The executive: mobility as a normalized practice

James Faulconbridge

Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK

Email: j.faulconbridge@lancaster.ac.uk

Chapter forthcoming in the Handbook of Mobilities (Routledge)

Introduction

The remit of this chapter is to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing how, for the executive,

mobility has become a normalized way of doing business. Specifically, the chapter explains the

normalization of executive aeromobility by drawing on work on social theories of practice (Reckwitz,

2002; Schatzki, 1996; Shove, 2003; Shove and Pantzar, 2005). The aim is to reveal the complex

interdependencies that both explain the year-on-year growth in executive aeromobility and the

difficulties executives face when trying to limit their mobility in the context of financial (recession,

spiraling travel costs), social (stress, work-life balance) and environmental (global warming, peak oil)

pressures.

The rise and explanation of executive mobility

Despite speculation that the information communications technology revolution might reduce the need

for executive mobility, there is widespread evidence that mobility is now more firmly institutionalized as

a business practice than before the arrival of email and videoconferencing. For example, The Barclaycard

Business Travel Survey which has been running since the mid 1990s has charted an almost continuous

year on year increase in the average number of miles travelled by the executives surveyed. By 2006 a 32

percent increase had occurred compared with 1996, where the executives surveyed were each travelling

on average over 600 miles per month (Barclaycard, 2006). Indeed, over 50 percent of those surveyed in

2008 said that despite the effects of the global recession, and growing concerns about the

environmental impact of business travel, they expected to travel more in 2009 than in previous years.

Other surveys, such as the American Express Survey of Business Travel Management Practices and the

PrivateFly Travel Survey confirm such trends and corroborate the findings of academic research which

suggest that the ‘mobile lives’ (Elliott and Urry, 2010) of executives are increasingly taken for granted.

Studies contributing to the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences explain the continued growth of

executive mobility through reference to the now well-documented interdependence between corporeal

and virtual forms of mobility (Urry, 2007); i.e., the simultaneous reliance on travel, email, telephone and

videoconference to conduct business (Faulconbridge et al., 2009; Haynes, 2010). The role of corporeal

hyper-mobility has predominantly been explained through reference to various ‘compulsions of

proximity’ associated with the doing of business (Boden and Molotch, 1994; Millar and Salt, 2008; Urry,

2003). Building on the typology of Davidson and Cope (2003), three inter-related compulsions of

proximity can be identified. First, mobility is associated with what might be described as ‘transactional’

obligations. Such obligations involve an individual fulfilling a functional need, such as attendance at a

particular place to repair a piece of machinery or install computer software. Second, mobility in

particular to attend meetings is associated with fulfilling ‘socio-economic’ obligations to other human

beings, whether they are colleagues, clients or suppliers. Socio-economic obligations relate to

sociologies of trust and intimacy with compulsions stemming from the association between embodied

encounters, seeing the whites of one-another’s eyes, and the development of strong ties through which

effective economic relationships can be built and profits generated. The third category in Davidson and

Cope’s (2003) typology – mobility to attend exhibitions, trade fairs and conferences – draws attention to

the fact that the division sketched above between transactional and socio-economic obligations is not

rigid. For example, participating in a trade show can both allow a transactional need to be fulfilled – a

display can be interacted with, learned from and the insights gained used to inform future work (see

Faulconbridge, 2010) – whilst socio-economic compulsions might also be fulfilled – a new client is met

and a relationship developed that leads to future contracts (see Power and Jansson, 2008).

It would be tempting to read-off from analyses of compulsions an explanation of executive hyper-

mobility that solely emphasizes the functionality of mobility. After all, both transactional and socio-

economic compulsions are ultimately tied to profit generation and the facilitation of business

exchanges. However, taking such an approach has its limitations. It ignores the complex array of

cultures, logics and technological systems of provision that have come together to make mobility a

taken for granted way of doing business. Without these coming togethers the kinds of productive

activities associated with compulsions would not be possible and mobility would not have become an

ingrained business practice. With this assertion in mind, the rest of the chapter considers the

implications for understandings of contemporary executive mobility of beginning not only with

questions about what mobility allows, but also with more fundamental questions about how mobility

has emerged as a normalized socio-technical business system. The theoretical framing provided by work

on social theories of practice is used to develop this argument.

