Work, mobilities and the life course: choices and logistical entanglements in mobile life-careers

ABSTRACT

This article employs the term ‘mobile life-careers’ in reference to work lives that have incorporated mobilities as ongoing constitutive features. The implications of oscillations between different forms of work mobilities over the course of careers are explored through a focus on the work histories of three development professionals. At issue are the ways in which the configuration of mobilities may change over time, as well as the extent to which workers are able to exercise choices (or not) in shaping these itineraries. What are the credentials that mobile workers must marshal to have a chance of balancing their personal and familial commitments with their professional mobilities? While an intense pace of mobilities has often been identified as the prerogative of the young and less encumbered, this article will consider why one of the critical resources affording participants in this sector, the capacity to sustain mobile life-careers was not their youthfulness, but the seniority and reputations they had accrued in the course of their work lives. Given the organisational variability of mobile work, for many personnel questions around work mobility may not be a matter of more or less, but of the form, pace and timing of mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Life-career
• mobile workers
• mobilities
• logistics
• choices

Introduction

Three to six months is a killer, a killer. You don’t have enough time to really build your life. It takes three to six months to start feeling comfortable. I’m not talking about going there and traveling. I’m talking about living and starting to go to the next step of okay, now that I’m organized, can I look around, can I try something new, a new activity? So, by the time you start to get to that point, you go back. But here, of course, people, you’re leaving them behind. They miss you at the beginning and you leave a hole, and they re-fill the hole with other stuff, so they don’t have your place anymore.

In the early 2000s when I met her, Christine¹ had worked for over twelve years as an international engineering consultant specialising in hydroelectric development. She had operated as an independent consultant as well as an employee for several large multinational engineering firms. Her work involved advising and/or managing projects in a variety of locales outside her home base in Canada, and her visits to these sites had ranged from a week to an 18-month stay. In providing an account of the temporal range of her international assignments, Christine was careful to distinguish between the circumstances of consultants travelling to as opposed to those living in these locales, even if temporarily. She contended that professionals taking long term assignments abroad had to learn about the different environments, cultures, values, and lifestyles of their temporary locale and rebuild their lives around these. In contrast, short term consultants relied on the ‘local’ knowledge of those colleagues who had lived there longer. But additionally, she noted that, quite often, ‘you have people coming short term who have [also] done a lot of long-term things’, equipping them with previous experiences of more extended sojourning that allowed them to get up to speed on their shorter visits much more quickly. ‘They know what questions to ask’. However, several of Christine’s international projects had also involved just a few months, marking out an in-between experience that in her view, had not allowed her to adjust properly and get to know her new abode while at the same time, still being just long enough to significantly disrupt her personal relationships in Montreal, her home base. Hence her conclusion in the opening quote that project assignments of three to six months were the ‘killers’.

In her account of temporary graduate workers and working holidaymaker programmes in Australia, Shanthi Robertson argued that ‘it is the temporal dimension, rather than the spatial, that distinguishes migration from other forms of cross-border mobility, such as tourism’ (2014, 1917). But time, Robertson noted, exercises influence, not just in the duration of a particular form of movement but in the way in which it shapes the biography of the mover (Ibid). Robertson’s observations accord with Christine’s insistence on the important difference between a short-term visit to a project site as opposed to living in this locale. These also correspond with Christine’s acknowledgement that despite the divergences between these forms of mobility, previous experience of a longer-term work sojourn could later crucially inform a shorter project visit even elsewhere. But there are some important differences between the temporalities being described by Robertson and Christine. Robertson’s study focused on the way in which the shifting duration of a move marked out a critical life course transition as some young sojourners who had started their stays as holiday or study visits, eventually sought extended or even permanent residence in Australia. Hence, in the case being described by Robertson, mobility is being configured as an intrinsically temporary, liminal state, whether it culminates in an eventual return to the country of origin or a more permanent relocation to Australia. In contrast, Christine was describing oscillations between a variety of different forms of mobility that cumulatively established a record of experience and accomplishment over the course of an ongoing life-career. Mobility in this rendering is a requisite, rolling feature of this career, even as its temporal dimensions may shift repeatedly.

In their study of French migrants working in London’s financial and business sector, Ryan and Mulholland (2014) argued that heightened mobility is more likely to characterise a particular phase of the life course than feature as an ongoing element of a career. In other words, the situation being described by Shanthi Robertson in which youthful visitors seek to convert a sojourn into extended residence is, according to Ryan and Mulholland, a more likely trajectory of mobility than Christine’s account of a career featuring a prolonged alternation between multiple mobilities. Ryan and Mulholland noted that while mobile professionals may start off with a short-term sojourn in mind, plans can be altered bit by bit, as people put off a departure and gradually settle in their new locale (2014, 597). The choice of staying or moving, they suggested, is not an either/or between discrete possibilities. Rather it reflects a gradual process of emplacement as career opportunities are combined with cumulative personal and familial factors (Ibid). They conclude that what has been identified as a new type of ‘super-mover’ skilled migrant might actually reflect a particular life stage ‘associated with the young and footloose’ (2014, 598).

