wellman@chass.utoronto.ca:
These are managers, professionals and technicians who spend a good deal of time traveling, either between organizational offices, or to other organizations or conferences. Modally, 2-4 days per week. They live by computer-supported and 800-number contact back to their home base. If you get into business lounges, you can see them pounding their laptops, checking their emails, and talking via 800 numbers to their colleagues elsewhere. They spend a lot of time in corporate hotels (e.g., the misnamed Holiday Inn), bars, medium-priced restaurants, and airport lounges.
Has anyone seriously studied such folks?
Two thoughts: 1) To the extent that this is pretty much standard operating procedure for large accounting and "consultancy" (management, strategic, process, IT, engineering etc) firms today, I would be surprised if studies hadn't been done on specific aspects of this aspect of the professions either in sociology of labour/work or, especially, by academics in business school contexts. 2) Again in terms of the nature of these professions themselves -- but not the specific microstructures of interaction and materiality that sustain the geographic nature of how these professions operate -- Saskia Sassen comes to mind, and I suppose that she would cite most of the more grounded studies that had been done. From what I have read, which isn't much, that area of research looks at the presence of Big-5 accounting firms, of global consulting firms, etc as an indicator of "global city"-ness, on which see specifically <http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/in_resea.html>. (The latter work also lumps lawyers in with accountants and consultants, which I think makes sense from the standpoint of the world-city, but less from the standpoint of geographic mobility. To the extent that advertising firms operate on a global network/local affiliate relationship, they may stand somewhere in between these two poles.)
What is their community, with work colleagues and friends -- and household members?
Might be worth spending a bit of time on thevault.com for flavour. I think that in the U.S.-Europe context there are magazines explicitly geared towards people in these professions; they'd have had the occasional feature article addressing these issues very specifically. My experience is that very large proportions of the travel apparatus -- airflight, hotels, car rentals, etc -- is specifically geared toward this customer base precisely because it is both relatively large and relatively inelastic as a customer group. It would be interesting to know the extent to which that targetting affects the shape of the travel apparatus at large, and what are the implications of that ... cheers Bram