistics needed to keep families together. Similar experiences can be identified across the sample, even though life in Geneva is described by most informants as relatively easy and manageable compared to what they have experienced elsewhere. The concrete imperatives of the field may thus vary to some degree as agents move from one geographical location to another, but there is still an overarching pressure on them to be ready to move and willing to make certain sacrifices in order to maintain their positions within the field.
This affects not only family life but also social relations in broader respects. Tina is committed to pursue her career within the UN sector, which probably means moving on to a country office after the current period in Geneva. But she is also aware of the risk of losing touch with some of her friends:
I have a very bad conscience … for example, in relation to old friends in Finland, when I say that I cannot go to Finland. But I cannot make any plans. Same thing in Indonesia, I couldn’t plan anything. I sometimes had to cancel my vacations. So what happens is that I never buy my tickets before I really know that ‘OK, I go’. Planning in advance doesn’t work. Those who have similar jobs, we understand each other and don’t take it wrong, but …
It’s almost like a stand-by mentality.
Yes, that’s what it becomes.
You must be prepared to …
But it’s easier here in Geneva, because I don’t have that many trips.
For many interviewees, especially women with young children, the Geneva stationing seems to provide an almost parenthetical time-space for negotiating and reflecting upon their trajectories. Some of them describe how they actively try to loosen up the institutional pressure on them to be in a state of readiness, something that would have been unthinkable if located at a country office. Linn, who is also engaged in union work and issues related to gender equality within her organization, mentions that she sometimes tries to say no to work-related trips, suggesting alternative solutions. However, even though Linn wants there to be more space in her organization for saying ‘no’, she is not willing to cross the line and jeopardize her future trajectory:
Does it affect your career to some extent, your level of mobility?
Well, it does … Or our culture says that it does, but then I don’t know if that’s the case in reality. I also would like to think that it gives you respect, to ‘lead by example’ kind of […] There is a diffuse organizational pressure, that it’s not considered good to go home at 5 pm and it’s not good to confess that one has a family and that they have needs. One should put the organization first. […] My nearest boss is quite sympathetic when it comes to my family situation and accepts that I sometimes say no – but there is always this undercurrent that ‘I actually want you to go on this business trip after all’. So it’s a difficult balance, which may influence qualifications or give you a stamp of not being cooperative.
This is a way of questioning the gendered value of cosmopolitan capital, exposing the limits of what goes and what does not. The field of UN organizations is marked by not only cosmopolitan values of global mobility and continuous engagement with ‘the other’ but also patriarchal norms that presuppose full commitment to the organization at the expense of family life. The access to cosmopolitan capital is thus conditioned by broader structural factors such as gender and family situation, which means that women who want to reach elite positions must either develop tactics for sidestepping some of the taken-for-granted expectations on continuous mobility and flexibility, or organizing their family lives in non-patriarchal ways. In this context, as we will see, mediatization plays an increasingly important role, both as an emancipatory force and as an extension of the social field.
A Bourdieusian analysis of mediatized social trajectories
The policies and regulations of the UN system do not only lead to explicit pressures on agents. As pointed out above, they also normalize certain patterns of mobility and attitudes to places, which become part of a taken-for-granted normative framework. There is thus a relatively open-ended relationship between written rules and what Bourdieu (2000 [1997]) calls doxa, which implies that agents often do not know exactly what is formally required from them and what is just ‘standard procedure’. This relatively diffuse boundary between formal rules and doxa needs to be taken into account when we study mediatization processes, whose influences on the field can only be understood if we grasp media dependences from a more phenomenological perspective, that is, through doxa. This section of the article begins with an outline of the Bourdieusian approach to mediatization, which is then implemented in empirical analysis.
