Doing the business: variegation, opportunity and intercultural experience among intra-EU highly-skilled migrants

Focusing on the working experiences of the French highly skilled in London's financial and business sectors, this paper examines the impact of ongoing pan-European variegation on intra-EU highly skilled migration in two key respects: firstly, in its role as a driver for mobility, through its association with divergent opportunity structures across different nations and regions; and secondly, as a potential obstacle to the successful realization of such opportunities, post migration, where mobility exposes the highly skilled migrant to new and embedded forms of difference. Such differences necessitate adaptations, and the acquisition of new inter-cultural competencies, that go on to mediate the experience, evaluations and outcomes of such opportunity-driven mobilities. In unpacking the particularities associated with the mobilities of specific populations (the French), to specific places (London) we seek to contribute to a people and place-sensitive understanding of the relationship between spatial mobility and social mobility.

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Mulholland, J. and Ryan, L. (2014), Doing the Business: Variegation, Opportunity and Intercultural Experience among Intra‐EU Highly‐Skilled Migrants. Int Migr, 52: 55-68. doi:10.1111/imig.12120, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12120. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.