Nevertheless, there is a growing scholarly literature (e.g. Cangia and Zittoun 2018; Bochove and Engbersen 2015; Lindemann 2017; Nowicka 2007; Suter 2020) concerned with probing the variety of strategies that may be employed by mobile workers to reconcile their personal commitments and relationships with career obligations that require some form(s) of mobility. These studies describe a spectrum of configurations and imperatives with which mobile workers in different sectors and organisations have to contend, from the business trips that Kesselring (2015) argued were characteristic of mobile work in an increasing number of occupations, to the mandatory multiyear rotations and associated relocations of United Nation officials (Nowicka 2008; Devadason 2017). A variety of mobilities may also feature within a particular occupation or organisation as well as between them. This multiplicity appeared in Christine’s account of international consultants working on hydroelectric development, but it has also featured in scholarly descriptions of other sectors and occupations. For example, the employees working for a transnational financial services company, who participated in Melissa Butcher’s study, included Australian nationals who had relocated to Singapore, the firm’s headquarters, but who were also responsible for regional operations that required them to travel regularly throughout Asia. Others remained based in the Sydney office, while travelling frequently on business trips (Butcher 2010, 26). The UN officials who Magdalena Nowicka interviewed had all engaged both in short-term business trips as well as in rotations involving longer-term relocations (2008, 44). Given this variability, across and between sectors, for many workers, questions around work mobility may not be a matter of more or less, but of the form and timing of mobility. Would short business trips be more useful in certain phases of family formation, and might longer sojourns or relocations be more feasible at specific points in your spouse’s career or your children’s education and so on? These types of queries in turn beg the question of choice (Devadason 2017). To what extent and in which circumstances can mobile personnel influence the form, timing, and pacing of their work mobility (Amit 2020)? Does choice require leaving a particular organisation or occupation or is there leeway for adjusting the nature of one’s mobility at different points of a life-career without that kind of rupture? What kinds of resources or credentials would enhance a worker’s capacity to configure their mobility?

To pursue these questions, in the sections that follow, I will be drawing on two of my own studies of mobile workers. The first is a study, conducted during the early 2000s, among internationally mobile professionals, including Christine, who advised or managed projects involving various aspects of infrastructure development from hydroelectric power to environmental or communications planning.² Based largely in Canada, their work required frequent travel to, and in some cases sojourns in, various international locales (Amit 2015, 2010, 2007, 2006). The second study,³ which is still in progress, involves a follow up to this earlier research that pays particular attention to changing patterns of work mobility. It has involved interviews with some of the professionals who participated in this earlier project⁴ as well as snowballing to obtain a larger range of mobile workers. These are professionals whose jobs have often required them to make accommodations to assignments of different duration, to be frequently absent from family and friends and in some cases, to relocate repeatedly. Central, therefore, to the relationship between these projects is a consideration of the factors and uncertainties that may prompt shifts in the pace of work mobility, and the social implications and ramifications of these transitions in peoples’ lives and careers. While the other participants in these projects did not necessarily share Christine’s views concerning the pitfalls of three to six months work sojourns, many did share her apprehension about their ability to reconcile the timing and duration of their work travels with both their personal commitments at any given moment as well as with the changing nature of these responsibilities and/or their work obligations over time.

In this essay, I will be using the term ‘mobile life-careers’ in reference to work lives, such as those of my interlocutors in these two studies, which incorporate mobilities as ongoing constitutive features. The invocation of this term is not, however, intended to mark out a classificatory distinction between mobile and sedentary careers. Rather, the term is intended to highlight the entanglements arising through the dynamic interaction between mobilities and work over the course of a life-career. The article focuses on the career histories of three professionals whose work lives reveal the importance of the interaction between, on the one hand, the range of mobilities that have featured in their occupational fields and, on the other hand, the credentials they have accumulated over time. While an intense pace of mobilities has often been identified as the prerogative of the young and less encumbered, I will explain why one of the critical resources affording my interlocutors the capacity to sustain mobile life-careers was not their youthfulness, but the seniority and reputations they had accrued in the course of their work lives.

Family and life course in mobile work

As Karen Fog Olwig and I noted in an introduction to a special journal issue focused on continuities and disjunctures of movement, ‘positing a relationship between age or life phase and mobility has long been a feature of studies of movement’ (Amit and Olwig 2011, 2). This connection has been of particular note in the frequent observation that migration favours the recruitment of the young. Accordingly, Philip Martin (2007, 7) has argued that ‘migration is not random: young people are most likely to move over borders because they have the least invested in jobs and careers at home and the most time to recoup their “investments in migration” abroad’.

Martin’s concern is with international labour migration. One of the principal benefits, however, of the development of mobility studies as a conceptual framework is the scope it has provided for an interrogation of a much wider spectrum of (im)mobilities. A corollary of this expanded scope is its facilitation of a more expansive exploration of the interaction between the life course and mobilities. It allows us to view, over the course of a person’s life, how different types of moves may be taken up, with one form of mobility following, or being prompted and/or enabled by another. In turn, paying attention to the interrelation between mobilities over the course of individuals’ lives can yield more general insights into the relationship between different forms of mobilities. Thus, the concept of lifestyle migration drew from Williams and Hall’s (2000) observations of the effects of cross-influences between tourism and migration in people’s experience of mobility. A person might choose to relocate either seasonally or permanently to a place they had first gotten to know and like on earlier brief holiday visits.

