Flying around the globe and bringing business back home

For many managers and professional today, to work is to travel. The variety of purposes and functions that travel enables for business encompasses almost every dimension of business and management and is therefore a very complex feature of business practice. Business travel is now so interwoven with doing business that its apparent continued growth is a matter of common sense. Yet paradoxically, these same business travellers are also intensive users of communication technology (phone fax, e-mail, etc), many will use web based technologies to locate information and even do business, while some will use information technologies to work together with colleagues in distant physical locations. Why then the need for physical travel? Rather than taking the growth of travel for granted, a sociology of business travel could explore those factors that make business more or less travel-intensive. Just as some forms of economic growth are more energy-intensive than others, just as some cities (with the same overall income levels) are more car dependent than others (Wickham, forthcoming), so some forms of business are presumably more travel-intensive than others. A few years ago such a question would have been ‘academic’, but today there is increasing awareness of the negative environmental consequences of hyper-mobility, and in particular of the contribution of air travel to global warming. Against this background, the research project from which this paper derives examines business travel from two separate angles. Firstly, we ask about the factors that generate business travel, and secondly we address the implications of business travel for the Irish software cluster in Dublin. This paper is based on preliminary work on these two topics.