Travelling and connecting, messaging and meeting: Business travel, information technology and the virtual organisation

There is now extensive research and discussion of the role of information and communication technology in organisations. Indeed, ICTs have been seen as interwoven with the emergence of a globalised economy. Thus Castells sees ICTs as now the “fibres of the organisation”, the warp and woof of global networks (Castells, 1996). Such arguments problematise electronic communication, yet take completely for granted the parallel expansion of business travel. This paper is part of an attempt to redress the balance, to examine in what way technologies of extensive physical travel are both constitutive of and shaped by contemporary organisations. An obvious starting point for research on travel is Urry’s conception of the “mobility turn” and the claim that social sciences now need to study flows (Urry, 2000, 2003). Such arguments undermine the conventional debate about whether electronic communication and physical meeting (itself dependent on transport technologies) are substitutes or complementary (Mokhtarian, 2003). That debate is constituted by the problem of the appropriate mode of connecting two points; the mobility turn suggests that the points are connected anyway. This raises a series of empirical questions about the uses and experience of business travel. Social science research on business travel focuses on its contribution to the general erosion of the gap between work and non-work, with important implications for work life balance and family life (Kvande, 2005). However, our concern is the implication of travel for work itself: for the work place, for working time and for work people. The paper addresses these issues through a case study of business travel in the Irish software industry. The software industry was chosen as an example of a particularly travel-intensive industry. These high levels of business travel are in one sense paradoxical, given that the industry’s essentially “weightless” product can be transmitted and meditated electronically and that workers in the industry are presumably particularly competent with electronic communication. The research is based on interviews in a cross section of companies in the industry. At its simplest, we ask whether organisations and careers really do now occur in flows rather than in fixed spaces, if organisations and careers really have become “virtual”. This generates a series of initial contrasts between “spatial” and “virtual” organisations. From the findings it emerges that in a spatial organisation travel time is “time out”, it is different to working time. It is time lost to work, whether it is regarded as a holiday or as simply irritating dead time. By contrast, in the virtual organisation travel time is simply working time. It is used to work and experienced as work. In a spatial organisation the business traveller goes from a “here” that is the home workplace to a “there” that is “elsewhere”; both places are distinct, with their own boundaries, but one (home) is known better than the foreign elsewhere. Between them lies a different place, the non-workplace through which travel occurs. These features of time and place mean that in the spatial organisation travel has many of the features of a rite de passage as studied by anthropologists: a movement from one condition to another, complete with an intervening liminal space. Such contrasts are absent from the virtual organisation, in which time and space become homogenous, and the intervening space is also part of the workplace. Furthermore, in the virtual organisation the traveller is a nomad, making unstructured journeys, whereas in the spatial organisation the traveller is either a commuter (travelling backwards and forwards between distinct places) or an explorer (making a series of discrete journeys from the safety of the home to different exotic locations). In the spatial organisation the people at the destination are “them”, as opposed to “us” who form the point of origin. I...