An examination of (im)mobilities over extended periods of time can reveal circumstances of gradual emplacement, as Ryan and Mulholland have described for French professionals in London and Shanthi Robertson for young sojourners in Australia. These are circumstances that while not involving the kind of largely unskilled labour migration that Martin was describing still agrees with his larger point. It is the young who are likely to move, and when they settle and take on commitments, they are less likely to move again. In these cases, a delimited life course phase remains tightly articulated with work mobility. But an examination of life-careers can also be revealing of efforts to pace mobilities in response to the accumulation and changing demands of family and personal commitments. In other words, the effort to balance career trajectories with an accumulation of social commitments over time can, in some cases, provide an impetus for a process of gradual emplacement but in other instances, it can encourage the organisation of a schedule of shorter duration work mobilities that can be attuned to the configurations and demands of familial and other personal obligations.

Most of the mobile professionals who participated in the two studies with which I’m concerned in this essay endeavoured to make these kinds of logistical arrangements over the duration of their careers. But the arrangements they organised shifted over different phases of their lives and work. These were not one-off responses to the opportunities for mobility afforded only in one relatively unencumbered life phase. Instead, these individuals repeatedly shifted and adjusted when they travelled for work, how often, and how long they were away, in their responses to the changing circumstances of their social networks, personal commitments and work domains over different phases of their life courses and careers.

As I will discuss in the sections that follow, the strategies they employed were not necessarily unique to the specific occupational field with which I am concerned. In the preceding section, I noted the emerging body of research that seeks to draw attention to the important role of family commitments and personal networks in the fashioning of mobile careers, often with an emphasis on the critical role of the temporal in these processes. My focus on pacing and timing in this essay also draws on a growing literature concerned with the dynamics of different aspects of temporality – including pace, tempo, speed, rhythm and intensity – across a range of mobilities (Amit and Salazar 2020a; Cresswell 2010, 18; Germann Molz 2009; Sheller and Urry 2006, 215).

Questions of timing, pacing and recalibration of work strategies are, of course, also part and parcel of any life-career, including those which are much less far flung. But the capacity to reconcile the geographical span and pacing of highly mobile life-careers with more localised personal commitments and relationships can be heightened by access to particular strategies and opportunities. The strategies and openings that I will be describing in this essay are not, however, available to everyone who has considered – or been pressured to consider – the possibility of regularly travelling for work. In a study concerning mobile UN professionals and banking executives, Devadason (2017) has highlighted the organisational constraints or ‘golden handcuffs’ that even transnational actors pursuing high-status careers may face. Unlike Devadason’s interlocutors whose career paths and mobilities were circumscribed by their employment in large global organisations, the capacity of my interlocutors to craft accommodations between their personal and professional commitments was enhanced by openings for alternation between various types of employment situations, projects and roles at different points in their life-careers. But these kinds of openings often tended to reward those with proven track records and seniority rather than youthful footlooseness.

In the following sections, I will, therefore, be drawing primarily on several interlocutors who participated both in my project during the early 2000s as well as in the more recent ongoing study. The opportunity to interview individuals at intervals of 15–20 years has provided a useful vantage point from which to consider the pacing of mobilities over the duration of a person’s career. But my analysis of this material is also informed by interviews with a larger number of interlocutors who participated in one or the other of these studies. In the earlier project, 38 interviews were conducted with individuals engaged in international ventures. In the current project, 24 interviews with mobile professionals have already been completed but the research is still ongoing.

Frequent, short and intense work trips

Most of the participants in these two related studies were engaged in occupations that involved various aspects of infrastructural development in locales situated outside North America and Western Europe. While most had actively sought out opportunities for engagement in assignments that would involve mobility, they found that getting a foothold in this kind of endeavour was neither easy or immediate. These professionals largely held Canadian, and in some instances American, European, or Australian citizenships. They had completed at least one and often two or more postsecondary programmes at Western universities. These were credentials that provided them with a privileged access to cross-border mobility and to professional employment (Amit 2007; Amit 2020; Amit and Salazar 2020b). But in and of themselves, these assets didn’t automatically establish their credentials as international specialists. They had been trained as engineers, environmental, communication or educational specialists as well as urban planners. They had not been specifically trained as international specialists in these respective fields. Sending specialists to work on projects far from their home bases is an expensive undertaking, so employers, associates, clients, and donor agencies are often wary of involving someone without a proven track record of mobile work. Professionals like Michael or James found they needed to build up a resumé of pertinent international experience before they were likely to be offered these types of opportunities. Once launched, as their record of work in a variety of dispersed locales accumulated, so too did their reputation as international ‘experts’. Ironically, therefore, while these kinds of mobile development specialists are formally tasked with ‘transferring’ a standardised and decontextualised repertoire of institutional protocols associated with Western donors and/or multilateral agencies (often themselves based in Western centres), their reputation as international experts is, as often or perhaps even more, dependent on the capabilities they are assumed to have accrued from the variability of their experiences in working at multiple locales outside North America or Western Europe.

