Joining,Constructing and Benefiting from the Global Workplace: Transnational Professionals in the Building-Design Industry

Re-inventing place in the space of flows

Globalization is inextricably tied up with time-space compression; the speeding up of temporal experiences and the diminishing relevance of borders, territory, particular locations and of copresent (Boden and Molotch, 2000) relationships based on physical contiguity. Instead, there is a relative shift towards the increasing significance of deterritorialized relationships conducted and spread over vast distances and involving virtual or imaginary rather than solely or mainly face-to-face involvement. According to Castells (1996) one fundamental consequence is that we increasingly live in the space of flows rather than in the space of place and are governed by network rather than ‘society’ logic. Of course, the continuing relevance of the locale – as the actual place we inhabit at any one time – is not in question. Leading theorists of globalization such as Robertson (1995) have always insisted that the local is where incoming global influences are encountered and selectively internalized, or glocalised, to met local needs. Moreover, the local is always a source of outgoing flows in its own right. Nevertheless, the local is locked into increasingly complex and co-evolving (Urry, 2003) cycles of continuous interaction with and reaction to the global and these processes increasingly forge our everyday lifeworlds. Accordingly, under globalizing conditions, ‘(O)ne's life is no longer tied to a particular place’ so that whether ‘willing or forced, or both, people spread lives and experience over separate worlds’ (Beck, 2000: 74) and experience ‘place polygamy’ (73), often of both body and mind. Moreover, although transnationalism is not new, in recent years the multiplication of social spaces that ‘exist above and beyond the social context of national societies’ has become a ‘mass phenomenon’ instead of a marginal one (Pries, 2001: 23) and such spaces generate shared interests and meanings that have profound implications far beyond the immediate sphere where they were constructed (Morgan, 2001).

Given the apparent ‘weight’ of all these experiences it is easy to imagine, especially in respect to all those employed in the symbolic wealth economy, the globalizing service industries and the transnational corporations (TNCs), that the work life and the relationships encountered there may demonstrate the following characteristics. First, they will be less and less reliant upon face-to face, directly interactive social relations. Second, increasingly work will become dependent both upon the virtuality made possible by information and communication technologies and the mobilities provided by what Urry (2004: 123) calls the increasing ‘materially heterogeneous’ nature of the social as a variety of technological resources – inhuman hybrid forms – merge with humans to create complex mobile hybrids (Urry, 2003). Last, we might expect that the significance of particular locations for the management and conduct of work activity will somewhat diminish as the space of flows leads not to the disappearance of places but to a situation where ‘their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network’ (Castells, 1996: 412). Interestingly, however, there appears to be a revival of interest in the continuing and essential significance both of face-to-face relations and of special locations for the ‘coterie of new specialists and professionals’ (Featherstone, 1990: 8) who work outside the ‘cultures of the nation-state’, the ‘cosmocrats’ (Micklethwaite and Wooldridge, 2001) who now make the global economy operate effectively or the transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 2002). In part, and paradoxically, this ‘rediscovery’ concerning the significance of place and copresent relations for economic life is linked to those very forces that have driven and accelerated economic globalization. Here, I include the shift towards ‘globalized regimes of flexible accumulation’ (Nonini and Ong, 1997: 9), the dominance of de-regulatory, neo-liberal policies and the ‘pressures of the world economy’ increasingly dominated by global corporations’ (O'Riain, 2000: 178). The various ways in which these forces have engendered the re-territorialization of space include the following.

Beaverstock et al. (1999 and 2000) have investigated the worldwide connections of law firms based in London and New York. Their research demonstrates that while the success of such companies in following their clients overseas requires the capacity to develop ‘novel packages of legal knowledge’ involving ‘transstate … scales of operation’, these law firms also need the simultaneous development of ‘a customized service built on local understanding and contacts’ (2000: 100), because legal codes originate in national development and history. The latter can only function on the basis of a highly localized ‘ensemble’ of interpersonal, on-going relations though this may include colleagues who rotate between national affiliates. Similarly, Storper (1997) has argued that coping successfully with globalized business relations requires new kinds of ‘economic reflexivity’ involving the sharing of new information and knowledge, the capacity to deal with uncertainty and the creative reading of market changes. All of these, in turn, depend upon close proximity between colleagues working together. Despite their ability to transcend the national and to provide a trans-urban network of sites that manage capitalism worldwide (Friedman, 1986; Sassen, 1991), global cities are one obvious location where a critical mass of professionals working in the same company and on similar projects can easily collaborate face-to-face in solving problems (Sassen, 2002). Moreover, global cities also provide the inter-personal space where non-standardized knowledge can be created and evaluated and a ‘mix of talents and resources’ (23) can be assembled. Castells (1996), too, notes that the ‘dominant, managerial elites (415) who direct the space of capitalist flows seek each other's company and live in close proximity in ‘residential and leisure-oriented spaces’ and tend to ‘cluster dominant functions in carefully segregated spaces’ (416).

