The elastic mobility of business elites – Negotiating the ‘Home’ and ‘Away’ continuum

Abstract

This study sets out to provide an understanding of internationally mobile elites from a perspective that takes into account the social costs that come with being away from localized, everyday life. We show that mobile elites are often reluctant travellers and employ Bude and Dürrschmidt’s notion of ‘transclusion’ to understand the often-unrecognized ambivalence of mobile lifestyles. One way of coping with the existential dilemma of being away is to stay connected with family and friends through technologies of communication, which are deployed by the mobile elite under the regime of what Tomlinson calls ‘technologies of the hearth’. We arrive at the concept of ‘elastic mobility’, which highlights central push-and-pull processes in mobile lifestyles. The concept forwards a perspective on the social consequences of globalization that goes beyond contemporary ‘flow speak’.