Business travel has become indispensable to the global economy, not only due to its necessity in the maintaining of corporate networks, but also because of the associated economies that cater to the daily requirements of the business traveller. Underlying these developments are concerns over the environmental impact of increasing air travel, which are likely to generate new challenges for the future of business travel. From a team of international experts comes this analysis of the role, nature and effects of modern business travel. Issues addressed include the relationships between airlines and business travellers, the role of mobility in business, and the opportunities and challenges created by mobile workforces. The study combines theoretical advances with comprehensive analysis, and will provoke debate across the social sciences on the nature, organization and space of work in the twenty-first century.

Executive search, headhunting, is now one of the archetypal new knowledge intensive professional services, as well as a labor market intermediary bound up with globalization. In this book, the authors examine the key actors in the process of executive search globalization - leading global firms - and offer an interpretation of the forces producing the contemporary organizational strategies of global executive search. The Globalization of Executive Search documents the forms of institutional work that have legitimated the role of executive in elite labor markets and created demand for the services of global firms; this exposes not only the changing geographies of executive search, but also how executive search has established itself as a new knowledge intensive professional service. The authors reveal how the globalization of executive search is exemplary of the processes by which a range of new knowledge intensive professional services have come to be globally recognized, approaching the heart of contemporary capitalism.

In common with geographical inquiry more generally, questions of power have long been fundamental to research in economic geography. For instance, investigations into the fundamentally uneven nature of economic development point to the enduring power asymmetries between different places and actors within the global space economy (see Storper and Walker, 1989). Meanwhile, the extensive literature on world and global cities has identified certain cities as particularly powerful actors in choreographing the transnational flows of knowledge, people and capital that characterise the contemporary global economy (Beaverstock et al 2000; Sassen, 2001). However, whilst questions of power are implicitly central to these literatures, power has only rarely been placed centre stage. This oversight has started to be addressed through an explicit focus on power by authors such as John Allen (2003) and in work beyond geography such as Stewart Clegg's (1989) research in Management Studies. These developments have stimulated a more careful consideration of power relations by economic geographers over recent years. Indeed, this renewed and explicit focus on questions of power is particularly evident in work that develops relational and production network approaches to understanding uneven economic development (see Yeung, 2005; Henderson et al 2002 respectively). Inspired by this resurgence of explicit considerations of power within economic geography, the papers in this Special Issue stem from two sessions organised at the 2006 RGS-IBG Annual Conference in London. The aim of these sessions was to use detailed empirical research from a range of geographic and economic contexts to develop understandings of power and the relationship between organisations, power, space and place. Echoing this focus, in this Introduction we consider how understandings of power within economic geography, particularly from a relational perspective, have been developed to date. We then consider the questions this raises for research into the organizational geographies of power in the future. We focus on work in relational economic geography, including recent work on global production networks because, as we discuss in more detail below, these literatures have been central to the development of the theoretical foundations that facilitate more sophisticated analyses of power in economic organisations from a geographical perspective. We develop our arguments over four further sections. First, we consider the central insights developed by recent theorisations of power within geography and the social sciences as they relate to our focus on organisations. Second, we explore how these analyses have been developed within relational economic geography. Third, we provide an example of how these analyses have been advanced by focusing on economic geographical research into processes of neoliberalisation. Finally, we reflect on the consequences of this development for economic geographers and other researchers interested in the intersections between organisations, power, space and place.

Through a historical case study of the internationalization of large English law firms in Italy, this paper uses Scott's three pillars approach (2005) to look at how local institutions constrain and mediate the strategies and practices of professional services firms (PSFs). In doing so, it corrects the economic bias in the growing body of literature on the internationalization of PSFs by stressing how local regulations, norms and cultural frameworks affect the reproduction of home country practices, such as the one firm model pursued by large English law firms, in host-country jurisdictions. The paper also extends existing work on institutional duality (Kostova, 1999, Kostova and Roth, 2002) by developing a fine grained, micro level analysis which emphasizes the connections between institutions and practices. This is crucial, we contend, since the difficulties encountered by PSFs (and multinationals more generally) in their internationalization do not result from collisions between home- and host-country institutional structures per se, but between the diverse practices generated by distant institutional environments.

Relational economic geographies highlight the importance of focussing upon the multiple embedded actors influencing transnational economic activities. This paper incorporates but also moves beyond existing discussions of regulatory embeddedness and embeddedness in nationally-specific consumer markets and, using the case study of transnational law firms, begins to develop a more subtle understanding of the way the influence of the national varieties of capitalism and the institutional legacies associated with them embed workers and create national peculiar work methods and practices. The paper argues that, for law firms, literatures exploring the national systems of the professions, when coupled to understanding gleaned from studies of the varieties of capitalism, can be used to understand the influences upon the behaviours and norms of workers. When also connected to understanding of the peculiarities of management in professional firms this helps explain the approaches to globalization and governance used by transnational law firms. Using empirical data collected through interviews, the paper develops a typology of the different strategies used in different institutional contexts. It also shows that globalization has led to changing national systems, something which means the governance approaches used by transnational law firms vary over space and time.

