The work-sociology of academic aeromobility at remote institutions

ABSTRACT

Theoretically framed by the concepts of networks, co-presence and proximity, we explore the interplay of corporeal and virtual academic mobilities in the context of ‘remote institutions’ to advance the work-sociology of aeromobility at a time of climate crisis. Empirical insights are drawn from 31 in-depth interviews conducted with academic staff at the University of Otago (New Zealand), to explore the complex personal and professional decisions that underpin academic mobility practices, and shed light on why levels of academic aeromobility have not diminished with the growing capacity for virtual substitution. Our findings inform discussion of the concepts of ‘necessary’ travel and virtual travel as a substitute for non-participation. We conclude with reflections on the scope for social (practice) and institutional (policy) reform, and avenues of future research.     

Mobilities in Finland’s Information Society Strategies from 1995 to 2010

Abstract

The article explores Finland’s national information society strategies and uses the Finnish case as an example to identify the limitation of the so-called ‘methodological nationalism’ and to explicate the advantages of the mobility paradigm. The research material consists of the Finnish national strategies published between 1995 and 2010. The article identifies two trends from the studied strategies; a further intermingling of physical movement of objects and virtual mobility, and a tendency to reduce corporeal mobility. The study also shows that most mobility-related challenges require international cooperation and multinational solutions, although state-centred thinking was prevalent in the studied strategies. In addition, it provides evidence that the various modes of mobility operate differently in micro and macro level analyses and that the mobilities paradigm could be enriched by studying policies of mobility.     

Lifestyle Mobilities: The Crossroads of Travel,Leisure and Migration

Abstract

This article examines how the mobilities paradigm intersects with physically moving as an ongoing lifestyle choice. We conceptualise a lens of ‘lifestyle mobilities’ that challenges discrete notions of and allows for a wider grasp of the increasing fluidity between travel, leisure and migration. We demonstrate how contemporary lifestyle-led mobility patterns contribute to and illustrate a breakdown in conventional binary divides between work and leisure, and a destabilisation of concepts of ‘home’ and ‘away’. We unpack issues of identity construction, belonging and place attachment associated with sustained corporeal mobility, and conclude by suggesting avenues for the further study of lifestyle mobilities.     

When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports,Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.     

Criticising the Solitary Mobile Subject: Researching Relational Mobilities and Reflecting on Mobile Methods

One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm is that people’s mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. Yet, empirical mobility research tends to research these two sides of the social separately – either mobility practices and their subjective sense and experience or their discursive, spatial or structural foundation. Taking this desideratum as point of departure, I will make a proposal for researching the links between structures and practices of mobilities consisting of the application of multiple correspondence analysis. This proposal attempts, furthermore, to operationalise mobilities as relational practices, which reinforces that social networks rather than solitary subjects are the origin of mobility decisions. This methodological approach is demonstrated by a comparative data analysis of movement patterns in England and Switzerland. In the final part of the paper, I will reflect upon methods and quantification more generally – against the background of an understanding of mobilities research as being also critical and political.     

Shadow mobilities: regulating migrant bicyclists in rural Ontario,Canada

This article explores bicycling practices among migrant farmworkers in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Migrant farmworkers are legally authorized to work in Canada for designated farm operations for up to eight months a year. Migrants lack access to cars in rural regions where motorized travel predominates. Consequently, bicycling is an essential yet inadequate and unsafe means of transportation for migrants, part of everyday geographies of what Tim Cresswell calls ‘shadow citizenship’. I use shadow citizenship to refer to the overlapping regulatory and geographical exclusions from mobility rights that create risk and stigma for migrants in Canadian communities. Migrants have become subjects of bike safety education in rural communities. I argue that bike safety regulates and orders migrants’ bicycling conduct rather than addressing the roots of unsafe bicycling conditions. Overall, the article complicates the conventional view of bicycling as a universally healthy and progressive travel mode. Racial and economic forms of exploitation as well as socio-spatial exclusions inflect actually existing bicycling geographies.     

Rethinking the Two-Body Problem: The Segregation of Women Into Geographically Dispersed Occupations

Empirical research on the family cites the tendency for couples to relocate for husbands’ careers as evidence against the gender neutrality of household economic decisions. For these studies, occupational segregation is a concern because occupations are not random by sex and mobility is not random by occupation. I find that the tendency for households to relocate for husbands’ careers is better explained by the segregation of women into geographically dispersed occupations rather than by the direct prioritization of men’s careers. Among never-married workers, women relocate for work less often than men, and the gender effect disappears after occupational segregation is accounted for. Although most two-earner families feature husbands in geographically clustered jobs involving frequent relocation for work, families are no less likely to relocate for work when it belongs to the wife. I conclude that future research in household mobility should treat occupational segregation occurring prior to marriage rather than gender bias within married couples as the primary explanation for the prioritization of husbands’ careers in household mobility decisions.     

