Radical changes in the lives of international professional women with children: from airports to home offices

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to discover the impact of restrictions connected with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on the work and life of international professional women with children.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative, explorative research was conducted with 12 international professional women, who were professional women with children under 12; semi-structured online interviews were used.FindingsThe radical decrease in international travel combined with an increase in online work and the increased demand of parenting resulted in work overflow, temporary re-traditionalisation of gender relations and a radical decrease in international mobility with respect to future prospects.Research limitations/implicationsThe relatively small and non-representative sample needs to be complemented with further investigation into the social and economic consequences of restrictions connected with the COVID-19 pandemic.Social implicationsA large-scale crisis like the pandemic-related lockdown has had a tremendous effect on societies, including with regard to gender relations. Reflection will be needed in the aftermath of the crises and the gender equality achieved before the lockdown needs to be rebuilt.Originality/valueThe exceptional case of the COVID-19 pandemic generated the need to understand the new situation, especially in the life of mobile professionals and women with small children.

Permanent provisionality: The homes of mobile managerial professionals between temporariness and permanence

Nowadays, mobility and transience are no longer exclusively associated with the marginalized and socially excluded, such as homeless or displaced people. On the contrary, mobility and transience have become a constitutive pattern of the highly skilled postmodern workforce. Yet, how mobile professionals negotiate the meaning of their homes in ‘liquid times’ and what homemaking practices they use to deal with the temporal uncertainty of their homes are questions that still require further research. This article ‐ based on ethnographic research on German and American managers conducted in China, Germany and the United States between 2011 and 2014 ‐ contributes to this research question by examining how mobile professionals make sense of the transience of their current homes and how transience is reflected in their homemaking practices. The article argues that for mobile professionals the home becomes a critical place not only because of new multilocal spatialities but also because of new transient temporalities. Due to the corporate practice of giving successive temporary contracts, the mobile managers’ everyday life is characterized by a ‘permanent provisionality’, that is, an incongruence of the initially imagined and the actual time horizons of their mobility. This article shows how this ‘permanent provisionality’ is worked into the material and social textures of expatriate homes.

Mobile Nationalism: Parenting and Articulations of Belonging among Globally Mobile Professionals

This article examines whether and how globally mobile middle-class professional families engage in practices of nationalism through forging connections with a ‘home nation’ despite continuous relocations for work. Drawing on the concept of boundary objects which are used to facilitate frequent boundary crossings, we identify the promotion of language acquisition and cultural or national rituals and traditions as two central family practices that maintain strong connections to a form of national belonging despite being physically de-territorialised. We coin the term ‘mobile nationalism’ to make sense of the ways these globally mobile professional parents cultivate a sense of identity, coherence and the necessary resources for future mobility. We argue that these articulations of nationalism continue to be critical as we seek to understand subjecthood formation in the face of the imperatives of globalisation.

Mobile Professionals and Metropolitan Models: The German Roots of Vocational Education in Latin America

The Latin American model of vocational education has been widely portrayed as a homegrown success story, particularly by scholars and stakeholders who are aware of the region’s skill deficits, wary of alien solutions, and suspicious of institutional transfers more generally. Is the Latin American model really homegrown? I use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to trace the model’s mores and methods not to the New World but to Central Europe and go on to identify three different transmission paths in the 20th century: imitation by Latin Americans of German origin, descent, and/or training in the run-up to World War II; propagation by West German attachés and advisors in an effort to rehabilitate their country’s image in the wake of the war; and adaptation by local employers and policymakers—who received additional support from Germany—at the turn of the last century. The results suggest that institutional importation is less a discrete event or outcome to be avoided than an ongoing process that, first, entails translation, adaptation, and at times obfuscation by importers as well as exporters; and, second, is facilitated by immigrants, their descendants, and diplomats in transnational contact zones.

(Im)Mobile imagination. On trailing, feeling stuck and imagining work on-the-move

Emerging research focuses on the role of time in the context of mobility and explores the conditions of ‘wait’ and ‘stuckness’ as conceptual tools for understanding the tempos and socio-cultural implications of mobile experiences. This paper contributes to this research by exploring these conditions in the context of work and geographical mobility, with a special focus on people who migrate and follow their working partners in international professional migration and temporarily live in Switzerland. The increasingly mobile and changing conditions of some professional sectors have made transnational career trajectories imaginable also for many partners. Yet, at times, their working life is not easily reconstituted on the occasion of the move, and the timing for job-search and unemployment can extend indefinitely. I will discuss how mobile professionals’ partners, by transiting from a working situation to another one that is not yet in place, experience a condition of stuckness between identities, phases of life and destinations of migration. I will ask how the subjective experience of stuckness can trigger and at times block a person’s capacity to imagine work under conditions of geographical mobility.

“Authorized to work in the US”: Examining the myth of porous borders in the era of populism for practicing linguists

This paper explores top-down, enacted, institutional pushbacks to supermobility and superdiversity in the under-examined arena of academia using emerging frameworks in political economy and the geography of mobility. Zooming in on the discoursal framings of a recent year of job advertisements on a popular, open-source forum for linguists supplemented with qualitatively and quantitatively sourced data from international, national, and local institutional contexts, the paper examines how macrocontextual pushes toward political populism combined with a synchronous tightening of job markets in academia have enacted a plethora of labels for temporary work in lieu of permanent academic positions—now, increasingly the only option for job seekers in a hypercompetitive academic market. In this manufacturing of euphemization discourse, we witness the invention of novel, microlinguistically rendered lexicalizations of semiotic redundancy in academic capitalism’s own obfuscation of profit margins, and a concomitant manufacturing of a new discourse of rationality in which floating semiotic signifiers at multiple scales deploy nationality-criteria to justify ethnic exclusion and/or entry into academic space. More crucially, in these commonsensical framings, we encounter both causation and consequence of newly enacted barriers to transnational mobility. In challenging the myth of porous borders for mobile professionals in the post-global moment, these emerging linguistic signifiers point to the ascendancy of a new public affectivity on display in intellectual spheres and a saturation of sentiment toward illiberality.

“Switzerland doesn’t want me” Work, precarity and emotions for mobile professionals’ partners

A wide range of professions demands mobility as a requisite for “excellence”, success and “good performance”. At the same time, more precarious and flexible conditions, ranging from unemployment, to temporary, free-lance and self-employed occupations, now characterize the mobile trajectories of a large number of professionals and their partners. What is the emotional cost of these conditions in mobility? How do mobile professionals’ partners feel and deal with feeling rules regarding unemployment and job search when moving? The article examines the case of Switzerland, by exploring the experience of mobile professionals’ partners.

Negotiating ‘national’ and ‘international’ elements of culture in a transnational social field

This article is concerned with the experience of children whose parents are highly mobile professionals, also known as ‘Third Culture Kids’ (TCKs). Through a focus on everyday practices and local emplacement, it shows how the cities of Melbourne and Singapore influence TCKs’ individual trajectories and complex forms of identification. By observing their engagement, or lack thereof, with the local majority population, the article demonstrates how ethnicity, among other factors, influences their experience of place and position of privilege. Participants learn to negotiate ‘national’ and ‘international’ elements of culture by drawing on social distance, international networks, language skills and geographic mobility.