Abstract
What happens when well-educated, highly skilled professionals leave their country of origin to work abroad? How do they make use of their skills and competences in another organizational framework and cultural context, and do they experience any limits regarding the acknowledgement of their seemingly transnational competences and diplomas? What kind of obstacles do they meet and what are their strategies for reestablishing professionalism and status in a new setting? In this chapter, we present the results from our ethnographic study “Polish Doctors in Swedish Medical Care”1 as a point of departure for a Bourdieu-inspired discussion on negotiations regarding symbolic capital in another national medical field (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 1988) and the conditions and limitations of transnational mobility of symbolic capital.
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© 2015 Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski, and Zdeněk Uherek
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Boström, K.W., Öhlander, M. (2015). Renegotiating Symbolic Capital, Status, and Knowledge: Polish Physicians in Sweden. In: Cervinkova, H., Buchowski, M., Uherek, Z. (eds) Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137524492_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137524492_3
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