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ABSTRACT
International business travellers are sometimes described as a cosmopolitan elite, with a strong international orientation but a low preference for local involvement and local obligations. This article uses Swedish survey data to investigate these claims, by comparing the orientations of persons who frequently travel abroad at work with the orientations of other workers. Frequent international travellers generally have more cosmopolitan orientations than others, but the local ties are not significantly weaker among frequent travellers than among occasional travellers or non-travellers. In some respects, notably social networks and associational activities, international travellers tend in fact to be more involved than non-travellers in all the four examined spheres – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Concerns among social theorists that highly mobile, locally disconnected elites are undermining social cohesion may therefore be exaggerated. Theoretically, the study suggests that localism and cosmopolitanism should not be treated as necessarily opposite and mutually exclusive phenomena, but that mobility in various forms may be used to combine local and cosmopolitan resources.
Acknowledgements
The research presented here was financed by FAS, the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research. The author gratefully acknowledges challenging and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this text from seminar participants and colleagues at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, and at the Swedish Sociological Association conference in Lund in 2007.