Even those who work at the frontiers of the global symbolic knowledge economy, developing software for international computer firms, find that the acceleration ‘of time and the extension of social space across physical distance’ far from destroying space ‘intensify’ its impact ‘in constituting successful global workplaces’ because for such companies the ‘local character of their work teams is essential for their efficiency’ (O'Riain, 2000: 178). Finally, Zhou and Tseng (2001) write about the Hong Kong business elites who have built-up substantial investments in California. Their businesses are capable of spanning continents precisely because they rely on the effective embeddness of these overseas Chinese diasporic networks in enduring family and ethnic connections. However, notwithstanding the continuing strength of these transnational ties, business profitability also depends on being able to ground them in locally-oriented ‘ethnic economies’ (132) constructed around numerous Chinese immigrants who have lived in Los Angeles and run family businesses sometimes for generations. The latter provide a valuable local client base but also essential linguistic and ‘bicultural’ skills, knowledge of the ‘regulatory framework’ for business and guidance concerning how to operate in the ‘local commercial environment’ (148). In short, it appears that the more globalized certain kinds of businesses become the greater their need to retain, or to re-ground, some of their activities firmly into concrete locations though the reasons for this and the particular forms this takes may vary considerably. I now turn to my case study to consider how these issues affect the global building industry.

The study and the uniqueness of the building-design industry

The study explored the work and non-work experiences of professionals working in the building-design industry in the UK. Eight enterprises were investigated, seven in London, and one in Manchester. Access to these firms proved difficult and was based on previous contacts which were then followed up through a ‘snowball’ effect. These firms were engaged in the design of various kinds of buildings but they often supervised the implementation of such projects, on site, through sub-contracting to numerous building specialists. Thirty two professionals were interviewed. Twenty three had originally trained as architects, though some had since acquired further qualifications, six respondents had trained as building engineers and three were in business management or interior design. It was not possible to select these respondents on a statistically random basis because many employees were on leave, working abroad or otherwise engaged during the research period. However, because the study focused on individuals who had personal experience of working continuously outside their native country at some time during their careers, many employees were excluded from the survey in any case.

Twenty nine respondents fulfilled these criteria while the remaining three had travelled abroad for shorter periods on numerous occasions. Many had worked overseas in two or more different locations. Twenty one respondents had worked abroad for more than two years and fifteen people had done so for more than four years. In addition, many made repeated short visits abroad – perhaps two or three days every week or fortnight – as part of their current UK post. The group included an assortment of nationalities: only twelve were born in the UK and/or had single British nationality status. The remaining twenty individuals hailed from seventeen different countries. Working in Britain exposed the latter to the same transnational experiences as their UK counterparts who had previously worked abroad. Eleven of the non-British nationals had worked overseas prior to repeating this experience in Britain. Most interviews were conducted in the summer and autumn of 2000.

Why work overseas?

The respondents’ employment histories mostly revealed no single factor that first led them towards overseas work but rather different combinations of personal background circumstances, social resources and economic pressures. This inter-meshing of micro-experiences with vast structural forces – as individuals struggle to turn the latter to their advantage and to feed the resulting experiences back into their own lives – has been outlined by Beck (2002). He describes the compulsion to ‘self organization’. In an age (at least for Westerners) of individualization we wish to construct ‘do-it-yourself biographies’ even though we are simultaneously driven to do so. The element of economic compulsion has of course always been endemic to industrial capitalism but two elements are new, he claims: the coincidence of a powerful desire for self autonomy alongside the chaotic forces unleashed by neoliberalism – compounded by the final disintegration of traditional social institutions – but second the reality that increasingly ‘the life of one's own is a global life … a travelling life, both literally and metaphorically, a nomadic life’ (Beck, 2002: 25).

The respondents’ transnational careers highlight a series of questions concerning how they had crossed various thresholds. First, how and why did they make the initial move into overseas employment and given that only a minority were strongly predisposed towards deliberately seeking a cosmopolitan life overseas from the outset? Here, as well as social background factors we need to consider the economic cycles and uneven development intrinsic to post-Fordist, global capitalism. Second, there is the question of how they came to be working for their current employees. These were cosmopolitan companies with strong overseas business interests that needed to attract professionals with transnational experiences and orientations. Finally, why, in turn, had these companies responded to the opportunities and pressures generated by economic globalization and established overseas links and interests?

Coping with the global workplace

Most of the respondents arrived overseas knowing few, if any, of their colleagues or the client, sub-contractors and others involved in the current project. A few were able to establish contacts with one or two friends/associates sharing the same or a similar profession befriended during a previous work encounter but who were now employed by different companies operating in the same city or region. In this way they gained access to a loose network of potential friends. Overlapping, inter-company and cross-locational networks of mostly young professionals sharing similar skills but working for different firms flourish particularly in global cities such as Paris, London or Hong Kong or in countries where foreign nationals are discouraged from mixing with the locals as in some Middle Eastern countries. Nevertheless, and quite unlike the situation encountered by most migrants, who become encapsulated within already established, protective ethnic/national enclaves in the host society, or professionals sent abroad to work en bloc in a subsidiary of the parent company with existing colleagues, perhaps accompanied by their families, the majority of respondents arrived with few social resources. They were therefore compelled to construct a supportive social milieu more or less in situ and probably from scratch.

Although they arrived endowed with rather little social capital, as already suggested they did bring a stock of cultural capital in the form of their professional credentials and previous working experience. Accordingly, they shared with their new colleagues a core of inherently transferable skills, orientations and commitments; a common legacy of specialized knowledge with deep roots in the past heroes, styles and traditions of architecture and an accumulated knowledge of techniques, styles and innovations handed on through training and practice. Moreover, as several respondents remarked, while fashions and styles change over time and between countries all buildings are designed to last, they have high costs, they need to satisfy the requirements of the clients who pay for them and the public who will use them and they must withstand local climatic and physical demands. Thus, the professionals in this field cannot escape being highly accountable. At the same time, however, cultural preferences, building techniques and materials, national legal, financial, bureaucratic and technical rules and customs often continue to vary significantly across regions and nations.

One additional problem not previously mentioned but which eleven respondents commented upon at length was the question of language. The need to be competent in the local language obviously depended upon several factors including the country concerned. Thus, working in Russia in the early 1990s, in South Korea or Japan might present more difficulties than working in Holland. Moreover, the general linguistic competencies of a country's wider population or a particular individual's previous learning experience were obviously crucial as well. Most of the English-speaking respondents were rather limited in their foreign language proficiency. At the same time, they were extremely fortunate in terms of their ability to work comfortably in countries where English is being increasingly adopted as the most widely used world language. Ironically, given the relative paucity of language skills among the British compared to other countries, several non-UK respondents complained that as foreign professionals employed in small British companies – in marked contrast to the more cosmopolitan, global firms – they had faced severe obstacles since not speaking English perfectly was regarded by their employers/clients and even colleagues as a sign of professional incompetence. The British, they claimed, expect everyone else to attain a full competence in English or face the possibility of being patronized or up-staged, yet more often than not they have no intention of improving their own language skills beyond ‘holiday’ French or Spanish.

As several respondents indicated, without a reasonable proficiency in the national language and a grasp of its nuances it is very difficult to fully understand the client's needs and to do the project full justice. In addition, an individual can easily become pushed out of the decision-making loop if s/he is unable to fully grasp what one respondent called the ‘local mentality’. It also becomes difficult to build strong bonds of trust and sociability. Indeed, the huge significance of language is one of the key reasons why an increasing number of companies wishing to tender for overseas contracts are now providing in-house language training sessions and why overseas partners are being sought.

This brief discussion of the language ‘problem’ leads on to an important point. Although this and/or numerous additional difficulties were unavoidable, especially in the early stages of a sojourn abroad, it is important to consider them against a wider perspective. Clearly, in the course of time and with greater familiarity concerning the details of the local situation, most problems were invariably reduced to more manageable proportions. But, there were several additional factors at work enhancing the ability of these transnational professionals to cope.

