|
|
Cosmopolitans, Organization Men, or Just Ordinary Migrants?
| In descriptions of the lives of knowledge workers or expatriates, two dominant images can be identified. According to the first, highly-skilled workers who travel around the world for their jobs are ‘cosmopolitans’, given that they are comfortable in many places and are open to different cultures and lifestyles. According to the second image, however, knowledge workers are ‘organization men’, who only feel at home in their own expat bubble, and whose lives are extremely dominated by their occupation. These two images have in common that knowledge workers are portrayed as a very distinctive group of people. The nature of their movement and settlement is considered to be ‘clearly very different to the standard migration/immigration story’ (Favell 2008). In this paper, I argue that knowledge workers actually are in many ways comparable to more ‘classic’ types of migrants. A systematic comparison between knowledge workers and middle-class immigrants in the Netherlands shows that although differences certainly exist, regarding their incorporation into the host society and their doubts about where they can find the best ‘quality of life’, both groups are rather similar.
|
|
