The potential of virtual global mobility: implications for practice and future research

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic has forced global organizations to adopt technology-driven virtual solutions involving faster, less costly and more effective ways to work worldwide even after the pandemic. One potential outcome may be through virtual global mobility (VGM), defined as the replacement of personal physical international interactions for work purposes with electronic personal online interactions. The purpose of this article is to establish VGM as a theoretical concept and explore to what extent it can replace or complement physical global work assignments.Design/methodology/approachThis perspectives article first explores advantages and disadvantages of global virtual work and then discusses the implementation of VGM and analyses to what extent and how VGM can replace and complement physical global mobility.FindingsRepresenting a change of trend, long-term corporate expatriates could become necessary core players in VGM activities while the increase of the number of global travelers may be halted or reversed. VGM activities will grow and further develop due to a continued rapid development of communication and coordination technologies. Consequently, VGM is here to stay!Originality/value The authors have witnessed a massive trend of increasing physical global mobility where individuals have crossed international borders to conduct work. The authors are now observing the emergence of a counter-trend: instead of moving people to their work the authors often see organizations moving work to people. This article has explored some of the advantages, disadvantages, facilitators and barriers of such global virtual work. Given the various purposes of global work the authors chart the suitability of VGM to fulfill these organizational objectives.

World-Making at the Margins

Transnational social networks are vital to West Africans in managing relationships but also in ascertaining viable ways of being and belonging in the diaspora. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, this paper examines the ‘Baay Faal paradox’ to address sites of contention in West African endeavours to bind a sense of self to transnational social networks. I propose urban world-making practices that sustain connections to transnational social networks from the margins of these relations signal what I am calling ‘affective tethering.’ The term ‘tethering’ in my analysis foregrounds an imagined distance between normative models of practice and purported deviations that result in precarious, unstable and patchy connections to transnational social networks. This approach sheds light on the complex relationship between a person’s sense of self and the transnational social networks that inform ideas of personhood in the context of global mobility and settlement.

ES-HAS: ECC-Based Secure Handover Authentication Scheme for Roaming Mobile User in Global Mobility Networks

The design and implementation of two-factor schemes designed for roaming mobile users for global mobility networks in smart cities requires attention to protect the scheme from various security attacks, such as the replay attack, impersonation attack, man-in-the-middle attack, password-guessing attack and stolen-smart-card attack. In addition to these attacks, the scheme should achieve user anonymity, unlinkability and perfect forward secrecy. In the roaming scenario, as mobile users are connected to the foreign network, mobile users must provide authentication details to the foreign network to which they are connected. The foreign network forwards the authentication messages received from the mobile users to their home network. The home network validates the authenticity of the mobile user. In the roaming scenario, all communication between the three entities is carried over an insecure channel. It is assumed that the adversary has the capabilities to intercept the messages transmitted over an insecure channel. Hence, the authentication scheme designed must be able to resist the above-mentioned security attacks and achieve the security goals. Our proposed scheme ES-HAS (elliptic curve-based secure handover authentication scheme) is a two-factor authentication scheme in which the mobile user possesses the password, and the smart card resists the above-mentioned security attacks. It also achieves the above-mentioned security goals. We also extended our two-factor authentication to a multi-factor authentication scheme using the fingerprint biometric technique. The formal security analysis using BAN logic and the formal security verification of the proposed scheme using the widely accepted AVISPA (automated validation of internet security protocols and applications) tool is presented in this article. In comparison with the related schemes, the proposed scheme is more efficient and robust. This makes the proposed scheme suitable for practical implementation.

Mobility Restrictions and Transnational Families: How COVID-19 Pandemic May Affect Families and Caring for Children?

In this article, we analyse how global mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 may affect Lithuanian transnational families and transnational practices of parenting. The article draws on the data from the quota-based survey, implemented while carrying out the research project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family Practices, Circulation of Care and Return Strategies’ (No. S-MIP-17-117), funded by the Lithuanian Research Council, to analyse the transnational care practices that require the mobility of family members. The challenges created by the pandemic are discussed while analysing the data from the case studies of transnational families. The article reveals that the free mobility of family members in the global world is an important part of the transnational care practices, ensuring continuity of family relations and childcare, regardless of the residence of the family members. The anti-mobility regimes create challenges to family unity, intergenerational relations and give ground to the emergence of new stigmas.

Africa: Her Space-Time Convergence Status

Today, the research interest on the state of mobility and accessibility of a place is growing everywhere. Previous studies on space-time convergence have shown that, the world has become ‘flat’ due to fastness in accessibility of places by goods, information and the people. Whereas this is true, the prevailing state of space-time convergence in Africa is still an outstanding issue of concern. This paper aims to fill this gap through story telling of the information borrowed randomly from existing literature on the subject matter. The results obtained show that, Africa is yet to fully get integrated proper into the global networked society because of her huge transport and communication infrastructure gap. The paper concludes with a recommendation that, African leaders should endeavour to fix the infrastructure gap and must at the same time, purpose to allow a faster cross border movement of goods and people to help speed up space-time convergence to match the global mobility pace.

A Novel Distributed and Federated Digital Contact Tracing Systems

There are several contact tracing solutions, some are for closed user groups, some are for the residents of a country, and some are open solutions with no clear boundary defined. These independent solutions are not adequate to support pre-pandemic global mobility. Ideally, what is needed is a global solution that can support decentralized control over data and at the same time support proximity data exchange among Apps developed by different vendors and for different countries. This paper proposes a family of contact tracing designs with low-risk anonymity that includes a centralized design, a distributed design, and a federated design for global solution.

Global Inequality, Mobility Regimes and Transnational Capital: The Post-Graduation Plans of African Student Migrants

Employing a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of global regimes of mobility and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article seeks to analyse how African student migrants in China navigate global structural inequalities in planning for post-graduation mobility, while strategising to overcome barriers to mobility and capital accumulation. It argues that China’s position within the contemporary global political economy is reflected in the ways these student migrants navigate intersecting global mobility regimes. Moving beyond the ‘stay/return’ binary common in student mobility research, the article delineates three post-study trajectories: returnees, deterred by structural barriers from staying in the host country; those who stay in China, overcoming these barriers by opening businesses, with plans to return home later; and those who plan to accumulate capital in China to meet the requirements of more stringent mobility regimes in the Global North.

A ‘crimmigrant ban’? Global mobility, urban (in)security and the changing dynamics of judicial practices

In the last decades, western countries have developed a set of policies and practices aimed both at crime prevention and social reassurance. Within this trend, the old-fashioned sanction of banishment has regained prominence. Banning orders, in particular, are widely used to remove from public spaces individuals who are deemed a threat to public safety and urban decorum. This article investigates the use of banning orders towards foreign defendants without a valid residence permit in an Italian criminal court. Based on empirical material collected during a one-year period of courtroom ethnography in Turin, this article sheds light on the rationales and objectives behind the use of banning orders. The interviews with courtroom actors reveal how banning orders have lost much of their preventive dimension to become an instrument of socio-urban control towards immigrants. This article invites future research to consider the role that urban management practices might play in the field of global mobility.