Applying Bourdieu’s capital-field-habitus framework to migrant careers: taking stock and adding a transnational perspective

Abstract

HRM and Migration scholars increasingly employ Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals, fields and habitus to explain the interrelationships between migrant careers and context. Both literatures employ a Bourdieusean framework to examine devaluation of migrant capitals in host nations and migrant responses to such devaluation. However, their explanations are based on different assumptions of context. HRM literature regards migrants as confined to the host nation context, whereas Migration literature places them in a transnational context, spanning both originating and host nations. In this conceptual paper, we argue for integrating transnational perspectives into HRM literature to offer a more accurate portrayal of contemporary migrant lives, and to capture greater nuance in migrant career experiences. We seek to expand the conceptual lexicon to support new conceptualisations of transnational context, and to explore how locating a Bourdieusean framework in transnational contexts enhances its ability to explain migrant career experiences.

Keywords:

• Migrant careers
• Bourdieu
• capital
• field
• habitus
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants in the Migration, Work and Organisations stream at EGOS 2015 for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. It is the emergence of strong nation-states in twentieth century that triggered the tendency among social sciences to view societies as ‘national container society’ (Lee, 1966) and formulate national-container theories to explain their workings (Levitt & Schiller, 2004). In 1990s, the recognition of the border-transcending nature of many social phenomena, led to transnationalism perspectives gaining currency in social science disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science and geography (Smith & Guarnizo, 1998). While phenomena such as the cross-border movement of capital, global media and emergence of supra-national political institutions were explored under the umbrella term ‘transnationalism from above’, those involving the cross-border movement and activities of migrants came to coalesced as transnationalism from ‘below’(Smith & Guarnizo, 1998; Mahler, 1998). Here, we primarily draw on the latter as it is specific to migrant lives and activities, but recognize their intertwining nature.