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Proceedings of the British Academy of Management Conference BAM 2025.Kent Business School, University of Kent. ISBN: 978-0-9956413-8-9
Globalisation, connectivity, and mobility are central to the 21st century business experience and entail the crossing of borders as individuals, goods and services, and cultural values traverse domains in search of new markets, new opportunities, and new lives. Borders can vary in terms of how hard, how flexible, how permeable they are, with ‘border keepers’ and contextual factors impacting on the ability of ‘border crossers’ to navigate them speedily or alternatively turn traversing borders into a gruelling experience. It is at borders that businesses reach out to the rest of the world despite increasing levels of uncertainty, disruption, and transition connected to bordering practices, movements, social and political disruption, and economic change. The University of Kent is in a unique position in relation to the economic, geographical, and cultural border of the UK as it is located 17 miles from the UK border at the main port of Dover, which is itself less than 30 miles across the Channel from the French port of Calais. Borders such as the one at Dover and the rest of the Kent coastline are at the forefront of attempts to both prevent and safely facilitate the hazardous crossing of refugees seeking sanctuary and a better life.
However, borders don’t just occur at geographical points in space or only relate to movement between countries and regions. Across organisations and sectors, all forms of organisational worker – professional and non-professional, senior and junior, virtual and non-virtual – can be conceptualised as ‘daily border crossers’. Interpreted in these terms, individuals are understood to experience regular and everyday ‘border crossings’ between their work and non-work lives. However, this experience of crossing borders – the level of flexibility or rigidity felt – is impacted by organisational status, professional standing, the personal resources available to individuals and their social characteristics. The latter include forms of difference such as class, race, gender, sexuality and disability. Understood in terms of domains, the extent to which individuals can separate or integrate their work and non-working lives when crossing the border between home and work, can be connected to how forms of difference come together intersectionally. How does the possibility of being an integrator of home and work domains, a segmentor, or a combiner of integrating and segmenting border practices, manifest as a source of inequality and what are the consequences of this? What does the emergence of working from home (WFH) and the growth of virtual working mean for everyday border crossing? In what way does the increased blurring of work-life boundaries impact on everyday border crossing between work and home? What can contemporary leaders at all levels of organisation do to ease the experience of everyday border crossing at an individual and organisational level? How does the intensification and extension of work influence everyday border crossing? Finally, how can organisations shape their borders internally and externally with employees, customers, suppliers and competitors so that experiences of border-crossing do not become a hindrance to the business?
The British Academy of Management Conference 2025 hosted by the Kent Business School, University of Kent will examine border crossing in all its forms, taking into account the temporal, spatial, geographical, sociological and psychological transitions that everyday border crossing entails.
