The purpose of this paper is to seek to address this challenge, and
in so doing argue that existing theoretical approaches to business
mobility – whilst valuable – have important limitations in their capacity
to better understand both the nature and significance of mobility
practices for firms and economies. At the heart of this is the
proposition that whilst the existing literature has done an excellent
job of developing categorical typologies of mobility practices, it has not
invested enough attention in analysing the differential importance of
different types of mobility practices and – just as crucially – has tended
to under-theorise the interrelationships and overlap between different
mobility practices. This contention is not intended as a strong critique
of the growing body of work – based on well-grounded empirical
research – which has informed these typological frameworks, but rather
as a constructive engagement aimed at building on their insights and
augmenting their typological approaches with a greater theoretical
capacity to understand the complexity of the increasing importance of
business mobility in today's global economy. In this respect, the paper
draws together and develops the existing conceptual literature to propose
a reformulated typology of business mobility that overcomes
some of the existing inconsistencies and absences in current frameworks.
It then argues that this reformulated typology needs to be
supplemented with a new theoretical approach that seeks to identify
and analyse the nature of the outcomes associatedwith different mobility
practices — as well as how practice are interrelated. By doing this,
more effective and nuanced theories of business mobility can be
developed.