After several years of public service employment in Canada, Michael, a specialist in resource and environmental management, spent two years working in West Africa as a volunteer for a Canadian charity focusing on international assistance. At least part of his motivation for taking on this mission was the hope that it might eventually enhance his prospects for an internationally mobile career. When Michael returned to Canada, he indeed succeeded in securing employment with a large engineering, construction and environmental management company that supported both domestic and international projects. It still took him several years more before he was eventually assigned to international projects. But ‘once I established a reputation with certain key managers that do a lot of international work, I guess my currency as a consultant within the company was established and I was in demand for working overseas’.

Like Michael, James’ career had been shaped in important ways by his desire to ensure a measure of international work mobility. After graduating with a B.A., James took a break and spent a year travelling around Central and South America. That experience led him to pursue an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, a degree that he was able to parlay into successive jobs involving international education programmes, work that involved frequent travel to and sojourns in different Latin-American countries as well as to various destinations in Canada. James subsequently moved from Ontario to Quebec to take a position in a small, independent consulting firm that provided evaluation studies for international development agencies. This firm became increasingly involved in project management, which in turn came to be the full time focus of James’ work, albeit in a different part of the world than hitherto.

Although Michael and James had earlier in their careers devoted some effort to actively seek out opportunities for internationally mobile work, both were nonetheless concerned to mitigate the impact of their travels on their families, especially while their children were young. They did so by trying to ensure that each of their trips away from home were kept to two or three weeks in duration, even though cumulatively they were likely to be absent for three to four months in any given year. Michael noted that this pattern of travel reflected a commitment he had made to his wife ‘so that the absence from the family [which grew to include two daughters] is not extended’. James noted that ‘for years, I’ve refused to take assignments which would make me be overseas for more than a month’. As I have noted elsewhere (Amit 2020), this strategy of multiple, short work trips recurred amongst many of my interlocutors when raising their children. It is also echoed in Karin Fast and Johann Lindell’s study of Swedish corporate business elites whose work involved frequent travel. Fast and Lindell note that, in their efforts to balance ‘work-time and family-time’, these professionals tried to restrict the extent of their trips away from home to periods ranging from a couple of days to a couple of weeks (2016, 442). And they tried to make the most of their time away by adopting strenuous work schedules when travelling, an intensity that has characterised most of the short-term project trips undertaken by interlocutors in my own research as well. Similarly, in an analysis of work mobility among Swedish medical professionals, Katarzyna Boström et al. include an account of ‘Mark’ who chose short stays abroad in order to limit time away from his family (2018, 105).

But arranging these kinds of schedules of multiple, intense but relatively short trips is not always easily accomplished. The ability of both Michael and James to insist on travel schedules that were more amenable to their family obligations was significantly enabled by their increasing seniority. While Michael started off as a project coordinator, he was eventually promoted to a management position within a regional office of his company. James acquired a partnership in the Quebec firm, which gave him sufficient leeway so that, for a time, he was able to further reduce the pace of his travelling to eight weeks a year or even less. Both James and Michael noted that their ability to insist on shorter trips away was not necessarily shared by other professionals who were engaged in related mobile work. James observed that ‘I do have that luxury, to get those kinds of jobs that have shorter trips. I know many people who have to do that [ travel of longer duration] and I think it’s really tough’. Similarly, in 2002, Michael had described the situation of some of the associates in his company as involving assignments of

six to eight months overseas and they have families with young kids. And they’re in a difficult situation because they don’t want to do that much but they get paid a good salary, they haven’t got a domestic practice around them, and they haven’t got staff that they leave behind to keep things moving along in their absence.

Michael had been determined to avoid that very situation and he did this in part by insisting on maintaining an involvement in domestic as well as international projects. But there had been a cost to that dual involvement: ‘I’ve probably sacrificed some of my career by choosing to be hard line and balance between domestic and international work’. The advantage of keeping a foot in both types of practices, however, was the leverage it had given him to resist pressure from some colleagues that ‘would have me overseas every waking moment and then some’.

Taking up openings in the life course

In contrast, Tanya thought it would be extremely difficult to sustain concurrent involvement in domestic and international practices even within the same organisation. She explained that

most people who do international work, end up doing very little but international work. International schedules, they move all of the time, they change. Nothing is ever as it’s originally planned to be in terms of a timetable and so, if you’ve made a commitment to a domestic project, then you can find yourself in a difficult position.

By 2000, Tanya, a consultant with training in urban and environmental management, had been working for large engineering firms for eleven years, with a dossier entirely focused on international projects. Unlike both Michael and James, Tanya expressed a decided preference for assignments that allowed her to spend longer on site:

It saves no money and it does not produce the results you’re being asked to produce if you try to send people in for a couple of weeks and then bring them home because you think it’s going to be cheaper for them to work at home and you don’t pay per diems and you don’t pay plane fares and whatnot. That doesn’t work because you have to try, even if you’re in a country for a couple of months, that’s still a pretty short time frame to try and establish a rapport.

