Environmentalist in Business Class: An Analysis of Air Travel and Environmental Attitude

Abstract

The strong growth in air travel raises the question of environmental awareness among air travellers. This article focuses on the exclusion of serious environmental problems of international air travel from the air travellers’ environmental consciousness. It approaches this question, in particular, by exploring international work‐related air travel in two Danish knowledge organizations. The article identifies that the knowledge workers, in general, consider themselves as environmentally aware. However, there is no connection between their environmental attitude and their actual travel behaviour. The article shows that a number of other rationalities seem to affect the travel behaviour more strongly than environmental attitude. Subsequently by reviewing other studies, the article describes how the exclusion of air travel from the environmental consciousness is not only the case among knowledge workers but also seems to be a general problem in relation to flying in modern societies. In the discussion and conclusion, the article therefore focuses on the possibility of creating a stronger link between air travel behaviour and environmental attitude.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to Erik Jensen, Roskilde University, for valuable comments on this article.

Notes

1. Such various theories are the deficit model; rational choice theory; the theory of planned behaviour; norm activation theory; values‐beliefs‐norms theory; Triandis’ theory of interpersonal behaviour; social learning theory; social capital theory; diffusion of innovations; transtheoretical model; systems theory (Anable et al., 2006, p. 9).

2. Bauman introduced this term during a Ph.D. course held by Øvind Larsen at Copenhagen Business School in 2002.

3. The employees were asked to indicate, on a five‐point Likert scale, to what extent they can decide the frequency of their work‐related trips, ranging from ‘completely free choice’ to ‘no influence at all’. The tendency in the answers is that, in general, the employees have a determining influence on their work‐related travel. At Hewlett‐Packard, 32% of the employees expressed that it is ‘predominantly a free choice’, while 41% said that it is ‘partly a free choice’. Finally, 22% said that they ‘have little influence’ on the period of travels in relation to their work. At Aalborg University, 72% of the employees answered that the frequency of work‐related trips is either a ‘totally free choice’ or ‘predominantly a free choice’. Furthermore, 22% expressed that it is ‘partly a free choice’ and 6% said that they ‘have little influence’.