Family, Boundaries and Transformation The International Mobility of Professionals and Their Families (original) (raw)
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Migration Letters, 2018
This special issue aims at understanding " expatriate " mobility with a special focus on the role of family and intimacy, and brings together different case studies, built through different theoretical perspectives. These allow approaching " expatriate " family mobility along two main lines: as part of the making of life trajectories, and as shaped by, and shaping, professional trajectories. This editorial highlights the contributions of the various articles, before addressing a series of emerging issues. Among these, it questions the very notion of " expatriate " in the light of family life, shows the evolution of families and family relations in repeated mobility, and brings to the fore the importance of temporality and timing in family mobile life, as well as that of reflexivity in mobility. As a whole, the various contributions of this special issue complement each other in illustrating the complexities of expatriates' migration and family life in times of increasing global mobility, but also, they raise theoretical discussions, point to possible empirical implications, and suggest avenues for further investigations. Expatriates and Family Migration The geographical mobility of the so-called " expatriates " , also known as expats, represents a significant component of contemporary migratory flows. These people include individuals who need or choose to move internationally for their career or life trajectories, professionals who change residence often for work-related reasons (e.g., employees at international organizations and multinational Acknowledgement: This Special Issue is the result of a stimulating dialogue initiated on the occasion of a panel entitled " Friction-less and Root-less Mobilities? Opportunities, Barriers and Intimacies in Expatriate Migration " , which was organized for IMISCOE and NCCR on-the-move Annual Conference in Geneva on June 2015. During the panel, some of the contributors of this issue discussed the different opportunities and possible constraints faced by mobile professionals and their families by drawing on their ongoing research studies. Afterwards, other scholars engaged in similar researches were also involved in order to enlarge the scope of the issue and its interdisciplinary character.
MIGRATION LETTERS, 2018
This special issue aims at understanding “expatriate” mobility with a special focus on the role of family and intimacy, and brings together different case-studies, built through different theoretical perspectives. These allow approaching “expatriate” mobile families along two main lines: as part of the making of life trajectories, and as these are shaped by, and are shaping, professional trajectories. This editorial highlights the contributions of the various articles, before addressing a series of emerging issues. Among these, it questions the very notion of “expatriate” in the light of family life, shows the evolution of families in repeated mobility, and brings to the fore the importance of temporality and timing in these family lives, as well as that of reflexivity in mobility. As a whole, the various contributions of this special issue complement each other in illustrating the complexities of expatriates’ migration and family life in times of increasing global mobility, but als...
Transnational families: Stories about moving and staying put
Mäetagused, 2014
The article analyses, using material collected through interviews, how members of transnational families talk about their own or their family members' experiences of migration and of crossing different borders. It also looks at the transnational family and the mechanisms of family formation from the perspective of both mobile and settled family members.
The article offers a relatively new theoretical framework articulating macro, meso and micro levels of analysis of the migration process, which often are disconnected in the sociology of migration. This alternative approach rests on the classical sociological concept of career. The concept of migratory career integrates structures of opportunities, individual characteristics and networks to make sense of the migratory experience. This concept helps us to fill the gap between scholars of migration and people’s movement on the one hand, and scholars of integration and incorporation in the new country, on the other hand. Migratory career must be considered as an additional concept to the traditional concepts such as integration, assimilation or incorporation, which are mainly focused on the situation of migrants in the receiving country. Furthermore, the use of the concept of migratory career allows to connect the theoretical thinking on migration to mainstream sociological theories.
Beyond the work-life balance: family and international mobility of the highly skilled
International mobility of the highly skilled has become one of the cornerstones of development in the current knowledge society. Correspondingly, highly skilled personnel are impelled to move abroad in order to improve their competences and build influential professional networks. Mobility implies some advantages involving personal, social and family opportunities when movers experience handicaps in their country of origin. For movers, mobility becomes a new challenge beyond the work-family balance, particularly for women who usually take on the lion's share of childcare and domestic tasks within the family. The literature exploring the gender dimension in relation to international mobility points to complex outcomes. Firstly, women are taking on a more active role in international mobility processes, even when they have family. Secondly, family and international mobility are interrelated both for men and for women, although family could become a hindrance, particularly for women. Thirdly, international mobility and women's career development may interfere with family formation or modify traditional family values. Finally, families moving abroad constitute a challenge for public policy, since they present a new area of problems. We aim to analyse the relationship between international mobility and family based on in-depth interviews from a purposive sample of highly skilled personnel in science and technology. The results of our research suggest that international mobility of the highly skilled has effects on the family and vice versa; however, while international mobility and family are compatible, measures and policies to reconcile them are still insufficient.
Transnational families in the era of global mobility
In book: Handbook of Migration and Globalisation, Chapter: 25, Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing, Editors: Anna Triandafyllidou, 2018
As a result of the dominance of highly individualised, economistic and gendered analyses of migration and globalisation processes, family life has often been relegated to the 'back stage' of research on globalisation and migration. However, a number of closely linked developments in both fields are raising awareness of the critical position that family occupies in the relationship between migration and globalisation, pushing analyses of family life to the 'front stage' of research. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between family, globalisation and migration through the lens of care, focusing specifically on the experiences of transnational families. We begin by examining how uneven globalisation processes produce 'crises of care', which migration can help alleviate. We move on to explore the transnational care strategies migrants and their kin members in the country of origin develop to maintain familyhood across borders, including when trapped in immobility. In such a context, the opportunities provided by ICTs to maintain connections and to care across distance have become especially important. We conclude by arguing that mobility and internet access are thus key features of globalisation that require careful policy attention at both national and transnational levels.
The Politics of Relocation and the Negotiation of Family Relationships across Transnational Space
2012
Expeditious global changes such as urbanisation, international migration, increasing educational opportunities and socio-economic change have led to shifts in contemporary family relationships. As a result of migration, family members are increasingly finding themselves in situations where they have to conduct relationships across different countries. These kinds of transnational relationships entail negotiating communication between spouses, the distribution of household tasks and living arrangements among others. The impact of transnational migration on family relationships and intimate relationships is however often underplayed and even overlooked. Though some researchers are committed to exploring the changing dynamics within transnational families, they have not paid attention to the consideration that transnational family ties cannot function across different worlds without the recognition of family members in different countries. The examination of the complex processes where...
In the ‘age of transnationalization’, spatial mobility is highly valued as a resource and accordingly ‘sedentariness’ is often symbolically devalued. Migration between Poland and Germany (mainly from Poland to Germany) has a century-long tradition. Not only has it yielded the emergence of a dense transnational social space, but is also considered as a re-enactor of cultural traits and symbolic meanings. Spatial mobility is tied to notions of social mobility and to projects of life-making. Since legal restrictions for Polish migrants seeking to work and settle in Germany have vanished, the quest for ‘normalcy’ has enhanced and pressures towards even more migration have increased. I argue that symbolic meanings of mobility are decisive for hierarchies in transnational social spaces. I have put main emphasize on families’ practices of caring for and caring about each other: the first being more a physical or material activity, while the latter is a more symbolic and emotional one. The interviews reveal that people draw multiple differentiations between migrant populations in terms of their migration reasons as well as between the mobile and the immobile. Those differentiations are embedded in the distinct feature of the transnational social space between Poland and Germany with assumed differences in terms of ‘modernity’. At the end the symbolic meanings of mobility also help explain the puzzle of why the emigration rates from Poland are constantly high, although Poland is a comparatively wealthy country.