Capital Mobilization of Skilled Migrants: A Relational Perspective

A central issue for understanding skilled migration in the management literature is human capital. This emphasis ignores other important forms of capital mobilization that skilled migrants from developing countries deploy in dealing with the barriers to their international career mobility. There is therefore a need to develop a holistic understanding of capital mobilization of skilled migrants. In order to develop a more holistic picture, we deploy a relational and multilevel perspective to explore how skilled migrants from developing countries mobilize capital in their efforts to undertake an international career. Career is a central construct in this study. Drawing on a qualitative study of skilled Lebanese in Paris, the paper offers two main contributions to the research on human resource management, in particular to the literatures on skilled migration and self-initiated expatriation. First it extends our understanding of the strategies that skilled migrants use to relocate from a developing country to an industrialized country. Beyond the traditional human capital perspective, it offers insights about migrants' capital mobilization experiences of undertaking international mobility. Second, using Bourdieu's theory of capital, it offers a relational explanation of their capital mobilization in a way to encompass micro-individual, meso-organizational and macro-contextual influences that affect their career choices.