Principal speaker
Dr Donald Hislop
Abstract: Central to Castells’ concept of the Network Society is a social and business world of highly inter-connected people and organisations. While ICTs play a key role in facilitating such inter-connections, the physical movement of people between diverse locations is also necessary to facilitate and sustain social relations and the sharing of knowledge. Within the business world, the spatial mobility of managerial and professional staff in particular is fundamental to sustaining work-relations among people and organisations that are increasingly spatially dispersed. The focus of this presentation is on understanding the extent to which the work of contemporary managerial and professional staff requires them to be spatially mobile as well as conceptualising the different types of mobility they undertake. It is argued that the mobility of such workers varies in terms of spatial scales, from the extremes of the localised movement of people within a relatively confined geographic area such as a city, up to international, inter-continental patterns of mobility undertaken by managers and professionals working in global multinationals. Arguably, more attention has been paid to the more glamorous patterns of international mobility, with, in contrast, more mundane patterns of localised mobility being relatively neglected. However, it is suggested that the mobility of managerial and professional workers across all spatial scales plays a crucial role in sustaining contemporary work practises and relations.
Speaker: Dr Donald Hislop’s research interests lay in two main areas: knowledge management and mobile working.
His knowledge management interests are broadly focused on social-cultural issues, such as how they shape the character of knowledge processes and people’s motivation to participate in them. Donald is involved in a project on the topic of unlearning (the process of abandoning and giving up knowledge) among managers within UK hospitals.
He has published on the topic in a range of journals including Management Learning, Journal of Information Technology, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management and the Journal of Knowledge Management. Donald is also the author of a popular and well-regarded textbook called Knowledge Management in Organizations: A Critical Introduction (2013, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press).
Donald’s mobile working research focuses on two specific, overlapping themes: the extent to which business people work while travelling on work-related journeys, and the way in which mobile computer and communication technologies are used in these work activities. He has published extensively on this topic in journals such as New Technology, Work and Employment, Information and Organization, Mobilities and Transportation Research [Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour].
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