But as she herself observed, by the time Tanya embarked on this kind of mobile work, she had few of the domestic obligations that led James and Michael to insist on relatively short trips abroad. ‘I don’t have the same stresses that I’ve seen in some of my colleagues because I don’t have a spouse and my son [ by then an independent adult] doesn’t depend on me being there’. She noted that while she had colleagues with young families who carried out a lot of travel for work – ‘more than I would have imagined’ – most in this situation didn’t want to. And there were other colleagues who, whether or not they had children, simply preferred not to travel for work. Tanya, on the other hand, found herself getting ‘antsy’ after even a few months without travel abroad, but she had been able to act on that love of mobility at a particular ‘opening’ (Boström, Öhlander, and Pettersson 2018) in her life. Similarly, in their review of the mobility strategies employed by peripatetic Swedish medical professionals, Boström, Öhlander, and Pettersson (2018, 102) describe efforts to minimise the effects of family separation in which the timing of travel focused on particular ‘“openings” in the life course’. These could include periods ‘between relationships’, setting out before having children or after the children have grown up (Ibid).

The notion of life course transitions serving as ‘openings’ for a re-pacing of mobilities appeared recurrently in the life-careers on which I am focusing in this essay. When I first spoke to Michael in 2002, he was adamant that he had no intention of ever relocating from the Western Canadian city in which he was based. But that assertion came with one caveat:

The caveat would be a longer-term assignment of two to three years that I would then be able to take the whole family off on. I would relish that, in the right circumstances, the right location with the right schooling, the right geopolitical issues around that. I think my daughters and my wife and I would all … it would be lovely. And it would then remove some of that frenetic pace, to-ing and fro-ing and having to plan my life around the travel.

When I spoke again to Michael in 2019, he was now living thousands of miles away from Canada and had been doing so for nearly six years. The opportunity to relocate had occurred after an extended period in which Michael had been seconded by his company to work on two major domestic projects situated in his Canadian home base. While Michael had enjoyed his participation in these endeavours, he had missed being involved in international work, so when the domestic projects were successfully completed, he was glad of his company’s offer to take up a post abroad as the regional director of a new environmental division. Michael was able to take on this new post with its attendant residential move because his wife, who accompanied him on this move, was able to secure a job in this locale that was commensurate with her skills. Their daughters were, by then, adults who could choose whether to join their parents to pursue postsecondary studies in this new location or stay on and complete a degree in Canada. The question of whether this move might become a permanent relocation or just a long-term overseas assignment was left open for a later decision.

Similarly, James’ choice of jobs and the tempo of his work mobility reflected, to an important degree, an effort to meet the shifting scheduling needs of his family at different phases. When his children were still very young, both James and his wife were, for a time, engaged in careers that involved extensive travel. The considerable challenges of scheduling posed by this dual mobility, James explained, was not just a matter of ensuring synchronisation between the demands of their respective work travels in any one period, but of synchronising the stages of their careers.

So, one time when she [his wife] had a big new job that meant that she was traveling, I purposely took a secondment to a [local] college which I knew would be less travel and less hours than the job I had, as a way of being the guy at home more. I had regular hours so she could do her traveling and build her career for a couple of years. Then when I had the chance to move to [Quebec] and join [the small independent consulting firm], she made somewhat of a sacrifice to leave, but by then she knew she could get a reasonable job here. So, you kind of try and plan your careers and balance that burden, but yeah, it’s stressful I think and a challenge. And many Canadian professionals are increasingly required to work overseas.

By 2004, with his children grown and away at school, James had more free time and was looking forward to the possibility of using this opening to work overseas more often again. ‘That’s where the work is, the most fascinating part of it, so it’s fun to go’.

Of relevance here is an observation by Findlay et al. (2015, 395) that an analysis of migration decisions inevitably involves a consideration of ‘linked lives’, as members of households with ‘multiple earners and complex labour market links’ engage in layered negotiations about possible relocations. Findlay et al. further note that migration decisions are not just a matter of timing in relation to life course transitions but also sequencing. They argue that ‘a change in sequencing fundamentally affects the meaning of a particular migration move’ (Ibid). While Findlay and his co-authors were concerned with migration, the entanglements described by my interlocutors suggest that similar temporal considerations also apply to a broader spectrum of work mobilities from brief trips to short sojourns to residential relocations of various durations. After all, the interaction between the timing, duration and sequencing of work mobilities does not occur at just one point in a person’s life. Instead, for mobile workers such as Michael, James, Christine or Tanya, it can be refashioned repeatedly over their life-careers.

Tanya’s career eventually involved an even greater number of repeated relocations and a variety of employment circumstances including long periods of work as a salaried employee for large engineering firms, then extended contracts as a specialist on projects sponsored respectively by a multilateral commission and an aid agency, as well as years of freelancing. These different forms of employment involved residential relocations between different regions in Canada as well as between Canada and Southeast Asia. Thus, for a time, Tanya maintained a base in a Southeast Asia city from which she travelled frequently to work as a freelancer on projects dispersed over various locales in the Global South as well as on occasional trips back to North America to visit family and friends. She eventually returned to Canada to take up the offer of a salaried position as the manager of an international division for a large engineering firm. But as a manager, the role left less time for on-site work and travel than she had expected, so after a couple of years she shifted employment again and embarked on a new five-year project contract. That commitment brought her back again to the same Southeast Asian urban base where she had lived earlier. Years later, as the term of that contract was due to expire, Tanya was beginning to think about planning for a new life course ‘opening’, a gradual retirement. Much as she had appreciated living in Southeast Asia, she knew that she didn’t want to retire in this region, not least because she wanted to be nearer to her son. She wanted to re-establish a home in North America and continue working and travelling, but at a reduced pace.

