How to Cope with Mobility Expectations in Academia? Individual Travel Strategies of Tenured Academics at Ghent University, Flanders

There seems to be a consensus that the production and transfer of knowledge is inextricably linked to different forms of international mobilities. As prime producers and transferors of knowledge, academics are obviously no exception to this rule, while their ‘compulsion' to proximity/mobility seems to be further propelled by institutional discourses regarding the alleged virtues of 'internationalization'. While it is clear that the ensuing 'mobility expectations' are often hard to balance with family and work obligations at the individual level, the existing business travel literature has paid scant attention to the form and function of academics' mobilities in light of their personal characteristics. In an effort to do so, this paper analyzes a recent dataset that contains data on academic travel over a two-year period (2009-2010). The dataset brings together information on both international travel behavior and a host of individual characteristics (age, gender, position) of academics (N=4000) at Ghent University in Flanders. The results show that personal characteristics and the career stage of academics play a considerable role in selecting mobility strategies. Especially young, female academics with children have difficulties coping with the compulsion to mobility, which explains the major gender inequalities amongst lecturers and professors. These results are further contextualized by complementing them with in-depth interviews of frequent traveling academics (N=25), which are used to identify distinct mobility strategies and discuss the rationale behind them