From cooks to chefs: skilled migrants in a globalising culinary field

ABSTRACT

Migrants do not simply move across physical spaces but within institutionalised social fields, including occupational fields. This ethnographic study takes a globalised culinary field – the social and economic space of fine restaurant dining – as an example of an emergent transnational social field. Focusing on culinary migrants to Shanghai, it shows how the institutionalisation, professionalisation and globalisation of the culinary field create new opportunities for the mobility of workers. Transnational mobility can be advantageous to the career mobility of culinary workers at all levels, from line cooks, to head chefs, and further to celebrity chefs building global brands. More generally, the mobility of skilled labour is shown to depend on the transnationalisation of the fields in which skills are socially defined, and migrants themselves are key players in instantiating and expanding a field.

KEYWORDS:

• skilled migration
• skill recognition
• skill acquisition
• culinary migration
• mobility lattice
• gastronomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).