First, several respondents insisted that while custom and practice may vary widely across nations the underlying problems involved in designing a project and then grounding it into an actual material site are fundamentally the same everywhere. As one succinctly observed: ‘everywhere the real problems are the same as are the objectives; it's just the implementation that changes’. In any case, as several respondents suggested, some difficulties are quite unrelated to national, cultural, regulatory, technical and other difference as between countries. Instead, they are often caused by the random and personal idiosyncrasies of particular individuals – awkward clients who keep changing their minds, or rude, chauvinistic and parochial contractors with a reputation for treating everyone badly including their own nationals.

Second, when asked about how they had dealt with the difficulties they encountered overseas virtually all observed that the ability to transpose skills to meet new situations, to constantly learn new skills while topping-up existing ones, to be flexible, to develop the trick of seeing problems as challenges rather than as formidable obstacles, and so on, were intrinsic to the nature of their job and their profession. Part of their training had alerted them to the need for this constant adaptability and had helped to prepare them for such eventualities. Such aptitudes have, of course, been noted by sociologists for some time. Thus, with respect to professionals working in the USA, both Merton (1957) and Gouldner (1989), distinguished between ‘locals’ – whose expertise binds them to particular companies and localities – and ‘cosmopolitans’ who seek the validation of their peers rather than their immediate employers and who accumulate a reservoir of skills that are not tied to specific places and businesses. They argued that the incidence of professionals who possess such inherently transferable knowledge and a frame of reference that transcends particularistic loyalties, has been growing for some time.

Returning to the transnational professionals included in the study we can see that they were engaged in a continuous process of creative problem-solving, capacities that writers such as Reich (1991) and Castells (1996) have insisted are increasingly important and necessary to the symbolic economy. They argue that the symbolic analysts, approximately twenty percent of the global labour force working in every kind of design activity, research, knowledge dissemination, the media, information technology and so on, have become the main wealth generators in the information society and their central task, above all, is to identify and find ways to solve problems. Much of this does seem to have a resonance with respect to the present study since problem-solving and trouble-shooting lies at the heart of most kinds of building work especially, though not only, in the case of overseas situations. Several respondents also observed that one of the key lessons learned by all professionals in this industry is that all problems can eventually be solved and that invariably there is often more than one solution. Moreover, a growing awareness of wider horizons and the ability to increase your repertoire of professional tricks was an advantage that working overseas was especially likely to enhance. Most respondents were absolutely clear on this point. The following sample of comments taken from field notes are typical of widely held sentiments concerning the gains from overseas work but they also hint at the resilience of local/national cultures and practices.

Rachel was an American architect in her late thirties who had worked in a London office for eleven years during which time she had frequently traveled to the Czech Republic, Germany and Holland for short trips involving projects partly managed from London. She argued that ‘working overseas means acquiring a diversity of professional experiences and perspectives … regulations are always there but dealing with them in different situations makes you become more eclectic, confident in seeing that the rules can be overcome – manipulated – so you can still put design considerations first’. Peter was a British building engineer aged thirty five who – unusually – had been employed by the same global company since qualifying and who had previously worked for periods of between four months and two years in New York, Tokyo and Sydney. He observed that ‘working abroad makes you more self-sufficient … so you become more confident and you gain professional exposure to a wider range of technical skills. You learn that there are many possible technical solutions – all valid’. Seth, another architect in his late thirties, who described himself as British-Welsh, had worked continuously in post-communist East Germany for three years from 1992 to 1995 before marrying. He was now a partner in a major London-based company and traveled often on short trips to Germany and Holland. He commented that: ‘international work enriches your mental map – its personally enriching – makes you tolerant and understanding. In any case, architecture is now global – so you have to pursue this’. Frank was an Afro-American architect in his early fifties who had made numerous short trips to Asia and Europe since 1987 and had then worked for eighteen months full time in Hong Kong followed by a year in the UK. He observed: ‘It's become second nature now and easier to adapt to different rules and procedures … and to acclimatize and re-acclimatize between cultures … Broadens your skills and outlook … You are able to transplant items from one country to another and this is welcomed. If I'd stayed in American I'd have been much narrower’.

