Introduction: Studying (Im)mobility through a Politics of Proximity

This chapter shows that mobility can be a resource or a boundary at the same time specifically for the middle and top managers of multinationals who have international geographic mobility. Sociological analyses on the geographical mobility of people deals with migrations on a global scale and aspects of exclusion and marginality on metropolitan scale, focus on people who transfer for necessity the poorly educated migrants for whom frontiers tend to close everywhere or who remain trapped in their local area because they have no access to geographical or virtual mobility. The chapter discusses various forms of mobility in spatial flow. The first space-temporal configuration characterizes the expatriation and second is identified as reticular mobility with a single base and the third circulation of externally mobile top management, is characterized by transfers which are very brief, of one or two days, and regular from one to three international transfers per week. The chapter explains ambiguous, functional, romantic, expatriation and reticular mobilities.