Mediatization and communicational doxa
Doxa originates from Husserlian phenomenology and refers to the shared principles and norms of practice that keep communities together, making their members act in ways that reproduce the order of the lifeworld. In Bourdieu’s (2000 [1997]) theory of social fields, doxa constitutes a set of ‘evaluative presuppositions whose acceptance is implied in membership’ (p. 100). Doxa is a source of social security, granting a sense of belonging as long as social agents adhere to the established order. It invokes restrictions to the autonomy of agents through consent rather than direct force, mediating ‘the dialectic of objective changes and the agents’ aspirations, out of which arises a sense of limits, commonly called the sense of reality’ (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]: 164). Bourdieu’s notion of doxa thus helps us understand how social power-relations and trajectories get normalized through everyday practices.
In order to grasp how mediatization influences the field of UN organizations, this study advances communicational doxa as a sub-category of doxa. Communicational doxa refers to an area of practical sense (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]) where social agents more or less automatically communicate in accordance with the logic of the field. It may involve everything from taken-for-granted norms and routines for how to use media in communication with colleagues to more strategic dispositions related to self-representation. Communicational doxa thus opens up for a coherent Bourdieusian understanding of mediatization. If we by mediatization mean the increasingly normalized indispensability of, and adaption to, technologies and institutions of mediation (as stated in the introduction of this article), mediatization can be traced precisely to those processes whereby media enter the practical order of communicational doxa. Media are then woven into the prescribed ways of doing things, which also implies that communicational doxa legitimates media dependence through the structural (mis)recognition of agents who (dis)obey doxa.
Still, the composition and boundaries of communicational doxa remain open, giving rise to symbolic struggles especially in relation to the appropriation of new media. During the current stage of mediatization, the mobile and inter-linked architecture of digital media technologies contributes to making the boundaries of communicational doxa more volatile. Such a conclusion can be drawn from research on how networked media foster flexible working conditions, involving the loosening up of boundaries between private and professional time-spaces and the normalization of social networking as a mandatory part of many white-collar jobs (see especially Gregg, 2011). The handling of communication flows and networks requires a great deal of discipline from individuals because expectations on availability, feedback and so forth are often implicit. Research on the mediatization of certain professions and organizational cultures points in the same direction (see, for example, Ihlen and Pallas, 2014; Kantola, 2014).
Very little research has dealt with the relationship between mediatization and elite trajectories, especially related to cosmopolitan capital. Quantitative studies show that cosmopolitan trajectories are accompanied by prestigious, diversified and globally oriented media (Lindell, 2014; Meuleman and Savage, 2013). At the same time, other studies suggest that the accumulation of cosmopolitan capital cannot be linked to any particular modes of technological appropriation. Cosmopolitan capital may work as a counter-force to mediatization, meaning that conditions of growing media dependence are avoided, while simultaneously necessitating extended connections to the larger world in order to ensure further capital accumulation (Jansson, 2011; Jansson and Lindell, 2015). This again suggests that the social ambiguities of mediatization may become particularly critical under condition of cosmopolitan mobility.
The indirect force of mediatization
Whereas mobility can be seen as a direct source of cosmopolitan capital among UN employees, media practices attain a more indirect significance. The interviews reveal that obedience to communicational doxa does not attain any value in itself, but is secondary to the demands on being mobile and acquiring international competence. There are indeed certain informal rules and expectations stating which media are considered mandatory to use and to what extent individuals are supposed to use them, but they are relatively volatile across the organizations and depend on individual leadership and geographical location. Again, there is a general understanding among the informants that Geneva constitutes an ‘easier’ environment than country offices where there is little space for social tactics:
It’s more OK here than in Zambia. When I was there it was too much. Most often I had to look at the Subject line to see if an email was something I had to read immediately or not and if I could delegate. I had too much. I couldn’t read all my emails.
Why was that? What was it that …?
I had a rather central role, I was directly under the boss, and Country Director. Everything, or almost everything he got I suppose, I got too. Or if he delegated to me and then I had to find somebody who could do it or do it myself. Yes, it was because of that central role everything was copied to me. And then I was of course also expected to read all my emails and respond to all my emails within a certain time. It was a lot of different things, it could be budget issues, it could be political issues, it could be all kinds of things …
Email is generally mentioned as the prevailing means of professional communication. Informants who occupy intermediary or higher positions describe a situation where information overload often occurs because of the routinized habit of copying a number of staff members in email correspondence. There are no written policies behind these norms; they rather stem from the desire to make sure that nobody feels sidestepped within a project. This need, in turn, is related to the general importance of making one’s work visible, which in the long run may have a positive impact on the agent’s chances to advance within the field:
One has to be visible in some way, in a good way. It’s not enough to do one’s job. One also has to do it well. And then people need to know about that work one has done …
And how do you do that?
