Työryhmä kokoontuu perjantaina 20.3 klo 15-18, Metsätalo (Unioninkatu 40), sali 5.
Many researchers claim that the globalized economy has created a transnational class of skilled migrants who can choose where they want to live and work. The European Union often sees the U.S. as the model of a well-functioning economy with a respectable amount of inter-state labor mobility, and has the ambition of creating a common European labour market, where workers and skilled professionals can easily move from one country to another according to the fluctuating demands of the economy and European labour markets. Yet local bonds, language and cultural differences and the specificities of everyday life in different countries may still form real life barriers to mobile careers. Even though discrimination based on nationality is forbidden in Europe, differences in social security, pension systems and regulation of working time, for example, pose real challenges to those who exercise their right to freedom of movement, and leads to a stratification of European citizenship.
The migration paths of individuals crossing borders in Europe and beyond have become increasingly individualised. On top of the refugee flows and illegal immigration networks there are young college graduates looking for freedom in the big cities of Europe, retirees moving to the south, nurses opting to transfer their credentials to a country that pays the best salary, IT-professionals moving to the Silicon Valley, and knowledge workers being seconded to developing economies, such as India or China, for example.
This workshop invites papers from researchers and students on a wide range of topics related to transnational labour mobility, the European Labour Market and professional mobility of the highly skilled within and from Europe. The main language of discussion will be English, but it is possible to present your paper also in Finnish.
Send your abstract by 15.2. to saara.koikkalainen(at)ulapland.fi
Asko Suikkanen, Professor, University of Lapland
Saara Koikkalainen, Researcher, Spatial Citizenship in European Labour Markets, University of Lapland (saara.koikkalainen(at)ulapland.fi)
Ohjelma:
Marja Katisko:“Kerrottu työelämä” Research of Immigrants in Finnish Labour Markets
Carol Kiriakos : The World Is My Workplace? The Meaning of Local Place and Interaction across Distance for Finnish Professionals in Silicon Valley
Saara Koikkalainen: Europe is my oyster: experiences of Finns working abroad
Nicol Foulkes: European Knowledge Workers in Emerging Economies
“Kerrottu työelämä” Research of Immigrants in Finnish Labour Markets
Marja Katisko (University on Helsinki, Department of Social Policy, Faculty of Social Sciences katisko@mappi.helsinki.fi)
Movement across national borders has been profound influence on the work career of the migrants. The migrants’ socio-cultural characteristics, such as their ethnic background, habits and experiences, form their migrant citizenship. Home as a place of origin and identity, and as a place of residence and domesticity, has been influenced by aspects of spatial movement. This has barely been studied in the context of labour markets and work cultures.
The focus of this research is on the self of immigrants in social interaction and situation in the work places. The starting point in this research is that we don’t have direct access to experience; instead that life comes to us in the form of stories. The aim of this study is to “come out” of stories themselves to occasions and practical associated with story construction and storytelling. (Bauman 1986; Gubrium and Holstein 2000; 2001).
The study material in this research is analyzed by M.A.K. Hallidays (Halliday&Matthiesson 1994) functional grammar. The verbal processes of immigrants work histories can be divided into three different process types: material, mental and relational processes. In additional to these basic types, there are the important subsidiary types of processes. The aim of the study is to connect the immigrants work life histories to the theory of semantic roles, which can be seen as an important intermediary step in the analysis of subject positions.
For this research 13 immigrants working in Finland have been interviewed. Interviews are performed 2-4 times per each individual, and thus the research material consists of 30 interviews.
The World Is My Workplace? The Meaning of Local Place and Interaction across Distance for Finnish Professionals in Silicon Valley
Carol Kiriakos (European University Institute, Carol.Kiriakos@EUI.eu)
This research explores the meaning of local place and distance for Finnish highly skilled professionals in Silicon Valley. Contemporary literature includes worthy attempts to capture the changing meaning of place and distance in the global era, but the discussions typically remain on a relatively abstract level. Furthermore, the diverse literature consists of paradoxical observations, on one hand suggesting “collapse of distance” and the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts, and, on the other emphasizing the increased importance of locality for innovation activity and the attractiveness of global cities to elite professionals.
The present research aims to bring clarity to these discussions and help fill a gap in empirical research closer to real-life practices and meanings. The methodology is qualitative and inductive: the main data are in-depth interviews with Finnish entrepreneurs, academics and public officials who have moved to Silicon Valley for their work. I examine a) the professionals’ personal relationship to place and b) their everyday work, which spans across the workplace, public space and private space locally, and across localities and time zones globally.
Through the experiences of the professionals and the meanings they give to them, the research aims to shed light on the challenges, struggles and satisfactions of being based in a particular location and at the same time being connected to home country and other distant places. It tries to understand the relationship to a place in a global era and why/how it still matters to be in a specific location. It also aims to map out on a more practical level the experienced possibilities and limitations of local and global interaction, in particular from the perspective of knowledge sharing and everyday organizing of innovation activity and skilled work. Ultimately, it analyzes what actually has changed and what has not when it comes to locality and distance in the age of globalization.