International business travel has always been an important labour process in the accumulation of capital for the firm. It is surprising, therefore, that relatively little time has been devoted to the study of business travel, both as a facet of contemporary mobility and as an economic practice. In this paper we review how existing literatures provide insights that can be used to understand the role of business travel as international labour mobility in the contemporary professional service economy. In doing so, we reach the conclusion that there seems to be at least two significant voids preventing a more sophisticated understanding from emerging. First, we suggest that international business travel needs to be studied not in isolation but instead as one component in a wider ecology of mobility that 'produces' the global firm. Second, we argue that it is important to know more about the time-space dynamics of international business travel in terms of how spatial relations are produced and reproduced by different forms and geographies of travel. We make these arguments and explore their implications using data collected through interviews in advertising, architecture and legal professional service firms. We conclude by identifying a research agenda designed to allow a better understanding of business travel to emerge in corporate and mobility discourses.

Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neoinstitutional theory-inspired analysis of the case of English law firms and their impacts on institutional change in Germany. The article shows that the shaping of the direction of institutional change by English legal TNCs was a product of conjunctural moments in which local institutional instability combined with the presence, resources and strategies of the TNCs to redirect the path of institutional evolution. This draws attention to the need to go beyond the TNC and its resources and to consider the way a diverse array of local actors and their generating of instability in existing institutional structures influence the ability of TNCs to become involved in processes of institutional change in particular, conjunctural moments in time.

Purpose: In this paper I explore the value of transdisciplinary dialogues for advancing critical perspectives on international business. Specifically, I consider how conceptualisations of transnational corporations as embedded social communities can be advanced through dialogues and collaborations between two broadly defined scholarly communities, economic geographers and organizational sociologists. Approach: The paper is conceptual and reviews existing work by economic geographers and organizational sociologists useful for studying transnational corporations. Specifically the paper considers how economic geographers' work on the affects of institutions on firms can be brought together with organizational sociologists' work on identity regulation to generate new lines of enquiry about the role of transnational identity regulation in firms. Findings: It is shown that pragmatic rather than adversarial dialogues can overcome the limitations of disciplinary approaches and develop new questions about, and more sophisticated studies of, international business and transnational corporations, as long as the inherent dangers of transdisciplinary working are recognised and avoided. Originality: The paper takes a different approach to existing discussions of the value of transdisciplinary collaboration for studying international business, explicitly advocating a pragmatic approach that involves collaboration between researchers from related paradigms so as to generate new questions for research rather than an approach that involves critique and counter-critique of work from starkly contrasting research paradigms.

In recent decades, numerous professional service firms have gone 'global' in search of new markets and to support clients requiring services across nations. Whilst a lively debate has developed over the organizational implications of this phenomenon, the role of the firms in globalizing the wider world economy has received less attention. In this paper, we address this imbalance through an inter-disciplinary synthesis of the literature at the intersection of the professions and economic globalization and apply a political perspective to frame our analysis. Our contribution is twofold. First, we argue for a broadening of the research agenda to better elucidate the critical role of professional service firms as agents of economic globalization. This role, we argue, should become a core research theme given the firms are not just businesses offering services across the globe but also active participants in the globalization of the world economy. Second, we shed light on and conceptualize the specific power strategies deployed by the firms as part of their role as agents of globalization. We develop an integrative framework which, firstly, distinguishes between 'design' and 'implementation' and, secondly, specifies how the firms exert power to their advantage in each of these related areas. This model provides a theoretical scaffolding for understanding how professional service firms shape and indeed become hegemonic agents of economic globalization.

In this paper, we argue that postgraduate education forms an important, but hitherto neglected, element in the distinctive institutional landscape of the City of London. In particular, and drawing on research into early career financial and legal elites in the City, we show how postgraduate education tailored to the demands of employers within London plays an important role in indoctrinating early career elites into situated, City-specific working practices, and, in so doing, helps to sustain the City's cultures and norms of financial practice. Specifying the role of postgraduate education in reproducing these situated City practices is significant because, although geographical variegation in working practices between international financial centres has been widely reported, less attention has been paid to how such institutionally embedded differences are created and sustained. By identifying education as one mechanism of creation and sustenance, our analysis enhances understanding of how the institutional landscapes that underlie financial centres might be maintained or when necessary challenged; the latter being significant in relation to attempts to reform practices and cultures in international financial centres in the wake of the 2007-8 crisis.