Tanya, who was American born, elected to re-settle in a city on the West Coast of the United States, a city that she had never lived in before. Her decision to move there reflected a careful analysis of factors such as the city’s reputation for progressive urban and environmental planning, the availability of good flight connections, an excellent stock of relatively affordable housing, and reasonable proximity to her son who had earlier settled elsewhere on the West Coast. By 2020, Tanya was enjoying her new home and garden, a developing network of local friendships and acquaintances as well as visits with her son. And before the pandemic hit⁵, she was also still travelling professionally to a variety of destinations, once again as a freelancer. But by this point the nature of her role as an internationally mobile specialist was changing in some important ways. By now her contributions often involved her in the role of an ‘expert’ evaluator or advisor rather than as a project head or team member. In this role, her work usually involved a combination of relatively short trips abroad and further analysis carried out at home.

Responding to restructured employment fields

In addition to key transitions in Tanya’s own life and career, including starting to gear down for an eventual retirement, the adjustment of her role in development projects also seemed to reflect broader structural shifts in the organisation of these types of endeavours. Thus, several of my more recent interlocutors who had worked in related fields contend that international development projects, whatever their source of funding, are increasingly likely to rely on the recruitment of professional staff locally, rather than importing them from western countries such as Canada. In a 2019 interview, Sidney, a senior engineer whose career had prominently featured projects outside Canada and a variety of work mobilities of different frequency and duration, argued that while Canadians were well known internationally for the quality of their expertise in hydro-electric development, the terms of their involvement in international projects were changing.

What’s happening is it’s less about sending somebody from Canada to Africa and more about building it in Africa, so I think the future will be that there will always be experts everywhere in the world, that may be centered in Canada or Australia or Africa, it doesn’t matter where but it’s going to be more and local staff in that country as opposed to how we do it. When I went to India [where early in his career, he had worked on site for three years] I went with 30 people from Canada, so that’s not going to happen, that kind of thing I think is over … I think the experts will still come from wherever the best place to get that expertise is, so that’ll still happen.

Similarly, James argued that the opportunities for young Canadians seeking to develop an international career in development work were now much reduced by comparison to his own entry into this sector during the 1970s. Donor agencies, such as the World Bank, increasingly gave the money directly to the executing agencies in the country in which the project was being developed rather than to consulting companies in countries such as Canada. Since there had, for many years, been a significant emphasis placed by these donor agencies on a transfer of knowledge, there was now much less need for NGO work or Canadian consultants. Nonetheless, James contended there was definitely still a role for western ‘experts’ in the field of evaluation and monitoring, which was ‘huge’.

Senior consultants, like Tanya, who have built long resumés attesting to their work in various capacities on diverse projects in many locales, regions and with different types of organisations, are more likely to have had the time to build an extensive international network of contacts and a reputation for valued expertise in certain specialisations. In short, since more people are likely to have worked with Tanya or to have heard of her work, it is not surprising to find her name coming up in searches for specialists to serve on international evaluation panels. So, here we have a transnational occupational sector that has been built on an expectation of work mobility that, in practice, often privileges senior or at least more experienced practitioners. The preference for experienced consultants in international development work is not, however, particularly new. After all, it took Michael years to build his resumé, first abroad as a volunteer and then in his company’s domestic projects, before he was regularly considered for international assignments. But this preference for seasoned ‘experts’ may have become even further entrenched more recently, at least for professionals based in western countries who are interested in pursuing opportunities to work internationally. It may not be especially easy for younger professionals to reconcile the demands of work mobility with family responsibilities, but neither is it that easy for them to enter this domain altogether.

The continuing but changing role of Tanya, as a consultant, also throws a broader spotlight on the ways in which other kinds of structural shifts in related fields, occurring at different levels, entangle with the pace and form of work mobilities as well as personal networks and attachments. Not long after Michael and his family moved away from Canada, there was a global slump in the resource market on which the development of the new regional group he was heading was premised. His company consequently decided to disband this division and return its employees to their original offices in various locales. Michael and his family, were, however, reluctant to return to Canada only a couple of years after they had experienced the major upheaval of a residential relocation. They enjoyed their new lifestyles, his wife had a very good post she didn’t want to leave – ‘she’d followed me all over the place, it was my turn to stay and support her’ – and one of his daughters wanted to complete her studies in a nearby university programme. So, Michael took retirement from his company and he and his family stayed put. For the next three years, he worked as an independent mobile consultant, travelling to various destinations in Asia and the Pacific. In addition, each summer, he and his wife made an extended return visit to Canada for five to six weeks. But the work visas on which Michael and his wife had depended were due to expire in the summer of 2019 and the family was planning on returning to Canada. Since Michael had made a point of staying in touch with former clients and associates, when he made it known that he would be coming back, he received a number of job offers, one of which he accepted. While Michael, now in his mid-60s, planned to continue working and travelling for some ongoing projects, he didn’t want it to be at the same ‘frenetic pace’.