For example, in the project with Spain very much was visible from the start, same thing with Greece. The very project gained a lot of interest. If one does a good job people will notice that. But one also has to know the right persons. That is not so easy.
As reported also from other expatriate environments (see, for example, Beaverstock, 2002), the capacity to connect with the right persons (both ‘online’ and ‘offline’) and to make one’s work visible, acquiring what Urry (2007) calls ‘network capital’, is important for not getting stuck in one’s career. In addition to email, the usage of professional online networks like LinkedIn and semi-professional/private networks like Facebook is seen as more or less mandatory among the informants. These media habits have emerged and expanded gradually without any formal sanctions and, as it seems, without much consideration among the agents themselves. Rather, they are treated as parts of the lifeworld, spanning the borders of private and professional life. The mastery of these media becomes valuable only in as much as they can contribute to the accumulation of cosmopolitan capital.
These findings seem to diverge from previous studies conducted in 2008 among expatriates within the field of international development aid (Jansson, 2011). In that context, the attitudes towards new networking tools and circulation of personal information were marked by reflexivity and scepticism. Cosmopolitan capital seemed to work as a resistant force. The most important explanation of the divergence between these studies is probably the time factor. Whereas social media platforms were not seen as indispensable in 2008, most agents within the field have since then naturalized certain ways of coping with the pluralized media landscape. Even though the organizations do not raise any explicit demands on networking, and do not provide all employees (but only those on higher positions) with smartphones and tablets, agents generally adhere to communicational doxa.
In the interview material, there are examples of how disobedience to communicational doxa may affect capital accumulation. Ruben, who is in his early 60s and works as an expert, used to travel a lot earlier in his career. More recently, however, he has found that life is more comfortable without all the travelling and has thus not aimed for higher positions or new stationings. One reason to his ‘travelling fatigue’ is the growing pressure on being constantly available also when away and the increasingly boundless spaces of work that emerge due to flexible forms of communication (see Gregg, 2011): When I started travelling in 1989 travelling was much more pleasurable. In 1989 we created a programme via letter-writing or using telex, and then there were always a few meetings that actually didn’t take place, and in the evenings I was free, didn’t have any mobile, no laptop. If I was away for two weeks I phoned the office perhaps once a week asking if everything was ok. But now one is expected to do the same work while travelling as one would have done if still in the office. That’s a bit strange … (Ruben)
Ruben’s story depicts a situation where media dependence is integral to the ‘rules of the game’, meaning that the normalized access to media can be used as a source of institutional pressure on agents competing for cosmopolitan capital.
Still, one of the most remarkable things about contemporary mediatization processes is the largely informal, diffuse and contradictory ways in which they take shape. The type of pressure that Ruben experiences, which has contributed to his rethinking of his own trajectory, partly emanates from socio-technological alterations that lie beyond the institutional framework. The social normalization of media channels like Facebook, Skype, Viber and WhatsApp, which are used regularly by most of the informants, is largely grounded in the need to stay emotionally connected with family and friends. New media entail a liberating potential that makes it easier for mobile households to organize their lives and compensate for the emotional and social costs of mobility, that is, to achieve a state of ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe, 2004). This is particularly salient when it comes to the abovementioned challenges that women face in relation to the patriarchal doxa of the UN system. At the same time, however, these developments necessitate a composite and growing media environment that generates dependences across the domains of everyday life, regardless of geographical location and time of the day or week.