Consequences of Overnight Work Travel for Personal Social Relations: Problems,Promises, and Further Repercussions

Abstract

The article uses survey data from Sweden to examine social consequences of the mobile society. Key questions tackled include the implications of overnight work travel for the travellers’ ability to cultivate locally based and long‐distance friendships and the potential of travel to provide a source of new acquaintances. Data analysis indicates that widening social networks and increasing opportunities to achieve co‐presence with long‐distance friends, as brought by mobility, represent significant consequences of overnight work travel from an individual’s standpoint. This experience was salient even among those respondents who travelled no more than occasionally, while only the most frequent travellers perceived their travel as something impeding with their chances of sustaining local social ties. While the benefits deriving from travel thus seem incontestable, it may therefore not be possible either to entirely discard the prevalent notion of mobile lifestyles as a factor undermining social cohesion and promoting isolation and loneliness.     

Rethinking network capital: hospitality work and parallel trading among Chinese students in Melbourne

Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chinese female tertiary students’ work practices in Melbourne, Australia, this article engages critically with John Urry’s concept of network capital. I show how these students’ work practices link them both into relatively fixed, localized, diasporic employment networks in Melbourne’s Chinese restaurant sector; and into relatively mobile, transnational, digitally mediated trading networks in the micro-entrepreneurial activity of daigou or parallel trading: buying local goods on behalf of customers in China. Based on this case study, I develop three main inter-related claims. First, I argue that geographic and social mooring in place, as well as mobility, can generate benefit for individuals and groups, just as both fixity and mobility may generate disadvantage or risk. Second and relatedly, I propose that social capital cannot operate entirely independently of geography, as Urry’s proposal of network capital as a replacement for the concept of social capital implies. Third, through my development of the concept of ‘feminine network capital’, I show how network capital may take ‘weak’ and tactical, as well as ‘strong’ and strategic forms.     

Social Networking,Mobilities, and the Rise of Liquid Identities

This research focuses on representations of mobilities and their role in social networking on Facebook. Based on an ethnographic research design embedded in a grounded theory approach, the study investigates the mobility patterns of one Generation Y network. The analysis of 50 profiles in this network, including texts, photographs, photo albums and check-ins, suggests that Facebook fosters corporeal as well as imaginative mobility, ultimately leading to the emergence of ‘liquid identities’, i.e. identities modelled on movement. Social media, specifically Facebook, have set in motion complex patterns of competition for network capital and social status based on mobilities.     

A Chance to Catch a Breath: Using Mobile Video Ethnography in Cycling Research

Abstract

Under the rubric of transport much previous research on everyday mobility has focused on understanding the more representational and readily articulated aspects of everyday movement. By way of contrast, emergent theorisations of mobility suggest that an understanding of the less representational – those fleeting, ephemeral and often embodied and sensory aspects of movement – is vital if we are to fully understand why and how people move around. Accordingly, the ability of conventional methods to complement new research agendas, particularly those related to issues around the sensory, affect and embodied experience has been called in to question. This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on mobile methodologies by critically discussing a theoretical and methodological journey towards mobile video ethnography in the context of a project researching cycling in London, UK between 2004 and 2006. In doing so it highlights three ways in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to research in the new mobilities paradigm: video as a way of ‘feeling there’ when you can’t be there; video as a way of apprehending fleeting moments of mobile experience; and video as a tool to extend sensory vocabularies. It also critically discusses the limitations of video as a text and the importance of embodied experience, interpretation and audiencing to its success as part of a mobile methodology. Whilst emphasising the need for caution, the paper demonstrates the way in which mobile video ethnography can contribute to a new mobilities agenda by facilitating more situated understandings of daily corporeal mobility which highlight an alternative time‐space politics to those inscribed in road spaces.     

Verflochtene Mobilitäten und ihr Management. Mobilitätspraktiken von Expatriate-Managern und ihren <Emphasis Type="Italic">‚trailing spouses‘</Emphasis> im Auslandseinsatz

This article analyzes forms and enabling practices of expatriate mobility, i. e. the mobility of managers and skilled professionals assigned to a foreign subsidiary of their company. We will show that (1) expatriate mobility has to be conceived of as complex entangled mobilities that add up to a hyper-mobility, and (2) that this hyper-mobility inevitably depends on the active mobility work of the expatriates’ ‘trailing spouses’. Thus, it becomes clear that the mobility management on which expatriate mobility depends is highly gendered. By focusing on the specifics of expatriate mobility, the article also opens up new theoretical perspectives for mobility research in general.     

