Permanent provisionality: The homes of mobile managerial professionals between temporariness and permanence

Abstract

Nowadays, mobility and transience are no longer exclusively associated with the marginalized and socially excluded, such as homeless or displaced people. On the contrary, mobility and transience have become a constitutive pattern of the highly skilled postmodern workforce. Yet, how mobile professionals negotiate the meaning of their homes in ‘liquid times’ and what homemaking practices they use to deal with the temporal uncertainty of their homes are questions that still require further research. This article – based on ethnographic research on German and American managers conducted in China, Germany and the United States between 2011 and 2014 – contributes to this research question by examining how mobile professionals make sense of the transience of their current homes and how transience is reflected in their homemaking practices. The article argues that for mobile professionals the home becomes a critical place not only because of new multilocal spatialities but also because of new transient temporalities. Due to the corporate practice of giving successive temporary contracts, the mobile managers’ everyday life is characterized by a ‘permanent provisionality’, that is, an incongruence of the initially imagined and the actual time horizons of their mobility. This article shows how this ‘permanent provisionality’ is worked into the material and social textures of expatriate homes.