Social Imaginaries, Transnational Occupational Cultures, and Sense of Place
The Case of German Corporate Managers in China
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Abstract
This article is situated within the ongoing debate about how spatial belonging is reconfigured under conditions of flexible capitalism and mobility. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores localities as imagined places and analyzes attachments and spatial aspirations of mobile managerial elites toward the places of their assignment as powerful imaginative geographies. It shows that managerial spatial imaginations oscillate between longing for belonging and the attempt to control and enclose belonging to places: on the one hand, belonging has to be constantly resisted and monitored, in order to make it compatible with the demands of flexibility and self-optimization; on the other hand, belonging to a career place has to be created biographically as a career asset. This, however, creates paradoxical attachments that have to be negotiated on an everyday basis.
Contributor Notes
Anna Spiegel works at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany. She has carried out research on the transnational mobility of people and knowledge in Asia and Latin America. Her current research focuses on privileged migrations with a specific interest in the paradoxes of elite cosmopolitanism, transient temporalities, and transnational belonging. Her book Expatriate Managers: The Paradoxes of Living and Working Abroad has been published in the Routledge Studies in International Business and the World Economy Series and addresses new forms of working, belonging, and dwelling of mobile corporate managers. Email: anna.spiegel@uni-bielefeld.de