A social practice interpretation of executive mobility

Social theories of practice have become an increasingly popular way of examining taken for granted

forms of consumption and everyday activity. Practices are defined as a ‘temporally unfolding and

spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings. Examples are cooking practices, voting practices,

industrial practices, recreational practices, and correctional practices’ (Schatzki, 1996: 89). Three core

elements makeup any practice:

Meaning: practices are associated with and driven by particular mental maps, emotions,

and understandings of legitimate ways of being (Reckwitz, 2002).

Competency: practices become widespread when, first, knowledge of how to complete the

required actions associated with a task (Reckwitz, 2002) and, second, knowledge of how to

engage in the practice in a way that others consider legitimate (Shove and Pantzar, 2007) is

shared by many individuals.

Materials: the availability of particular objects, knowledge about how to use them (Shove

and Pantzar, 2005), and the intimate tying of objects to meanings (e.g., the car to

convenience and comfort – see Warde, 2005) is central to the institutionalisation of a

practice as a way of being/doing.

Here I want to suggest that by the early 2000s, because of the ‘hanging together’ of a range of

meanings, competencies and materials, and not just because of what it functionally enables, executive

mobility had become a taken for granted practice - i.e., a routinized way of doing business. To develop

such a line of analysis, I begin by sketching out the trajectory of change in one practice of executive

mobility – aeromobility – and then consider what a practice informed interpretation of this trajectory

reveals about the causes of contemporary normalized executive aeromobility. I choose aeromobility for

two main reasons. First, aeromobility is perhaps the most studied form of executive mobility (see Adey

et al., 2007; Bowen, 2010; Cwerner, 2009; Derruder et al., 2011) and the existing literature provides a

useful starting point for developing an interpretation of its normalization as a way of doing business.

Second, aeromobility is a practice that has received most attention both in terms of its detrimental

social impacts on executives (Espino et al., 2002; Gustafson, 2006) and its related environmental impacts

in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (Cohen, 2010). Any new insights that a practice perspective can

provide into the normalization of aeromobility will, thus, be potentially useful as part of attempts to

reconfigure mobility systems so as to minimize their harmful effects.

International aeromobility: the birth and growth of a normalised practice

As has been previously documented (see Beaverstock and Faulconbridge, 2010), there is a surprisingly

limited supply of data about business travel. The UK International Passenger Survey (IPS) is thus used

here to chart the growth in executive aeromobility to/from the UK between 1977 and 2010 because it is

one of the few sources of data allowing comparisons of volumes of travel over time. The limitation of

using this dataset is, however that it does not provide any basis for comparing the UK with other

countries. Nonetheless, the trends revealed by the data do appear to correspond with others’ analyses

of different national contexts (see for example the similar trends reported by amongst others Bowen,

2010; Lassen, 2006) giving some indication that the data is representative of broader trajectories of

growth in executive aeromobility.

Figure 1 reveals that that there has been significant absolute growth in aeromobility since 1977, but that

this growth has been uneven over time, being most dramatic between 1990 and 2007. Post 2007 the

global recession led to a marked decline in mobility, confirming at the most fundamental level the now

intimate relationship between travel and revenue generating business activities. Below I sketch out the

developments leading up to 1977, the earliest year IPS data was available for at the time of writing, and

since 1977 that explain the growth detailed in Figure 1 and the associated gradual normalization of

aeromobility as a way of doing business.

[Insert Figure 1]

Foundations: circa 1960-1980

To understand contemporary executive aeromobility, it is necessary to begin any story at the point of

the birth of the commercial aviation industry itself. Bowen (2010) offers a rich analysis which reveals a

number of important points in this regard. The late 1950s heralded a major shift in aeromobilities,

primarily because of the invention of the jet engine, the impact of which was twofold. First, the jet

engine accelerated air travel, allowing speeds of around 500 miles per hour compared with 300 miles

per hour in propeller aircraft. Second, it made long haul travel more feasible and less unpleasant

because of the range and enhanced acoustics of the jet. Consequently, the 1960s and early 1970s saw

the emergence of many of the components of the technical systems that now permit executive

aeromobility. Table 1 summarizes a number of the other key developments in this period.