A similar kind of structural shift in the nature of the work available in a particular region occurred in James’ life-career. When I spoke to James in 2019, he revealed that in 2007/2008, he had sold his partnership and resigned from the consulting firm that had originally occasioned his move to the province of Quebec. His departure reflected a waning of the international work available to him through this firm, a development prompted by a shift in Canadian government policy, which cut funding for the region on which James’ project work in this consultancy had come to focus. Almost immediately following his resignation, he received an offer from another firm to work as the manager of a new project abroad. This new firm was, however, located in Ontario rather than Quebec. This time, however, James didn’t move his home or his family, choosing instead to commute weekly between his work base and his home in Quebec, in addition to travelling outside Canada for multiple short trips over the course of the year. After three years, James had had enough of this demanding pattern of dual mobilities and he decided to set out on his own as a freelancer.

Both Michael and James had to respond to the unexpected impact of broad restructurings of the fields in which they were working. But in responding to these macro shifts, Michael and James had to bear in mind the implications of these transitions for their work plans but also for their most intimate relationships and domestic arrangements. The ensuing occupational choices of both men incorporated an insistence on respecting the preferences and circumstances of family members who had supported them on previous schedules of mobilities and ‘followed them all over the place’, to paraphrase Michael. But Michael and James’ abilities to make the kinds of accommodations that would allow them to reconcile work, family and mobility were significantly enabled by their extended resumés. Their professional reputations led to job offers when they needed them. Like Tanya, this previous experience also allowed both men to take up the option of working independently as freelancers at key points in their careers. Roland, another interlocutor who had embarked on freelance work relatively late in his career, noted that his ability to do so effectively, relied heavily on the professional reputation and large network of contacts that he had built up over years of working as a salaried consultant (Amit 2020, 170). It would be much harder to go out on your own, Roland conjectured, at a junior stage of your career (Ibid).

Conclusion

Over the course of a life-career, what are the possibilities for achieving a satisfying balance between the itineraries of mobile work and the accumulation of familial and personal commitments? The fields of development work in which my interlocutors were engaged encompassed mobilities varying from brief visits of a week or two, to sojourns ranging from several months to several years and finally residential relocations. This variety of mobilities reflected in part the multiplicity of roles that individuals might take on at different points in their career. They might serve respectively as a specialist team member advising on specific domains of a project, or as a project leader, expert evaluator and so on. In turn, they might also serve in different employment capacities at various points in their career: as a salaried worker, an administrative manager, corporate executive or as a freelancer. In principle, this range of roles, statuses and mobilities can provide professionals working in these fields with a greater ambit of modalities for engagement than their counterparts in other occupations or organisations where work might be associated primarily with a particular type of mobility.

Indeed, what is particularly striking about the job histories of my interlocutors is the diversity of mobilities with which they engaged at different phases in their careers and lives. These included residential relocations both within Canada and across its borders, inter-urban commuting, sojourns abroad of various durations, short work trips as well as periods of relative sedentarism. As Boström, Öhlander, and Pettersson (2018) noted in their study of Swedish medical professionals and Suter (2020) observed in her study of intra-corporate transfers between Europe and China, efforts can be made to time work mobilities so that these correspond with particular ‘openings’ in the life course. It is noteworthy that Tanya embarked on a highly mobile career when her son was grown up and that she subsequently made a major residential move at a late stage of her career to enable her to be geographically closer to him. Similarly, when James’ children had grown up, he considered ramping up the pace of his international travel again. And Michael undertook first one and then another major residential relocation when his daughters were of university age.

But the accounts of these interlocutors also underscore the impact of larger and smaller structural shifts in their occupational sectors. The inter-branch move that Michael made with his family was disrupted by the international collapse of a resource sector on which the plan of a new corporate division had depended. James’ partnership in a Quebec consulting firm was upended by shifts in Canadian government policy and funding for projects in his region of specialisation. Broader shifts in the way in which outside specialists may be deployed by donor agencies in the evaluation and monitoring of development projects have provided new roles for several of my interlocutors, including Tanya.

These changes didn’t, in and of themselves, precisely determine what kinds of mobilities these professionals undertook. Indeed, the histories of the life-careers I have described in this article illustrate both the significance of the structural changes that (re)shaped their work trajectories as well as the discretion these professionals sought to exercise over how they would respond to these structural modifications. For Tanya, the increased importance of the outside ‘expert’ proved useful in the implementation of a gradually attenuated pace of work travel in her decision to move back to North America. Michael chose not to return to Canada as his employer had arranged but instead undertook a new increased tempo of consultancy travel as a freelancer. And when government funding for development work in his region of expertise declined, James embarked on an entirely new circuit of double mobilities, including both inter-provincial commuting and project trips to a new location. Each of these professionals made a set of choices about how they would respond to these structural developments, choices that reflected appraisals of their respective domestic and personal commitments as well as of the career options available to them in particular periods of their lives. And this measure of discretion appears to have been enabled by the capability and willingness they demonstrated for moving between different types of employers (large corporations or organisations, small consulting companies, freelance work), projects (multi-year, short term, domestic or international) and roles (project leader or team member, evaluator, consulting specialist) at various points in their life-careers. The possibilities of moving between these different kinds of employment situations stand in contrast to the more limited channels available to the executives and professionals on whom Ranji Devadason’s study focused, ‘whose career paths and life choices are channelled, if not driven, by their organisations via routes and destinations that are often not of their choosing’ (2017, 2280). Similarly, as Michael and James noted, the options available to them and attendant flexibility were not equally available to many of their younger colleagues or associates.