The normalization of individual media access thus implies that family life can be further distributed across geographical spaces, as suggested by Christensen (2009), while simultaneously reinforcing and expanding the logic of the field. This interplay may generate the type of ambiguities and pressures that Ruben talks about, but the general picture is that the mediatization of communicational doxa occurs through consent and successive adaptations rather than through institutional force. Matilda, who is in her 40s and a mother of two children, tells a rather typical story:
Do you ‘turn off’, as a matter of routine, in order to create that boundary between work and free time?
No, actually I don’t. Because I’m also interested in my work. Working is like my interest. And now when we are working across several time zones I might know for instance that there is something happening in Latin America that I want to keep track of and then I can check it out online in the evening and see if there is something I need to tweet or just keep track of when I get back to work the next morning. Or if somebody will give a talk at a conference during the weekend I can keep track of it during the weekend. This is something that nobody demands from me, but it’s just that I think it’s part of my job. Perhaps it’s a ‘good-girl-thing’, but I want to know what’s going on.
These social conditions are certainly not unique to the field of UN organizations, but rather a feature of mediatization in general. However, the present analysis stresses that the combination of mobile working conditions, sometimes involving coordination across time zones, and transgressive forms of digital media accentuates the overlapping of professional and private time-spaces, which implies that media dependences easily spill over from one realm to another. The mediatization of communicational doxa drastically expands the possibilities for making investments in the cosmopolitan field without altering its overarching logics, that is, without challenging the value of cosmopolitan capital. This illuminates how mediatization processes affect this field in context-specific ways, attaining at the same time a socially transformative and structurally reproductive power (see also Kantola, 2014).
Conclusion
This study has assessed the ways in which contemporary mediatization processes influence the logics of cosmopolitan fields, exposing how the emergence of various forms of media dependence plays into the creation of cosmopolitan elite trajectories. The analyses started out from a critical understanding of mediatization as marked by the dialectical interplay between autonomy and dependence, and applied qualitative interview data gathered among Scandinavian expatriates working for international organizations in Geneva for reaching an inside view of the on-going adaptations to changing technological landscapes.
The findings can be summarized in three main points. First, the interviews revealed that mediatization processes exercise merely an indirect influence on the logic of the field. Whereas the general conditions for acquiring cosmopolitan capital, understood as a field-specific sub-form of cultural capital (Igarashi and Saito, 2014), have clearly altered along with the successive re-composition of communicational doxa (including the expanding taken-for-grantedness of personal devices for online communication), this does not involve any substantial shift in terms of what counts as capital (notably, international experiences and connections and a manifest readiness to be mobile). At the level of day-to-day activities, then, mediatization can be conceived of as a complex set of environmental changes that accentuate rather than challenge the classificatory structures of the cosmopolitan field.
This underscores, second, that the dependences that mediatization brings about are established at the intersection of social preconditions and technological affordances. It means that mediatization takes on different shapes in different settings (e.g. Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Hepp et al., 2015; Kantola, 2014). The transnational field of international politics, diplomacy and development is marked by a situation where new media habits, grounded in the emotional needs of highly mobile and distributed family lives, leak into, reinforce and expand the geo-social radius of the field, which is then acting back upon the private lifeworld (see also Jansson, 2015b).
Finally, the Geneva study has shown that the interplay between mediatization and cosmopolitan capital is conditioned by place and gender. Even though the overarching logics of the field persist regardless of location, the interviews revealed that the possibilities for tactical negotiations in relation to communicational doxa and other organizational demands are much greater in Geneva than at country offices. This condition, in combination with the flexibility of new media, proved to be very important among female interviewees in the parental phase, whose capacities to make investments in the field were otherwise circumscribed by the patriarchal structures of the UN system. The Geneva location was experienced as a parenthetical time-space where cosmopolitan capital could be consecrated at relatively low emotional costs in terms of broken ties and longer periods of absence from one’s family. In a longer perspective, however, further investments in the field would necessarily require intensified mobility and thus greater pressures on these agents to act in accordance with communicational doxa. The contradictory experiences of mediatization, the tension between autonomy and dependence, thus went hand in hand with a feeling of being located at the existential crossroads between an extended cosmopolitan trajectory and return-migration, where the latter would probably be the same thing as leaving the field.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council, project number B0185501.