Highly Skilled Migration As a Structuration: What Is New?

This paper examines the role of interaction between social structure and human agency in the process of international migration of the highly skilled professionals. The discussion draws from Giddens‘s structuration theory and Bourdieu’s forms of capital. It revisits Giddens’s analysis of duality of structure and relocates this in a migration field. This presentation is devoted to explore second questions: Why do highly skilled professionals migrate even they are financially satisfied? Why others do not consider migration? What kinds of forces in migration decision process do participate? This paper is based on results from twenty in-depth open ended interviews with highly skilled professionals of Lithuania in the fields of natural and technological sciences. Migration and social status is seen as endless process constructed from set of events passed on micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

In the view of structuration theory migration is seen as recursive process formed and transformed by active agents and itself shaping and structuring subsequent social behaviour of agents. Both structural determinants in the countries of emigration and immigration and acknowledgment of migration as efficient strategy for life betterment creates new cultural element in the social structure that influences migration-decision making of other peoples. International migration is a continuous interaction between migrants and economical, political, social, and cultural contexts on macro level in the sending and receiving countries.

New insights shed light on deeper than just economic considerations layers involved in forming attitudes towards international migration. The structural ant socio-cultural context where individual is acting, migration experience in parent family, seek for higher social status, personal freedom, and need for professional recognition are just several pieces of the puzzle, the outcome of which is decision to (not) migrate.