Marco, whose career profile was outlined above declared that ‘increasingly our work is about collaborating with people from other nations … constantly having to adapt to other people's cultural practices’. Inevitably, ‘a professional architect's role is shaped by overseas experiences … in Italy, it's design/artistic aspects that are valued, in Britain it's the structure of a project, thinking about the needs of people who live in the buildings … in France, the business aspect’ might count for more. All of this makes professionals stronger and more adaptable. Darren, a British architect in his early thirties with nearly four years overseas experience soon after qualifying, followed by many short trips abroad since he had become a permanent employer in a London firm, declared, that ‘working in Germany increased my range of skills and gave me advantages … made me more self confident and self reliant … I'm not afraid of challenges … indeed now I relish change and new languages’. Finally, Ahmed, a Jordanian-born civil engineer aged thirty eight, had trained partly in Kuwait and later worked there for three years – for two different companies including a Japanese firm for twelve months – before moving to Hong Kong where he was employed for a short time by a British building company. He then attained the permanent post with a Manchester-based company where he was interviewed. His comments on the problems encountered during, but also the gains from, overseas work again suggest interesting scenarios. ‘To be successful you have to adapt because you live in a different culture, even in Kuwait I had to adapt’ (despite being from the Middle East). Many aspects of the work vary between countries; ‘there are differences and difficulties in understanding clients’ needs … different levels of detail in doing the job … but I have definitely gained’. Working abroad ‘gave me an identity and a more flexible approach … I am more international in my outlook … I have more confidence in working anywhere’. I think that these comments point tentatively towards a likely future scenario with respect to the continuing tensions between different national work and professional cultures. Thus, in the long run the latter may become more ‘manageable’ not by conveniently melting away under the homogenizing glare of increasingly hegemonic global market pressures but through a process of gradual glocalization as locals and foreigners adapt, borrow, transplant, blend and hybridize elements of each other's work cultures through increasing social interaction.

A third resource which was very significant in helping these respondents to adapt to transnational work life was the key role played by their local or multi-national colleagues, working mostly on the same team and project. Usually they could be relied upon to provide many kinds of support; with language, technical details, differences of practice and custom and so on. However, very often what underpinned the on-site collaboration taking place in the global workplace was the gelling of close inter-personal relationships and patterns of sociality that often owed as much, if not more, to the shared experiences operating in the parallel non-work lives of the respondents as to those they encountered while engaged on-site. I now examine this interaction between work and leisure and how the global workplace is shaped by shared non-work experiences continuing alongside.

At work and play: building friendships

The newly arriving professional is thrust into an existing or a newly formed work team all – or most – of whom s/he has never met before. Together, the particular demands of the work project, or projects, and the need to establish professional and inter-personal relationships with the work team, involving not just other professionals but also clients, suppliers, sub-contractors and artisans, generate an emergent dynamics that becomes extremely important in shaping the incomer's experience. More often than not, the respondents claimed, the pressures on the team were intense. Deadlines had to be met and the need to work eighty hours a week was not uncommon. This left little time or opportunity for building a social life outside the company. Time was spent in grappling with a host of problems connected to operationalizing the original design into a concrete project; dealing with officials and their regulations, the changing demands of clients, sorting out legal and financial issues, coping with in-house and external cultural and language differences and disentangling the numerous conflicts, demands and delays brought by numerous sub-contractors, suppliers and their employees. Above all, what made all this possible, bearable and effective was the establishment of relationships of mutual liking, trust and friendship particularly among the key professionals at the core of the project though these reciprocities and close interpersonal dependencies might also extend to the clients, partner firms or suppliers and even government officials. Without the cooperation, patience, assistance, good humour, mutual respect and liking emanating from fellow members of the work team – giving rise to friendships that crossed over national lines – the effectiveness of the respondents and the successful implementation of the project would have been in question. I now provide three examples illustrating different dimensions of this situation though other respondents told very similar stories.

Clive, was a British engineer. Based for the year preceding the interview in Malta he had found himself working directly alongside a group of site colleagues consisting of some Australians, Croatians and Maltese but also in frequent contact with Japanese, German, South Korean and other national specialists in the electronics industry because the project involved not just constructing but also tooling a factory in this industry. He referred to various difficulties: for, example, the lack of sophistication among local building contractors, the obstacles involved in getting needed materials and equipment through the Maltese customs and a more laid-back attitude generally to work deadlines and quality than in the UK. However, he explained how in the face of such problems he and his multi-national work colleagues had become ‘more prone to help the situation and get round the situation by acting jointly rather than view them as individual problems. Things are resolved more collectively than in the UK and people use more initiative’ in surmounting such problems. Moreover, ‘the more people you get to know and the better the social life you have, obviously this makes the project easier … you don't see it as a term … as a sentence … and then I'm home … so if you've got a social life and friends … you are looking forward to the project and not looking for the day that you come home’. This greater ability to cooperate through forming strong social bonds was a quality that, once acquired, was transferred to other transnational situations.

