Transnational Work in the Biographical Experiences of Traditional Professions and Corporate Executives: Analysis of Two Cases

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to inspect how, and to what extent, working abroad (or transnational work) and exposure to non-native forms of life are likely to be a vehicle of Europeanisation understood in terms of a process through which a European mental space and European identifications (as defined in the project) may emerge. The database consists of 67 autobiographical narrative interviews carried out mostly with educated persons of European origin. Bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of immigrants take low paid and menial jobs, so that current East-West migration in Europe may be homologous in some respects to South-North migration during the 1960s and 1970s, this could be seen as a somewhat skewed sample. However, we offer a closer look at ‘well educated’ mobile Polish people, whose type of work affects their attitudes towards various kinds of ‘collective’ belonging, especially European.