To a certain extent the mobile life-careers cultivated by my interlocutors turn the presumption of youth, that usually presides in calculations of mobilities such as migration, on its head. The career histories recounted by participants in my own study seemed to suggest a trajectory of mobility that almost inverts this oft presumed demographic arc. It was not especially easy for young and still relatively inexperienced professionals to enter this domain of international work assignments. For those who did manage to gain a foothold, it could be difficult to negotiate the pacing of their work trips. It was more feasible for senior professionals to say no to assignments that would entail long separations from their families. And the range of mobility options available to more senior personnel increased with age before retirement. In part, this is because certain ‘openings’ in their personal lives – adult children leaving home, shifts in a spouse’s career etc. – provided them with more flexibility in terms of work mobility. But in part, this is because the corporations and agencies recruiting them often preferred to work with consultants who could boast a substantial record of experience on a wide array of projects. In this type of career trajectory, it might, therefore, not be so much the ‘young and footloose’ as the senior and well-established who are able to shape and thereby sustain their work mobility in satisfying ways over time.

In their research with French migrants moving to work in the London business and financial sectors on initially short-term sojourns, Ryan and Mulholland (2014) argued that deciding subsequently whether to stay or move on was not an either/or choice. My own research suggests that the question of choice in the fashioning of mobile careers remains ambiguous even for relatively privileged professionals. But this ambiguity arises as much from constraints on the latitude for choice as from the personal preferences of workers in various fields. Most of the young people admitted to Australia as temporary graduate workers and working holidaymakers will experience significant barriers if they try to convert their temporary stays into extended or permanent residence. In particular, Shanthi Robertson noted the categorical differences that can bear on the labour market experiences of these workers, including racialised, gendered and linguistic segmentation (2014, 1926). The advent of Brexit forced many French migrants in the UK to make a decision about staying or going more abruptly than they might have preferred (Reed-Danahay 2020). It will likely also make any future comings and goings more complicated or difficult. Many professionals who pursue engagement in occupational sectors featuring some measure of mobile work still face significant limits on their capacity to mould the form and pacing of their mobilities.

Choosing whether to travel for work and opting for one type of work mobility over another are, therefore, not simply matters of personal preference. Rather, it is in the complex and uncertain interplay between the organisation of occupational sectors, shifting patterns of work travel, biographical transitions, intimate commitments, differential credentials and personal discretion that mobile life-careers take form in all their temporal and structural particularities. It is also in that interplay that the question of choice with respect to mobile work becomes more substantive and less categorical. It is never simply a matter of choosing between a mobile or sedentary livelihood but of trying to win space for the mobilisation of a multiplicity of (im)mobilities in different chapters of the life course and career.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was made possible by two grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), an earlier Standard research grant [#410-2000-805] and a more recent Insight research grant [#435-2018-0447].

Notes

1 In the interests of confidentiality, I have used pseudonyms instead of the actual names of all the participants in both studies reported in this chapter. I have also deliberately omitted some biographical details where these might have identified the participants.

2 This study, which was entitled: ‘Itinerant Consultancy: An anthropological study of transnational travel, work and social location among mobile professionals’ was made possible by a SSHRC standard research grant. It was reviewed and granted an ethics certificate by the Concordia University Human Research Ethics Committee. Informed consent was provided either orally at the start of a remote interview or through a signed information sheet in a face-to-face interview.

3 This study is entitled: ‘Gearing Down: An anthropological study of changing mobility patterns among previously peripatetic professionals’, which is being conducted in collaboration with Noel Dyck and is made possible by a SSHRC Insight research grant. It was reviewed and granted an ethics certificate (#30009539) by the Concordia University Human Research Ethics Committee. Before participating in this project, participants were provided an information and consent form for their review. Consent for interviews conducted by Vered Amit was either provided in a return email confirmation and/or through signing and returning the consent form.

4 Follow up interviews have also been conducted with two professionals who participated in another of my earlier studies, entitled ‘Coming of Age as Dual Nationals: An anthropological study of belonging’, which was made possible by a SSHRC Insight research grant (#410-2009-1874). While this study was not specifically focused on mobile work, a number of the participants in the project were highly mobile professionals. These and two related interviews (i.e. through referral) were conducted by my assistant Mathieu Lamontagne-Cumiford. These interviews are not included in this essay.

5 With the exception of several email exchanges, the interviews on which this article primarily focuses were conducted before the pandemic became manifest. While my research has continued since and I expect to follow up with a number of my interlocutors, it is still too early, at this point in time, to adequately assess the long-term impact of the pandemic on this form of mobile work and on the career trajectories of my interlocutors.