Dan was a structural engineer who had previously worked overseas in Saudi Arabia (two years during the 1980s), Abu Dhabi (four months) and in Australia (nearly three years). In Saudi Arabia, he and the other professionals engaged in building work had little choice but to live separately from the locals in a closed expatriate community. At that time there were few locally trained professionals. Though most of his immediate work team were British and from the same company he made friends with professionals working on similar projects from several nationalities: Norwegians, Australians, Americans and others. ‘I formed a stronger bond with those working there than would happen here or in some other less repressive Middle Eastern countries. Most of us have kept in contact over many years’. Now in his mid-forties, he was based permanently in London. From here he had made frequent short trips to different company sites across Europe including France and Holland. One such project had continued for over two years. This concerned a building site in Lille run partly from the London office but also with the central involvement of a Dutch architect based in a partner-firm in Rotterdam as well as an assortment of additional professionals from America, Japan, New Zealand and Ireland. He described how, ‘the client was very difficult to work with and this

united us all together … we were staying in the same hotels whenever we met over a two year period … working and drinking together. Some of these people are now back in Japan and the States … at least once a year we email … so I'm still in contact with most of them’.

Another aspect of coping with the exigencies of the global workplace involves the reality – as I have already emphasized – of not just transforming a design blueprint into a concrete building but also grounding the ideas and ambitions emanating from a global company into a very local situation while trying to remain formally in control from a distance through managing the space of flows. Making all this materialize successfully ‘on the ground’ is a very different matter. Donna, whose profile was outlined previously, explained this very clearly. She pointed out that an important company ‘can plan the building in London but they have to work with the local architects and deal with the local detail. The implementation is essentially local – operationalizing the project into a real place’. By contrast, ‘urban planning remains conceptual and strategic and it comes before the architecture and so flows around more. Architecture does have global flow aspects too – design ideas and knowledge – but further down the line it becomes much more concrete’ and depends on the ability to form effective working partnerships. ³

The bonds of friendship created by the demands of the project were also strongly reinforced by several other contingencies arising from the possibly unique nature of transnational experiences among professionals. One was the constraints – especially the lack of energy or time – on building a social life outside the firm and therefore the tendency to socialize with fellow colleagues from the project and/or other professionals working in the location but from different firms through late-night clubbing and drinking sessions, going to restaurants, cinemas, weekend parties and so on. Work and non-work life tend to become interchangeable. Then there is the reality of a shared sense of relative social exclusion from the host society. Partly, this may result from the long hours of work and being rather tied to one location for long periods of time. But there is also the likelihood of being held back from engaging in in-depth personal of cultural encounters with locals because of limited language skills unless these are also middle class, multi-lingual, educated individuals who have, in any case, like you, probably become partly detached from their socio-cultural roots by virtue of their class and education. Not just the willingness but perhaps more critically the ability to engage with the ‘true’ local cultural ‘others’ as a mark of cosmopolitanism, in the sense outlined by Hannerz (1990), may be an experience reserved for very few.

But most respondents also discovered that even their fellow host society colleagues engaged on the same project were not always readily available for non-work friendships. This was because many were likely to be married with families and so were tied into long-standing kinship, school, neighbourhood and other obligations which rendered the frequent sharing of leisure time, especially after work, very difficult. Here, it is important to remember that the ability to work for prolonged periods of time overseas is mainly a prerogative of young professionals who are probably not involved in long term relationships and certainly do not have children. Even the larger and more progressive companies in this industry normally make little or no provision for their employees to be accompanied by families when located overseas on a semi-permanent basis. ⁴ The mean age of the sample in 2000 was thirty nine years and seventy percent of the respondents were between the ages of 31 and 40 years. ⁵ Thus, the stage in an individual's life-cycle and their personal profile are closely linked to transnationalism.