With a cross-disciplinary nature (drawing on sociological theory, economic geography and organization studies) and a foundation in fresh empirical data, this study advances theory on one of the most fundamental issues in the contemporary era. It also provides tools for practitioners involved in organizing highly skilled work and innovation activity globally.
Europe is my oyster: experiences of Finns working abroad
Saara Koikkalainen (University of Lapland, Department of Social Studies, Saara.koikkalainen@ulapland.fi)
Transnational mobility within Europe has been moderately on the rise and the European Union encourages labour mobility to create a common European labour market. My conference paper looks at the experiences of Finns working in other EU countries, based on a Working in Europe online survey, which was conducted in 2008.
The respondents of the survey were found via a method of snowball contact. Thanks to the free movement rights and the ease of migration, mobile EU citizens are a “hidden population” in the destination country and they cannot be easily accessed to form a statistically representative sample. Therefore the results of the survey cannot be generalised to represent the views or career paths of the whole population of Finns living abroad.
The responses of the survey can, however, give an interesting view to the working life experiences of at least this group of tertiary educated Finns in other EU countries. It is well known, that when transferring abroad the loss of cultural capital, as well as problems with degree recognition and knowledge of the local language may worsen the migrants’ labour market situation. Yet the majority of the 364 Finns, whose survey responses were analysed, rate their experiences as positive.
My paper outlines four explanations to this almost univocal happiness. Firstly Finns seem to have good standing compared with other mobile groups and their education holds its value abroad. Secondly they work in international environments where employee nationality per se is not very significant. Thirdly many respondents were employed because of their language skills, especially because they speak Finnish and Swedish. Fourthly, it can be argued, that the sample is biased: perhaps only those who are happy responded, whereas those who were disappointed did not reply - they returned back home. To supplement this picture and account for the relative weight of explanation number four, a set of more thorough qualitative interviews is envisioned as a continuation of the study.
European Knowledge Workers in Emerging Economies
Nicol Foulkes (University of Tampere, Department of Social Research, Nicol.Foulkes@uta.fi)
According to policy programs and discourse on Europe, the vision of the European Social Model combines sustainable economic growth with continually improving living and working conditions. This involves full employment, high quality jobs, social protection for all, social inclusion, equal opportunities, and allows citizens to have a voice and influence on decisions affecting them. In many areas national social models continue to exist in quite different forms among the EU member states, while the goal of becoming a dynamic knowledge based economy is a stark reality as production and industry move to the global south.
In the Global Competitiveness Report 20072008, Denmark, Germany, Finland, and UK ranked within the top 10 (occupying third, fourth, sixth and ninth positions respectively) as some of the world’s most competitive economies .1 While the economic effects are blatantly evident, the gap between rich and poor widens with the increase in power and deregulation of capital markets; profits are capitalized, losses are increasingly socialized and individuals face new social risks. The question arises as to how well equipped the workers and their dependents are to deal with the challenges that arise from globalisation? In other words, how robust are European social protection systems in safeguarding their citizens against both old and new social risks, and is the objective of a European Social Model realistic in the current climate?
Taking the aforementioned sample of countries, the paper investigates to what extent the social rights of mobile knowledge workers, namely seconded employees, and their dependents are protected not only by the state, but also by the enterprise they work for and the market. In doing so I investigate elements of both new and old social risks, by comparing family policy (child support, care arrangements, parental leave), labour market policy (unemployment benefit, activation policy) and education policy (access to adult education, compulsory schooling) in the four countries . Do the employees and their dependents suffer a loss in citizenship rights such as unemployment benefit, access to education and voting rights as a consequence of their move? And to what extent do accompanying wives depend on their spouse’s income?
In keeping pace with globalisation, multinational enterprises have for many years been seconding employees to foreign markets. In recent years however those markets have expanded to include ‘beta’ global cities in developing countries such as India, which do not have solid infrastructures and offer the ‘full services’ one finds in ‘alpha’ global cities such as New York and London. In addition the increasing exposure of (and in some instances attempted integration of) cultures, traditions and ‘norms’ on both a business and societal level, is raising questions and doubts regarding ethics, morality, responsibility, and individual self-fulfilment. The paper also aims to identify some of the social and environmental challenges that these temporary migrants may face during their stay in less developed environs of the world, namely issues of gender, privacy, safety and mobility.
To summarize, it is the aim of this paper to establish to what extent the welfare and wellbeing of individuals are sacrificed or enhanced under globalization hence questioning the validity of the European Social Model’s aim of improving living and working conditions for EU citizens.
3 USA occupied first place (for entire listing see www.weforum.org)
4 My broader research project focuses on employees seconded to India and China, therefore the analysis pertains to employees who move to destinations outside of the territory of the EU.