[insert Table1 here]

The work of the airlines in making executive aeromobility a way of doing business was not, however,

simply to provide the required technological capabilities. The airlines also set about actively constructing

cultures of executive aeromobility. Two discrete approaches to creating such cultures can be noted –

both of which are documented by Bowen (2010: 178-179) through reference to the work of Hudson

(1972). First, airlines attempted to shift executives from car, rail and other modes of travel to air. This

involved using publicity materials to make an economic case for aeromobility as opposed to other forms

of mobility with the time savings offered by air travel being focused on intensely. Second, airlines

attempted to distinguish business travel from leisure travel. Exemplifying such attempts, Hudson (1972:

126) documents how a British Overseas Airways Corporation advert sought to generate such

distinctiveness by arguing that “If you want a man to do a first-class job, give him a first-class ticket”.

This logic was supported in the advert by a description of the physical, psychological and ultimately

economic benefits accrued from not travelling in economy class, thus generating an image of the

successful executive being the aeromobile executive who is productive because of what the luxury and

experience of travelling (in first or business class) allows them to achieve. Note the gendered nature of

the executive in this establishment phase; something that has begun to change but arguable still inflects

many of the images and logics tied to executive mobility (Gustafson, 2006; Presser and Hermsen, 1996).

In many ways, the initial strategies of the airlines to lure executives into the skies could be said to be

successful. Between 1960 and 1970s the airlines saw the largest growth in passenger miles travelled

ever witnessed with executives playing a significant role in this growth (Bowen, 2010: 43). Yet, the

executive market would be inherently limited by the relatively small number of corporations that

operated in spatially distributed markets in the 1960s and early 1970s. Put simply, aeromobility is only

important if companies are operating in multiple places separated by significant metric distance. In the

UK context and many parts of Europe this meant, in particular, that the number of transnational

corporations (TNCs) was a key determinant of executive mobility volumes, whilst in the US the larger

size of the union meant the number of corporations with operations stretched across the entire country

mattered. In the rest of the paper, in line with the use so far of UK data on changes in volumes of

executive aeromobility, it is the relationship between the activities of TNCs and UK executive

aeromobility that is focused upon.

The making of a market: circa 1980-2000

Figure 2 confirms that the surge in the number of and in the intensity of the activities of TNCs –

measured using the proxy of foreign direct investment into/from the UK - correlates with growth in

executive mobility in the UK. At one level, this relationship might be explained by the airlines’ strategies

outlined above and the capabilities that aeromobility provided corporations seeking to operate across

space. However, when the wider economic context of the late 1970s and the 1980s in particular is

examined, developments outside of the sphere of influence of the airline industry also become

obviously important in explaining the establishment of aeromobility as a way of doing business. These

developments act as elements in the co-evolution of various cultural, economic and technical systems

that together generated both growth in the number of TNCs and the normalization of executive

mobility.

[Insert Figure 2]

Element 1: new economic discourses and practices

The ideological discourse of neoliberalism that has pervaded political-economic circles since the late

1970s especially has been particularly influential in the production of executive mobility systems. Of

most relevance here are liberalization initiatives such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

(GATT). For instance, the Tokyo Round of negotiations, concluding in November 1979, negotiated the

biggest single set of trade barrier reductions ever achieved by the GATT – worth US$300 billion in 1980.

This opened the way for significant rises in the number of TNCs in the 1980s with subsequent rounds of

negotiations, and the expansion in the 1990s to include services through the General Agreement on

Trade in Services (GATS), underpinning the continual growth in foreign direct investment through the

period between 1980 and 2007.

But it was not just the functional effect of roll-back neoliberalism and initiatives such as the GATT and

GATS that was important for normalizing executive aeromobility. It was also the discourses that

accompanied such initiatives. Larner (2000) outlines how neoliberal projects are as much concerned

with gaining ideological hegemony as they are with changing particular policies. This hegemony leads to

the logics of neoliberalism pervading the consciousness of business leaders and ultimately shaping

economic logics and decision making. For Larner (2000), this is a form of Foucauldian governmentality

which encourages executives to conform to the norms of neoliberal markets. One particularly significant

governmental effect has been to instill into the consciousness of executives the need to continually

seek-out opportunities to cut costs (for example by relocating low skilled activities to developing

countries) and grow revenues (for example by entering new markets). Such financialized logics

encourage globalization and executive hyper-mobility as individual workers are charged with managing

more and more spatially dispersed operations, requiring their constant mobility between subsidiaries;

what Wickham and Vecchi (2009) call ‘nomadism’.