A final factor that helped to bolster the formation of strong inter-personal ties was the common experience of emotional vulnerability associated with being in a strange country and away from home, family and friends, especially, perhaps, for the first time. One way of dealing with this hollowing out of a person's emotional life space may be to form friendships with others who find themselves in the same predicament – who are young, mostly unattached and partly excluded from close host society relationships unless with locals who are in the same stage of their life cycle. The most likely and accessible candidates for establishing such close, compensatory relationships will probably be the fellow-professionals with whom you already share so much and even more so, if, they are also strangers – non-nationals – who for similar reasons to you are also partly excluded from close attachments to many members of the host society. It is possible, too, that forming friendships in many instances with people of different nationalities and so becoming part of a multi-national friendship group generates a sense of bridges being crossed, the excitement of discovering that the otherness of the ‘others’ can be overcome much more easily than one suspected. Mutual liking may lead to a greater sense of achievement than relations with fellow nationals and is imbued with a special value and intensity that is never forgotten. Recalling his current Malta experiences as well as earlier stints working abroad, Clive articulated his feelings as follows:

Turning briefly to the composition of the friendship networks in which the respondents had participated during their various work sojourns overseas (forty nine such occasions altogether) three things were notable. Friends from the host society (locals) were much more likely than expatriates to be present in these networks but this is hardly surprising given the obvious presence of locals in everyday life, in streets, shops and places of residence, but also the strong likelihood that several, perhaps most, work colleagues will be locals along with suppliers, clients and sub-contractors. However, far fewer of these friendship networks than might have been expected, given their ubiquity in the host society, were predominantly or entirely built around relationships with nationals. Thus, in only nine of the forty-nine overseas situation had host society friends been the sole source of network companions (eighteen percent). Last, those who did provide a large and frequent component of these non-work friendship networks tended to be people of different nationalities. Thus, in thirty two of the total number of overseas stints which between them the respondents had undertaken, friends from several or many nations other than the respondent's own, or the host nation, made up a substantial, the main or the sole component. Consequently, these networks were partly, mostly and sometimes completely multinational in composition. These multinational friendship networks had mostly survived long after their members had dispersed far and wide from the locations where these ties were first forged. Nearly two thirds of the sample had maintained contacts with some of their former overseas friends of different nationalities over the years including, in twelve cases, through mutual visiting often connected to holidays or where a business trip offered opportunities to meet. Sometimes theses visits involved entire families.

Conclusions

What wider implications can be drawn from these findings? First, Giddens (1990) has argued that modernity displaces or empties geographical localities of their former deep significance so that places become more ‘phanatasmagoric’ (140) than real. Events in time becomes separated from, and no longer dependent upon, place while social relations become disembedded – capable of being reflexively ordered across distances and released from their former embeddedness in concrete face-to-face relations. As localized, copresent influences drain away more impersonalized relations become predominant. These changes long pre-dated the recent intensification of globalizing forces. However, Giddens also argues that these processes make possible a fundamental alteration of spatiality such that opportunities arise for the construction of new patterns of sociality involving ‘the intersection of intimacy and impersonality’ (142) often based on relations stretched across vast distances. Here, a kind of reembedding occurs whereby ‘faceless commitment are sustained or transformed by facework’ (88). Thus, over time clients may build close, intimate relations with impersonal professionals on whom they depend. Even professionals themselves may find that trust based not just on codes of ethics and legal requirements but also on the evolution of close interpersonal relations and friendships can be generated (87). It is precisely such reembedding experiences, involving the formation of emotionally charged, copresent, inter-personal ties often between individuals of several different nationalities, that we have encountered among the professionals discussed in this paper. Giddens further suggests that while such reembedding experiences continue to be found in some ‘aspects of life in local contexts’ (140) they do ‘not derive from the particularities of localized place’ (140) as such.

Here, however, the evidence from this study indicates not just that copresent relations continue to be essential and rewarding to those caught up in them but also the possibility that despite their immersion within global economic streams the particularity of these locations remained central. Instead of the de-territorialization supposedly associated with life under globalizing conditions, what we see is the re-territorialization or re-colonization of place. Thus, each site where a work project was managed, and usually the adjacent locale where non-work life was also experienced, became saturated with the kinds of meanings and continuous interactions that enabled those who were assembled there to cope effectively with the demands of what was, in effect, a global workplace with its own peculiar requirements and characteristics.

