The making of a skilled worker: the transnational mixed embeddedness of migrant workers

Abstract

Migrant workers’ employment pathways are mainly analysed by observing their behaviour in receiving societies. In dialogue with critical studies of mobility, migration, and skill, we argue that the ‘transnational mixed embeddedness’ approach, used to analyse migrant businesses, should extend to include migrant workers. Based on multi-sited ethnography, we discuss the phenomenon of Chinese migrant workers in Italy who exploit the transnationally embedded opportunities to access training courses in China. We analyse the transnational workers’ agency in circumnavigating socially constructed notions of training and skill, and stress the transformative logic of the migrant trajectories as transnational mobility influences the trainees’ perspectives.

Keywords:

• Transnational mixed embeddedness
• migrant workers
• transnational mobility
• skill training
• Italy
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Devi Sacchetto for his significant contribution, both during data collection and the writing of the paper, by participating in discussion and offering invaluable insights. Any inaccuracies are our sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The ethnographic work was conducted by author B.