The emergence of particular socio-economic logics relating to business practice as a result of neoliberal

reforms and their effects on the spatiality of the operations of firms is, therefore, I claim an important

component in explanations of the growth in aeromobility in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and its

ultimate normalization as a business practice. However, this is not the only element in the story. The

development of additional systems of provision is also important.

Element 2: new systems of provision facilitating and respond to new economic practices

As Dicken (2011) notes, the 1990s and 2000s were characterized by one of the most significant

technological advances of the 20th century: the emergence and boom of the internet. And as already

noted, the explosion of corporeal mobility can only be explained if its relationship to virtual – principally

internet enabled - mobility is considered. Specifically, rather than being a way of reducing mobility,

virtual communications (email, video conference, document sharing etc.) should be seen, to use the

words of Haynes (2010), as ‘mobility allies’ with corporeal business travel. The most notable effect of

this allegiance is that the internet revolution has actually generated new needs for executive mobility.

The internet allows firms: to market their goods and services internationally; and to more closely control

and coordinate the activities of spatially dispersed subsidiaries. Both of these developments enabled

and encouraged more firms to engage in international business, something which in turn ultimately led

to growth in demand for aeromobility, in the first instance so as to fulfill the kinds of compulsions of

proximity outlined earlier in the chapter.

Moreover, other technological developments in the 1990s also helped institutionalize business travel

because of the new affordances they offered to the mobile executive. For example, the laptop and

batteries that provide several hours of work time helped ensure that mobility meant working on the

move and not losing productive time in transit (Holley et al., 2008). In addition, the mainstreaming of

mobile telephone communications in the 1990s, progressing into the 2000s with the development of the

smartphone, is a further example of how communication technologies that might reduce the need for

face-to-face interaction have actually driven the growth in business travel. Not only do such devices

offer the ability to coordinate meetings whilst on the move (cf., Licoppe, 2004), they also allow

executives to stay in touch with the office via voice calls and email, thus minimizing the chance that

travelling results in missed business opportunities or the slowing down of ‘fast’ capitalist activities

(Middleton, 2008).

In addition to communications technologies revolutions, changes within the airline industry systems of

provision in the 1980s and 1990s were also part of the co-evolutionary process that led to executive

aeromobility becoming a normalized practice. Increased capacity on existing routes and expansion in the

number of city pairs served from hub airports made aeromobility more convenient. Moreover, reflecting

the growing need of executives to travel to ever more dispersed subsidiaries, the formation of a series

of airline alliances made inter-continental multi-leg travel smoother (Fan et al., 2001). There are now

well over 500 formal alliances between airlines. The most significant are those now claim to offer

globally integrated coverage and access to virtually any airport worldwide through a partner carrier. For

example, Star Alliance, major members including Air Canada, British Midland International, Continental,

Lufthansa, and Thai International, formed in 1997 and serves 900 destinations. At the same time, a new

breed of low-cost carrier transformed short-haul aeromobility in the late 1990s, leading to falling prices

and the development of ever greater numbers of routes to key business destinations (Mason, 2000).

A third element in the system of provision that has been vital in the co-evolution of the executive

aeromobility system is the emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of an array of industries dedicated to

making executive mobility as hassle free as possible (see Table 2). The birth of each industry further

ensured executive aeromobility was feasible and economically productive, thus helping expedite its

normalization.

[insert Table 2]

Aeromobility as a way of being and doing business: a practice perspective

The main contention here is that the institutionalization of executive aeromobility as a way of business

life is a result of the co-evolutions outlined above in aeromobility technologies, neoliberal logics, the

internet and mobile communication technologies, as well as in the allied services outlined in Table 2. To

interpret the implications of such developments, Table 3 deploys the practice theory terminology

outlined earlier in the chapter to explain how between 1960 and 2000 the core elements of meaning,

competency and materials associated with executive aeromobility came to hang together to generate a

normalized practice. Each of the core elements of the practice, which result from one of the

developments charted above, on their own are not capable of generating the normalized state of

executive aeromobility that exists in the early 21st century. But together the various elements have

combined to enable mobility performances that generate an institutionalized, robust and apparently

indispensable way of doing business.

