Anxiety and Individualism

Abstract

The journey this book undertakes begins with the initial decision to leave home. The motivations that people in Xiamen expressed for leaving their homeland can be understood in terms of the demands of a global flexible workplace and in terms of changed understandings of time and place within a global, national and personal context. The value of individualism plays a central role in this decision to leave home and essentially ‘become global’. The tension between value discourses of this heightened individualism and the contrasting expectations of the community results in a form of vulnerability — expressed here as the emotional structure of anxiety. Through exploring the connections between the values that underpin global mobility (such as individualism) and locally experienced emotional structures (such as anxiety) the transnational skilled worker can be viewed as simultaneously reacting against and contributing to globalizing processes.