Migrant workers’ engagement with labour market intermediaries in Europe: symbolic power guiding transnational exchange
研究了来自中欧和东欧的移民工人在跨国劳动力市场中介影响下的策略，利用布迪厄理论框架分析他们在英国获取和转换资本的过程，揭示了文化资本和中介服务的作用。
This article explores the strategies of migrant workers from post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within the process of transnational exchange characterized by transnational labour market intermediaries that have substantially altered the former national bilateral employment relations. Utilizing a Bourdieuian conceptual framework it examines Slovenian and Polish workers’ migration strategies and struggles to acquire and convert capitals within the process of transnational exchange and upon arrival in the UK. The article uncovers the (self-)colonial cultural capital embodied in CEE workers’ habitus that drives their strategies to take up various working and training opportunities in the UK in order to acquire (trans)nationally recognized cultural capital. This labour of acquisition drives Polish and Slovenian workers to seek specific cross-cultural and ethnic-niche intermediary services that can manipulate the most reliable symbolic signs in order to make profits from migrant worker-consumers. In this regard the article also exposes inter- and intra-ethnic variations.