[insert Table 3]

One of the most important contentions of work on social practice is that once normalized, any practice

such as executive aeromobility becomes so taken-for-granted that decisions are not rationally made

about whether to and how to engage in the practice. Rather, the practice becomes part of what

Bourdieu describes as the doxic realm – an unconscious way of being and doing. Hence the implication

of conceptualizing executive aeromobility, or any other executive mobility associated with the doing of

business (e.g., travelling sales people, train travel), as a routinized and taken for granted practice is to

challenge the idea that ‘compulsions of proximity’ (Boden and Molotch, 1994) or the pleasure,

experiences and perks of travel (Lassen, 2006) can alone explain hyper-mobility. Also important are

particular meanings and logics that render mobility the ‘right’ way of doing business, in-line with popular

expectations and thus a tacitly routinized and embedded way of doing business. Hence there are

compulsions of mobility as much as there are compulsions of proximity. It is not enough to think about

what mobility allows when explaining its normalization. It is also necessary to think about what mobility

means, the technologies that make mobility possible, and how together such influences lead to the

construction and sustaining of a taken for granted business practice. This does not mean that executives

and their employers do not reap economic rewards from the work achieved thanks to mobility. But it

does means that the economic value added is only one of the meanings of mobility, and not necessarily

more significant in generating compulsions of mobility than the other meanings and logics – such as the

mobile executive as the successful executive - that lead executives to unquestionably view mobility,

rather than virtual interaction or immobility and localized activities, as the way to do business. The

practice perspective also does not deny that the executive might experience forms of pleasure, benefit

from perks such as visiting friends, or enjoy memorable experiences during travel. But, again, it does

suggest that such factors need to be viewed as one constituent of wider assemblage that includes

competencies (the ability to do mobility with minimal economic cost) and associated materials (airline

networks and mobile work/communication tools) without which the performance of the normalized

social practice that is executive (aero)mobility would not occur.

Conclusions

This chapter has sought to explore what a practice perspective can do to develop understanding of the

normalization of executive mobility. Using the case of aeromobility, an analysis has been developed that

reveals the complex ‘hanging togethers’ that result in executive aeromobility being normal and a central

part of the doing of business in the 21st century. In particular, the discussion reveals that normalized

aeromobility results from not simply functional need, but also particular meanings and systems of

provision that help to render aeromobility practice as taken for granted. This suggests that the future of

aeromobility and executive mobility practices more generally is likely to be determined by a number of

interrelated variables associated with the elements that make-up mobility practices. For instance, in the

context of climate change and peak oil and associated attempts to reduce absolute volumes of mobility,

it is likely to be not strategies that simply overcome the functional need for mobility that have most

impact on mobility practices, but strategies that also change one or more of the elements of executive

mobility practice, for instance the meanings attached to mobility. For example, and most radically,

future crises such as oil shortages that lead to many of the material elements (and aeroplanes

especially) central to executive mobility practices becoming unavailable cold lead to transitions away

from current hyper-mobility. Or, alternatively and less radically, the practice of executive mobility could

be rendered extinct by the creation of meanings, competencies and systems of provision that lead to

mobility substitutes such as videoconferencing becoming the ‘new’ normalized way of doing business.

Or put another way, a practice perspective suggests that virtual mobility via videoconference has yet to

become a taken for granted practice because shared meanings, competencies and materials are absent

and prevent its normalization as a way of doing business.

The approach developed here is valuable, then, because it takes the first steps towards a new way of

thinking about the causes and management of executive mobility. But, a practice-informed analysis does

also generate many new questions. For example, all practices are spatially and temporally situated.

Consequently, the relevance of the UK-biased analysis developed here in different national contexts is

unclear. Meanings, competencies or materials may be replicated or may be different between situated

communities of executives. Further analysis is thus needed to understand how widely the practice of

executive mobility described here has diffused and how the practice may vary between situated

contexts. There are also important questions about ways of changing practices that have only been

touched upon here. For example, how work on transitions management in socio-technical systems (e.g.,

Geels, 2010) can be used to further understand the rise and potential future decline (naturally or as a

result of disruptive interventions) of executive mobility is an obvious line of analysis that could

complement the discussion here. As such, the chapter is only a starting point for the development of a

practice perspective on executive mobility.

