Doing Family on the Move
Highly-Skilled Migrants in Switzerland and Germany
Florian Tissot
This book focuses on the coordination between family life and professional career under the condition of repeated mobilities. It analyses the division between the labour force work and the care work of couples of highly-skilled migrants settling in either Switzerland or Germany. A mutually exclusive model provides an innovative understanding of gendered hierarchies in career achievement. The male partners operate three parallel elements: an upward professional career, a family-life implying child(ren), and maintaining their availability to further unplanned relocations. The female partners can only coordinate two of these concurrently. In fact, the male partners combine the three elements by taking advantage of specific, and mostly invisible, care work that the female partner provides.
Contents
Contents
2 Moving with Skills: A Review of the Literature
2.2.3 Migrants, Families, and Couples
2.3 Highly-Skilled Migration Studies
2.3.3 Intermediary Summary: Construction of a Polarisation I
2.4.2 Assigned Expatriate and Self-Initiated Expatriate
2.4.4 Intermediary Summary: Construction of a Polarisation II
2.5 Gender and Highly-Skilled Migration
2.5.2 Gender as a Dichotomous Variable
2.5.3 Gender as a Relational and Situational Feature
2.5.4 Intermediary Summary: Overcoming the Polarisation
3.1 Decentring and Deconstructing
3.2 Methodological Individualism
3.2.1 Defining the Family and the Couple
3.2.2 The Hidden Economy of Kinship
3.3 Methodological Nationalism
3.3.1 Changing the Entry Points
3.4.2 Temporal Mobilities and Permanent Migration
3.4.3 Defining and Problematising the Skills
4.2.2 Constructing the Interview Corpus
4.2.3 Analysing the Interview Corpus
5.1 Contextualising the Researcher
5.2 Contextualising the Lake Geneva Region and Frankfurt Rhine-Main Region
5.2.1 Family Policy in the two Regions
6 Professional Careers Coordination
6.1 Migration Triggering: An Individual Approach
6.1.3 Intra Self-Initiated Expatriate
6.1.4 Inter Self-Initiated Expatriate
6.2 Migration Triggering: A Collective Approach
6.2.1 Primary-Mover and Secondary-Mover
6.3 Conceptualising the Professional Careers Coordination
6.4.3 Continuum of the Primary-Mover
6.5 Secondary-Mover and Secondary-Stayer
6.5.1 Total-Move of a Partner-Initiated Mover
6.5.2 Unique Challenges of a Partner-Initiated Mover
6.5.3 Half-Move of a Partner-Coordinated Mover
6.5.4 Immobility of a Secondary-Stayer
6.5.5 Access to the Labour Force
6.5.6 Types of Moves of the Secondary-Mover
6.6 Theorising the Professional Careers Coordination
7 Representing Migration: Between Motilities and Anchors
7.2.2 Career Men and Career Women
8 Family-Strategies of Highly-Skilled Migrants
8.1 Conceptualising the Family-Strategies
8.2.2 Homemaking and Caregiving
8.3.1 Low Support for the Care Work
8.3.2 Combination of Formal, Informal and Non-Formal Care Support
8.3.3 Separations and Divorces
8.4.1 Succession of Half-Moves
8.4.3 Mobile Family-Strategy and Children
8.5 Theorising the Family-Strategies
8.5.1 Care Work Organisation and Social Networks
8.5.2 Iterative Logic, Path-Dependency, and Conflicts
8.5.3 Mutually Exclusive Model
9 Theoretical and Empirical Insights
9.1 Decentring the Literature and the Research Design
9.2.1 Consequences following the Decision to Migrate
9.2.2 Narratives Displaying the Division of the Tasks
10 Recommendations for Practice
10.1 Migration, Children, and Gender Wage Gap
10.2 Childcare in the Geneva and the Frankfurt regions
10.3 Family-Friendly Companies
10.4 Summary of the Implications for Further Research and the Recommendations for Practice
11 Conclusion: Motility and Mobility