Qualitative Fall- und Prozessanalysen Biographie – Interaktion – soziale Welten herausgegeben von Karin Bock Jörg Dinkelaker Werner Fiedler Jörg Frommer Werner Helsper Rolf-Torsten Kramer Heinz-Hermann Krüger Heike Ohlbrecht Fritz Schütze Sandra Tiefel Anna Guhlich Migration and Social Pathways Biographies of Highly Educated People Moving East-West-East in Europe Verlag Barbara Budrich Opladen • Berlin • Toronto 2017 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8474-1106-2. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org © 2017 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. (CC- BY-SA 4.0) It permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you share under the same license, give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ © 2017 Dieses Werk ist beim Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH erschienen und steht unter der Creative Commons Lizenz Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Diese Lizenz erlaubt die Verbreitung, Speicherung, Vervielfältigung und Bearbeitung bei Verwendung der gleichen CC-BY-SA 4.0-Lizenz und unter Angabe der UrheberInnen, Rechte, Änderungen und verwendeten Lizenz. This book is available as a free download from www.barbara-budrich.net (https://doi.org/10.3224/84742118). A paperback version is available at a charge. The page numbers of the open access edition correspond with the paperback edition. ISBN 978-3-8474-2118-4 (paperback) eISBN 978-3-8474-1106-2 (ebook) DOI 10.3224/84742118 Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH Stauffenbergstr. 7. D-51379 Leverkusen Opladen, Germany 86 Delma Drive. Toronto, ON M8W 4P6 Canada www.barbara-budrich.net A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Die Deutsche Bibliothek (The German Library) (http://dnb.d-nb.de) Jacket illustration by Bettina Lehfeldt, Kleinmachnow, Germany – www.lehfeldtgraphic.de Picture credits: www.istock.com Editing: Alison Romer, Lancaster, UK Typesetting: Ulrike Weingärtner, Gründau, Germany – [email protected] Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... 9 Preface: Pathways to the research questions ............................................ 10 1 Introduction ......................................................................................... 11 1.1 The context of EU enlargement ............................................................ 13 1.2 Outline of my research questions .......................................................... 15 1.3 Studying migration and social pathways by means of life stories ......... 15 1.4 Structure of this thesis ........................................................................... 16 2 Context: Czech-German border crossings against the backdrop of the shifting landscape of European migration ............ 20 2.1 Historical interconnections over the past millennium ........................... 21 2.2 The 19th and 20th century ....................................................................... 22 2.3 Border crossings during the Cold War .................................................. 25 2.4 The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the establishment of new migratory spaces ................................................................................... 29 2.5 The enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 and the financial crisis ...................................................................................................... 35 3 Research on highly skilled migration in Europe: state of the art ......................................................................................................... 42 3.1 Changing contexts of highly skilled migration: working towards the liberalisation of skilled migration flows .......................................... 42 3.2 Rethinking the migration of highly skilled people: the research agenda ................................................................................................... 47 3.2.1 “Highly skilled migrants” as the subject of research ................ 47 3.2.2 The neglected gender dimension within studies on highly skilled migration ....................................................................... 49 5 3.2.3 Going beyond the dichotomy of “low skilled migration” and “highly skilled migration” ........................................................ 54 3.2.4 Redefining “highly skilled migrants” and “highly skilled migration” ................................................................................. 56 3.3 An overview of recent studies on highly skilled migration pathways to and within Europe ............................................................. 58 3.3.1 Education – the ticket to work? Statistical evidence. ................ 59 3.3.2 Legal and institutional frameworks affecting highly skilled migrants: studying the interplay of class, gender and ethnicity .................................................................................... 60 3.3.3 An agent-centred approach to pathways to the labour market .. 63 3.3.4 Experiences and coping strategies for deskilling and contradictory class mobility ...................................................... 70 3.3.5 The role of the family and social networks ............................... 79 3.4 Summary and research desiderata ......................................................... 83 4 Biographical approaches to migration and social mobility ............. 85 4.1 Biographical approaches ..................................................................... 85 4.1.1 Historical and theoretical background of the biographical approach.................................................................................... 86 4.1.2 The central biographical concepts ............................................ 93 4.2 Biographical approaches to migration ................................................. 100 4.2.1 First approaches to migration from a biographical perspective .............................................................................. 101 4.2.2 Links between the transnational and biographical approach .. 106 4.3 Shifting social positions in transnational spaces ................................. 119 4.3.1 Theorising social mobility in transnational spaces ................. 119 4.3.2 The transferability of skills across borders ............................. 126 4.3.3 Translocational positionality................................................... 129 4.3.4 Making sense of one’s own class positioning ......................... 132 4.4 Summary: biographical approaches to migration and social mobility ............................................................................................... 134 5 The research process ......................................................................... 137 5.1 Telling the stories: the theoretical background behind the “biographical narrative interview” ...................................................... 138 6 5.1.1 Theoretical assumptions ......................................................... 139 5.1.2 The focus on storytelling ........................................................ 141 5.1.3 The autobiographical presentation .......................................... 141 5.1.4 Narrative constraints ............................................................... 143 5.1.5 Cognitive figures of autobiographical presentation ................ 143 5.2 The reflexive research process ............................................................ 147 5.3 Constructing the sample ...................................................................... 149 5.4 Interview settings ................................................................................ 150 5.5 The interview process ......................................................................... 152 5.6 A brief summary of interviewees ........................................................ 153 5.7 Ethnographical notes ........................................................................... 156 5.8 Transcription ....................................................................................... 158 5.9 Analysis............................................................................................... 159 5.9.1 Formal analysis of the text ...................................................... 160 5.9.2 Structural description .............................................................. 162 5.9.3 Analytical abstraction and the construction of types .............. 164 5.10 Reflections on the research process .................................................... 167 5.10.1 Reflections on the research process in transnational settings . 167 5.10.2 The role of language and translation in the research process .. 170 5.10.3 Being part of it: reflections on my own position within the field ................................................................................... 172 6 Biographies ........................................................................................ 175 6.1 Background: