How to cope with mobility expectations in academia: individual travel strategies of tenured academics at Ghent University, Flanders

The production and exchange of knowledge are inextricably linked to different compulsions to corporeal proximity and therefore travel. As primary producers and transferors of knowledge, academics are no exception to this rule, and their compulsions seem to be further propelled by institutional discourses regarding the alleged virtues of “internationalization.” Tenured academics, moreover, have a high degree of independence and can therefore easily choose how to cope with compulsions and constraints to internationalize. However, the business-travel literature has paid scant attention to academics and their individual contexts. In an effort to rectify this situation, this paper explores a travel dataset of tenure-track academics (N=870) working at Ghent University. The insights emerging from this analysis are then contextualized by complementing them with in-depth interviews of tenured academics (N=23) at the same institution. This paper argues, first, that varying compulsions and constraints at home and abroad lead to distinct non-travel and travel-intensive academic roles. And second, that academics who have difficulties coping, try to rationalize their corporeal travel behaviour and their mobility behaviour to meet the needs and expectations to internationalize. These strategies give an indication of how travel-related working practices can become more efficient and sustainable in the future

A Trans-Tasman Business Elite?

Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand (partial

Demystifying the Euro in European financial centre relations: London and Frankfurt, 2000-2001

The introduction of the Single European Currency, the Euro, put London and Frankfurt’s position as European financial centres under the spotlight at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Many commentators suggested that London being outside ‘Euroland’ would begin to leak capital, labour and prowess to Frankfurt as the German city out-muscled London as the preeminent European financial centre for the next Century. In the British and German financial national press the discourse was one of competition and rivalry with predicted winners and losers depending on whether one stood in London or Frankfurt. The London-Frankfurt rivalry is a microcosm of traditional world city research, which in this paper is turned on its head. In-depth research with financial institutions and stakeholders in each city pre-Euro indicated that London’s relationship with Frankfurt is based more on cooperation and strong network relations between the two cities than competition. In effect, the cities are bound together by firm and regulatory ties and networks, cross-border mobility and working practices and complementary, relational roles in Europe’s architecture of financial centres. Accordingly, we conclude in this paper that London will always be Europe’s premier financial centre because of its scale and relationships with New York and Tokyo, but equally note that Frankfurt and London are co-dependent on each other in a Europe of relational cities