Second, the study suggests that many other sets of social relations, and the places in which they are embedded, continue to remain partly untouched and certainly not dominated by the logic of the space of flows; for example, regional/ national interests, loyalties, rules, norms and practices. Indeed, frequently these created considerable and not easily surmountable difficulties for the respondents in the study who were trying to implement global projects; the local continues to thrive. Of course, the continued vibrancy of place as well as sociality is not denied by the theorists we have mentioned. Yet, there is surely a sense in which the language employed – even if this is unintentional – overplays the importance of flows, virtuality, endless mobilities and hybrid post-social forms while ignoring or neglecting the continuing centrality of everyday, affective human social interaction and mutuality as well as physical place. As Taylor (2004: 56) usefully reminds us when arguing against the tendency to reify cities as economic entities: the ‘economic links that tie cities together in networks are forged by specific economic actors’ and ‘at the most general level, the agents of economic change are the holders of capital’.

It is possible that the findings I have discussed are unique to, or certainly much more prevalent within, the building-design industry. Until further research can provide clarification I suggest that even the most cursory consideration of other globalized economic sectors, including producer services, indicates that deep sociality remains unavoidable and crucial while being rooted inevitably into particular locations even though these simultaneously function as global workplaces. Warehouses, ports, railway stations, factories, airports, law courts and the rooms where barristers and clients bargain, company boardrooms, the bars and offices that allow negotiations and deals to be discussed and agreed between insurance agents, bankers, business consortiums and consultants, the studios where advertising team struggle with clients to create themes that sell – all these and many more thrive as essential, vibrant locations where social actors must operate together in order to make global as well as national and regional economies work.

Third, as previously mentioned several scholars have recently argued that occupational life and the work place are losing their capacity to give purpose and meaning to people's lives compared to the past. Beck (2002: 36), for example, argues that ‘both the firm and the workplace lose their significance in conflict and identity formation’. Instead, a ‘new site arises for the formation of social bonds and for the development of conflicts: namely, the sphere of private social relations and of personal modes of work and life’. Similarly, Sennett (1998) has recently claimed that the flexible nature of contemporary post-Fordist capitalism has generated work experiences where ‘fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections’ and teamwork mostly involves frequent changes in personnel. Consequently, people find it difficult to develop long-term loyalties or a ‘narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments’ (26). As with Beck, these observations carry considerable resonance. Much contemporary work life, for professionals as for everyone else, is characterized by sub-contracting, free-lancing, continuous movement in search of job opportunities through networking and so on (see, for example, Wittel's study of people working in the media and the dot-com sectors: 2002). However, this study suggests that even if de-skilling, employment insecurity and declining work commitment and the rest are eventually shown to predominate within most national economies – and more detailed evidence is needed – the global workplace can sometimes reveal a very different set of experiences.

Increased mobility and the relatively short character of many individual work situations does not necessarily equate with a shallowness and de-intensification of experience. As this study has demonstrated, work projects of a few months or years can generate highly intense inter-personal relationships that give rise to multi-national friendships (and sometimes life partnerships between individuals of different nationalities). These are essential to company effectiveness and the ability to succeed in the market. But they are also likely to generate enduring social networks from which their members derive many career benefits – information concerning jobs, contracts and social connections – in addition to personal support, loyalty and comradeship. Such experiences are especially likely to arise in global workplaces because here, not only is the bonding of those involved in the work project necessary for project success but such work situations are accompanied by very definite kinds of shared non-work experiences. These include the high probability of a sense of social exclusion and emotional deprivation as well as the commonalities generated by social class, education and life cycle similarities. Together, these may generate multi-layered affiliations of mutual interdependence between those who face the same circumstances. Indeed, perhaps some transnational work experiences are more likely to generate richly satisfying work experiences and patterns of sociality than most nationally-based situations in that their emergent properties either cancel out or override the adverse consequences of much contemporary work life as described by Beck (2002) and Sennett (1998). Finally, as overseas employment by professionals increases, so the content of much professional practice and the ways in which training takes place will almost certainly be radically altered. Moreover, the prospect of transformation is probably increased where work teams involve a genuinely multinational mixture. Thus, mutual learning and borrowing of cultural and technical practices, cross-fertilization and hybridization, the transplantation of techniques and ideas between sites and countries, greater experimentation – all of these seem increasingly likely. Similarly, those who believe they are the guardians of a precious ‘national’ professional legacy may come to feel beleaguered as the ability to identify what constitutes a truly ‘national’ body of traditions becomes problematical and as the transfers and exchanges taking place in global companies trickles down into more nationally-based firms. On the other hand, as each national ethos becomes diluted and infused with global elements perhaps professionals will become even more adaptable and innovative.