ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of official data collected by the United Kingdom's Statistical Authority on international business visitors in the statistical digest, Travel Trends, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). In the UK, official data collected on international travel are derived from the International Passenger Survey (IPS). A long line of literatures from Dunning and Norman (1987) to Bartlett and Ghoshal (1998) have described how transnational corporation (TNCs) have had to manage the difficulties posed by geographically heterogeneous resources, business cultures and regulations that embed subsidiaries operations outside of the host country. Business travel has multiple roles in the construction of organizational space in TNCs, but perhaps one of its most significant roles is in the development of organizational control and coherence. Finally, the chapter concludes by setting out a research agenda for collecting unofficial data sets on international business travel in the world space economy.
