Organising global work travel: An ethnography of the travelling organisation

Abstract

This thesis explores the organisation of global work travel. The practice of work travel denotes different modes of working away from a permanent workplace, such as an office or factory, where professionals like engineers are typically required to travel to remote locations to perform their work. In particular, I find that work travel encompasses five forms of mobility: geographical movement; being away; engaging in travelling; enacting the traveller; and utilising digital technologies. I identify two challenges that work travel posits to the discipline of Management and Organisation Studies (MOS). First, that work related mobilities like work travel are generally studied as discrete entities disconnected from the organisations within which they emerge. Second, organisations are generally perceived as static and bounded units, where I specifically question the applicability of established organisation theory to the practice of work travel since this theory is derived from, and usually applied and researched in static settings that are unlike the conditions surrounding work travel. Over the course of a 12-month ethnography in a multinational engineering company, ProQuip, I studied how work travel is practised by engineers who are regularly expected to travel to remote locations to engage in factory-building work on client sites. These professionals spend most of their working lives outside of the premises of their employing organisation, often away from their national cultures and countries. In order to understand how work travel, a practice that is inherently dynamic and based outside of the permanent organisation, is organised, I investigated what forms of control are applied outside of conventional organisational settings. I identify three modes of control that affect the organising of work travel, specifically formal, social, and "other" organising. I first studied formal organisational control mechanisms that were deployed from the central organisation and its offices to ProQuip's peripheral offices and sites. Second, I accounted for a range of social mechanisms and behaviours that organised travel, discovering a Travelling Organisation that substitutes ProQuip formal control where it does not extend. Finally, I considered "other" modes of control that are not institutionalised within the MOS discourse, such as Organisation by Product. I argue that all three perspectives are instrumental for gaining a richer picture of work travel. I find that in studying work travel as an activity, the interrelation between ProQuip and travelling is illuminated, showing a symbiotic relationship where the practice of work travel constructs ProQuip as much as ProQuip gives rise to work travel.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Miguel Martinez Lucio (Supervisor)