Geographies of International Business Travel in the Professional Service Economy.

Faulconbridge, James R and Beaverstock, Jonathan V (2008) Geographies of International Business Travel in the Professional Service Economy. In: Mobility and technology in the workplace :. Routledge, London. ISBN 978-0-415-44346-3

Abstract

the chapter focuses exclusively upon the international dimensions of business travel and proceeds as follows. Section one briefly illustrates contemporary patterns of business travel through an analysis of official data from the United Kingdom’s Travel Trends (Office for National Statistics, 2007) and unofficial data, sourced from the European airline industry (Witlox et al, 2007). Sections two and three examine the way this proliferation in business travel supports the operation of globalizing professional service firms. Drawing on examples of how lawyers use business travel we show the topologies of social space opened up by occasional face-to-face encounter and how these are used to sustain working relationships and facilitate transnational business. This raises a number of important questions about the way geographies of business travel reproduce the global space economy, something that we address in the concluding section of the chapter.