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.