Gambling Drivers: Regulating Cultural Technologies,Subjects, Spaces and Practices of Mobility

Abstract

In this article, we analyse intersections between gambling and driving as everyday cultural practices of mobility. Building on Nikolas Rose’s argument that subjects in post‐industrial democratic societies are governed through appeals to ‘freedom’ rather than through overt forms of coercion or organised campaigns of state propaganda, we explore the different ways that producers, regulators and consumer advocates involved in gambling and driving appeal to our ‘powers of freedom’. We demonstrate that promotional and regulatory discourses of driving and gambling rely on a concept of freedom as self‐regulation. And we argue that the cultivation of social responsiveness is needed to address some of the problems created by individualising practices, spaces and technologies of mobility currently offered by automobiles and poker machines.     

Female Migrant Entrepreneurs in Vienna: Mobility and its Embeddedness

This article discusses how female ‘migrant’ entrepreneurs present and connect mobility to their social realities and how spatial mobility influence their economic activities, social interactions and subjectivities and the way how female ‘migrant’ entrepreneurs experience and define social mobility. This perspective allows to critically analyze the shortcomings of the debates on ‘ethnic’ entrepreneurship and the gender bias which still dominates the mainstream debates. Based on qualitative interviews with female migrant entrepreneurs in Vienna it can thus be shown that mobility does not only become an important marker for boundary drawing but gets rationalized by the female entrepreneurs as an important qualification and a means for social mobility.     

‘When and where does being Welsh matter to me?’ The influence of cross-border mobilities on constructions of sub-national belonging in the lives of Welsh Muslims*

This article will discuss how Welsh Muslims construct what a sense of place means to them through their cross-border mobility between England and Wales, and how this contributes to the ongoing re-construction of a plural understanding of nationhood in an era of diversity. To understand when and where being Welsh matters to Welsh Muslims, it will explore how mobility rather than being the antithesis of belonging, can be used as an essential tool in highlighting how perceptions of the nation, sub-state nation, home and place are influenced and understood.     

When runways move but people don’t: The O’Hare Modernization Program and the relative immobilities of air travel

Abstract

This paper draws on Urry’s four interconnected senses of mobility to argue that the O’Hare Modernization Project, carefully framed as moving runways rather than expanding O’Hare International Airport, has differentially affected the mobilities of people and land uses in addition to airport boundaries and noise, and that work on aeromobilities has not sufficiently considered spaces on the ground beyond airport borders. The relative immobility of the built environment around a major piece of infrastructure such as O’Hare has significant material consequences when the airport itself becomes mobile, reminding us of the politics inherent to the production of mobility systems and cities.     

Navigating disabling spaces: challenging ontological norms and the spatialization of difference through ‘Embodied Practices of Mobility’

This article draws from diary and interview data to look at the strategic ways in which disabled people use mobile devices to navigate their social and spatial world. The data reveal that space is not passively perceived, but rather actively challenged and reconfigured. The concept of ‘embodied practices of mobility’ is introduced to account for the ways in which disabled people negotiate access and inclusion. By using mobile devices to access information, connect with others and engage in advocacy, participants are contesting spaces that are arranged according to preconceived ontological norms and asserting their embodied presence.     

‘Facework’, Flow and the City: Simmel,Goffman, and Mobility in the Contemporary City

This paper contains a re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman with an eye to the mobility practices of the contemporary city. The paper offers a ‘new’ perspective on mobility in the contemporary city by re‐reading two sociological ‘classics’ as there is a need to conceptualise the everyday level of flow and mobility in the midst of an intellectual climate dominated by grand theories of networks and globalisation. In the re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman, the aim is to reach an understanding of how contemporary material mobility flows and symbolic orders and meanings are produced and re‐produced. You may argue that other academic disciplines such as anthropology and human geography have made important contributions to this understanding. What has not been done, however, is to show how these two sociological thinkers can move beyond mere application to this field of study. With their sociological sensitivity, they rather carry important insights that will benefit the sociology of mobility. Arguably Simmel and Goffman offer the opportunity to connect the global flows to the everyday level of social practice, as well as linking more basic/classic sociological theory to contemporary issues of mobility. The reason to ‘look back’ is therefore to capture some of the past's ‘sociological imagination’ and relate it to an important social phenomenon of the present.     

Level of choice in older women’s decisions to retire or continue working and associated well-being

Retirement is a complex life transition. Women’s retirement, like their work lives, may be further complicated, for example, by family or financial obligations; they may feel forced to retire or to continue working or feel they have the choice to do so. This study examines the role of voluntary versus involuntary retirement or continued work participation among retirement-age women; specifically, the relationships between choice, work status, and well-being. Compared to women forced to retire, women who chose retirement or continuing to work had higher levels of life satisfaction. Findings highlight the importance of examining retirement within the life course context.