Travel as Individual Institutional Navigation: Invisible Work in a Changing Institutional Environment and Social Hierarchy, a seminar by Professor Helena Barnard (University of Pretoria)

Travel as Individual Institutional Navigation: Invisible Work in a Changing Institutional Environment and Social Hierarchy

By Professor Helena Barnard from University of Pretoria, South Africa

Abstract

Travel is a routine yet consequential feature of organizational life. But travellers do not merely change location; they enter institutional settings governed by different logics, norms, and evaluative criteria. Travellers must prepare for and make sense of the new environment, and thus travel represents real work, albeit functionally invisible. In this paper, we provide a theoretical account of what business travel is and why it persists. We conceptualize travel as the process by which the traveller moves from their origin to their destination through a changing institutional environment and social hierarchy. To theorize this, we draw on work on individual institutional migration, social navigation and social hierarchy, as travellers inevitably encounter social worlds with different status (via relationships) and power (via resources) hierarchies. Travellers’ work to be effective in the social hierarchy at their destination importantly shapes travel, especially where travel highlights differences in travellers’ status and power. Because status is relational, the cost and inconvenience of travel for lower status travellers (e.g. from the global South) matter less than their ability to signal that they are part of the collective at their destination. In contrast, the relative ease with which travellers with high status and high power can (mitigate the inconveniences of) travel becomes an expression of their power. Business travel is background work for all, but within that world of invisible work is another layer of invisibility. Invisible work helps reproduce social structures, and travel serves to reinforce travellers’ social hierarchy: Because it confirms their membership of a collective, those for whom travel presents the greatest burden stand to gain most from traveling. As the colloquial term “travel warrior” suggests, travel is not a neutral act.

About the speaker

Prof Helena Barnard is a full professor at the Gordon Institute for Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria. Her research interests are in how knowledge (and with-it technology, organisational practices, and innovation) moves between more and less developed countries, particularly in Africa. She researches both organisational mechanisms (notably emerging multinationals and internet-enabled businesses) and individual mechanisms such as scientific collaborations, doctoral training, and the diaspora.

Helena specifically theorizes neglected but important topics in international business like religion, violence and local elites. She studies how turbulence affects international business directly, and also its implications for knowledge development and migration. Much of her work codifies insights about doing research in under-researched and uncertain contexts.

Helena has published in the Journal of Management (ABS4*), Journal of International Business Studies (ABS4*), Research Policy (ABS4*), Journal of World Business (ABS4) and others. Her paper on religion as an institution in Africa (with her colleague Prof Anastacia Mamabolo) won the 2023 Best Paper award of the Journal of World Business, and her Journal of Management paper on the global platform economy with Lehdonvirta et al. (2018) is in the 99th percentile of cited papers for the field

She was the Academy of International Business (AIB) Vice President for Administration (2017 to 2020) and currently chairs the Advisory Board of the Emerging Markets Special Interest Group of AIB, having been its founding chairperson from 2021 to 2025. From 2018 to 2019, she was the Dunning Fellow at the John H Dunning Centre for International Business at the University of Reading. 

Helena has been an area editor for the Journal of International Business Policy since the founding of the journal, and is an area editor for Academy of Management Perspectives for the 2024 to 2027 term. From 2017 to 2021, she served as deputy editor in charge of Africa for the journal Management and Organizational Review where she was recognised with a Distinguished Editor Award, and from 2017 to 2022 the editor in charge of international business research for the Africa Journal of Management.