Title:	High Mobility in Europe
Authors:	Gil Viry Vincent Kaufmann
Keywords:	High Mobility
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	Migration is only one form of mobility that social scientists document as intensifying in the contemporary period; the focus of High Mobility in Europe encompasses another more routine form of mobility – travel to and for work, whether across national boundaries or not – while looking more holistically at the relationship between movement, employment and personal life. Debate continues about the consequences of mobility. For example, Claire Holdsworth 1 notes ‘sweeping generalisations about the intensification of mobility at the expense of the family’ that provoked her own research (Holdsworth, 2013: 1). The authors of High Mobility in Europe demonstrate reasons for avoiding ‘sweeping generalisations’ along with the enormous importance of mobility for personal and family lives. Their original research shines a timely spotlight on patterns of mobility, weighing assumptions against the evidence. They look within and across nation-state boundaries in Europe to deliver an evidence-based account of who is mobile, and why. Their comparative and collaborative efforts put competing theoretical claims about what mobility means for our future to the test while asking their own brand of distinctive searching questions about the reversibility of mobility practices, spatially, temporally, socially and experientially. This is done without unnecessarily proliferating the growing set of neologisms already coined to capture the mobile characters of contemporary life – flying grannies, LATs (couples living apart together), astronaut parents and transnational families. The European residents who feature most strongly are long-distance commuters whose time away from home is extended by over two hours travelling both to and from work, the overnighters who regularly stay away from home for work reasons, and those in long-distance relationships where, again for work-related reasons, each partner has his or her own residence in geographically separate localities. The nature of the evidence deployed by the authors – longitudinal surveys and qualitative interviews – offers breadth and depth, change over time and change across life courses. This provides multiple routes to explore reversibility, patterns that are subsequently undone. Sample diversity enables analysis by gender and socio-economic circumstances. The fact that mothers bringing up children alone are sometimes longdistance commuters defies common stereotypes and demonstrates how a feeling of entrapment in high mobility is more typical of those with few resources. It is the more advantaged research participants who have a sense of choosing high mobility as a lifestyle or a life phase. The European countries involved – France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland – do not represent all the regions of Europe. Nevertheless, the detailed and comparative analysis offers food for thought to those of us outside these territories considering our own research evidence. The authors direct our attention to how the sequencing of mobility across the life course reflects differential socialisation that underpins a propensity to mobility, as well as how variations in gender divisions around caring and providing and the impact of recession are affected by different national contexts.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53675
ISBN:	978-1-137-44738-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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