Conclusions

Travelling intensively to and for work helps but also challenges people to find ways of balancing work and personal life. Drawing on a large European longitudinal study, Mobile Europe explores the diversity and ambivalence of mobility situations and the implications for family and career development. Throughout the book, we found that the importance of the high mobility phenomenon lies mainly in what it reveals of societal changes. From a theoretical viewpoint, high mobility challenges the conceptual apparatus of sociology, revealing changes in the spatiality of contemporary societies. In particular, high mobility illustrates the changing nature of what is nearby, what is connected and what moves, thereby changing their very meanings. From an empirical viewpoint, high mobility provides a powerful lens for exploring a broad range of dimensions of social life, such as socialisation, social inequality, sense of place, territory and potential receptiveness, personal life and gender. We now turn to a brief summary of our major findings and discuss them in relation to the initial research questions.