Acknowledgements

The ideas developed in this chapter emerged as part of research funded by the EPSRC under the

auspices of a Research Councils UK Energy Programme project, grant EP/J00460X/1

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Table 1. Key developments in the airline industry in the 1960s and 1970s that provided the

technological advances needed for executive aeromobility.

Year Development

1968

Boeing 737 makes first commercial flight – the ‘work horse’ of the skies because of

how it makes short/medium-haul air travel affordable

1965 Jumbo Jet commissioned (first commercial flight in 1970). The piece of technology

that made long-haul air travel affordable.

1976 Concorde makes first commercial flight. For business travelers leaving London in the

morning and arriving in New York at the start of the business day exemplifies the

benefit of this innovation.

1978 First business class service offered by Pan AM – with all other major airlines

introducing such services soon after. The start of the provision of services that

enhance and enable executive mobility.

Source: Bowen (2010)

Table 2. The development of key allied executive aeromobility industries and their role in the

normalization of aeromobility.

Industry Role

International airport and business hotel chains

Provision of meeting and work spaces for mobile

executives

Corporate travel management companies and in-

house travel management departments

Translating an executive’s list of destinations into a

series of flight codes and hotel bookings that

minimize travel time and maximize work time

Executive intelligence services Magazines/websites (e.g., Business Traveller) and

guides (e.g., The survivors guide to business travel

(Collis, 2000). Providing executives with the

competency to effectively manage their mobility

and minimize personal (stress, work-life balance)

and corporate costs (expense, travel time)

Table 3. The core components that ‘hang together’ to render executive aeromobility a normalized

practice of doing business

Element of

practice

Factors generating executive

aeromobility as practice

Contribution to the compulsion of

aeromobility

Meaning

Airlines: defining the economic rationality

and the status of aeromobility

Neoliberalism: the need to seek-out new

markets

Mobility markers: corporate discourses

about the aeromobile executive as

successful, ripe for promotion and a

profit generator

Air is the right way for executives to travel

Aeromobility becomes essential to fulfill

new cultures of corporate

internationalization

Demonstrating aeromobility (e.g., days on

the road; elite status on frequent flyer

programmes) is essential for career success;

Clients expect executives providing goods

and services to be mobile and visit them in-

situ

Competency

Knowledge about how to become and

minimize the costs of aeromobility gained

from:

Acceptable ways of being mobile develop,

with common ways of acting and using

systems of provision being associated with

legitimate (cost effective, culturally

normalized) aeromobility practice

Colleagues in the workplace

Publications that provide intelligence

Employers - training schemes and in-

house travel support departments

Materials

Airlines: providing executive aeromobility

infrastructures (from the business class

cabin to the executive lounge and

geographically expansive network

coverage)

Communication technologies: allies

allowing the coordination of mobility and

spatially dispersed business

Aeromobility made possible and

economically viable with materials designed

to produce/meet particular logics of

executive travel

Executives made efficient and negative

economic impacts (e.g., lack of coordination

of subsidiaries; working time lost on the

move) overcome

Figure 1. Volumes of executive aeromobility in the UK, 1977-2010

Source: International Passenger Survey data available at

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/tsdataset.asp?vlnk=683

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

7000

8000

19

77

19

80

19

83

19

86

19

89

19

92

19

95

19

98

20

01

20

04

20

07

20

10

Nu

mb

er

of

visi

ts

Year

UK Residents overseas visits by air for business

Visits to the UK by air for business

Figure 2. The relationship between the globalization of economic activity, measured as levels of FDI,

and executive aeromobility in the UK

Sources: Visits to/from the UK by air - International Passenger Survey data available at

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/tsdataset.asp?vlnk=683 ; Inward/outward FDI – UNCTAD data

available at http://unctadstat.unctad.org/

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

1980 1990 2000 2007 2010

Pe

rce

nta

ge c

han

ge in

FD

I

Pe

rce

nta

ge c

han

ge f

rom

19

80

in a

ero

mo

bili

ty (

nu

mb

er

of

visi

ts)

Year

UK Residents overseas visits by air for business

Visits to the UK by air for business

Inward FDI to UK

Outward FDI from UK