Lifestyle Migration

International Residential Mobilities, 2021

This chapter explores lifestyle migration from the vantage point of a global sociology of migration. It picks up strands of the transnational approach to migration studies, and asks what other concepts and concerns emerge when lifestyle migration is added to our picture of global migrations. The chapter explores how the self-understanding and place representations of North-South migration, often studied in lifestyle migration scholarship, reflect global inequalities. Drawing on Bourdieu s field theory, the chapter develops some key concepts for lifestyle migration scholars to think with, concepts that allow us to locate self-projects, identities, emotions and place representations in global social space. The chapter also reflects on the role of a critical, public sociological approach that lifestyle migration may be able to develop towards lifestyle migration and global inequality.

For the past few years, the term ‘lifestyle migration’ has been used to refer to an increasing number of people who take the decision to migrate based on their belief that there is a more fulfilling way of life available to them elsewhere. Lifestyle migration is thus a growing, disparate phenomenon, with important but little understood implications for both societies and individuals. This article outlines and explores in detail a series of mobilities that share in common relative affluence and this search for a better lifestyle. We attempt to define the limits of the term lifestyle migration, the characteristics of the lifestyle sought, and the place of this form of migration in the contemporary world. In this manner, we map the various migrations that can be considered under this broad rubric, recognising the similarities and differences in their migration trajectories. Further to this, drawing on the sociological literature on lifestyle, we provide an initial theoretical conceptualisation of this phenomenon, attempting to explain its recent escalation in various guises, and investigating the historical, sociological, and individualised conditions that inspire this migration. This article is thus the first step in defining a broader programme for the study of lifestyle migration. We contend that the study of this migration is especially important in the current era given the impact such moves have on places and people at both ends of the migratory chain

The Sociological Review, 2016

This article places under critical and reflexive examination the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of lifestyle migration. Developed to explain the migration of the relatively affluent in search of a better way of life, this concept draws attention to the role of lifestyle within migration, alongside understandings of migration as one stage within the ongoing lifestyle choices and trajectories of individual migrants. Through a focus on two paradigms that are currently at work within theorisations of this social phenomenon-individualisation and mobilities-we evaluate their contribution to this flourishing field of research. In this way, we demonstrate the limitations and constraints of these for understanding lifestyle migration; engaging with longstanding debates around structure and agency to make a case for the recognition of history in understanding such the pursuit of 'a better way of life'; questioning the extent to which meaning is made through movement, and the politics and ethics of replacing migration with mobilities. Through this systematic consideration, we pave the way of re-invigorated theorising on this topic, and the development of a critical sociology of lifestyle migration.

Intersections, 2022

The first panel of the workshop aimed at conceptualising the shift in the drivers of migration. One way to understand the shift from economic accumulation to lifestyle consumption is, in Weberian terms, as a shift from Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) to Wertrationalität (value rationality). Alternatively, one can conceptualise it as a shift from production to reproduction migration (Xiang, 2021). How useful are these distinctions? Can they help in reformulating gravity-based push-pull models in migration theory? Should the role of social reproduction, understood as everything that sustains the generational reproduction of life (including education, environmental quality, healthcare, and care for the elderly) be acknowledged in shaping migration decision-making more generally in shaping both the symbolic (Wert) and economic (Zweck) landscape of mobilities? Or should values (such as nostalgia for a simpler life and more meaningful human relations) and ideologies (such as freedom or tradition) be acknowledged as determinants of migration in their own right? Full article is available at https://www.eth.mpg.de/6184512/Geopolitics_2022.pdf

AAU Project, 2019

This master thesis aims to juxtaposes two disperse concepts: lifestyle migration and informality. In a case study around the Lisbon and suburban areas, the focus directs on lifestyle migrants from northern Europe migrated to south to Portugal for an escape to a better quality of life, away from cold to a place fit them best. The literature review examines lifestyle migration critically through three correspondent concept fields; the power of mobility, transnationalism and sociocultural-economical essential variables to revise a wished or a specific lifestyle. It gives a critique of the literature on how it is presenting lifestyle migrants in research. With empirical qualitative methods, the subject entering lifestyle migration from the angle of tourism expands it into mobility where it critically excavates of lifestyle migrants within Europe with the concept of informality. In-depth interviews, together with casual conversations with various groups, hold up the methodological groundwork on the empirical data. Moreover, the thesis shed light on informality, a field which recently becomes an emerging study within tourism expands it by examining new angles to receive a wished lifestyle. The analysis takes new insights of the field of how project informality, not only to be an advantage for the lifestyle migrants and informality but it will highlight informality to be an illegal mare tool or an escape from poverty. A dialectic view of the migrants exist which show how power constitutes within directed policies by nations on the one hand, and established systems the other hand both, which will willingly and unwillingly keep lifestyle migrants’ attached strings with both countries. For some, nation-state aid by citizenship and hypermobility empower one’s life that fits better personal preference. However, it is also shown that the transnationalism of lifestyle migration also changes one’s perspective of both the country of origin and the new host country. At first, it was an aspiration being away from cold and darkness, but afterwards, some even might antagonise their nation of origin. The conclusion shows a possibility to include or exclude social and cultural barriers but might not fully grow into an integrated part of the society because of a lack of formal rights. However, constituted by mobility, they gain power through their status as lifestyle incentivised by the nation-state policies.

eds) (2009) Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences. Surrey: Ashgate. 168 pp. images of migration are often populated by people from the Global South fleeing war, environmental degradation, and poverty to the Global North where they are seen as threatening and inscrutable outsiders. Much of contemporary research focuses on the dynamics of integration and estrangement in various local -global contexts where resources or community relations are considered to be strained by the influx of working class migrants. Studies of voluntary migration from the Global North are usually pigeonholed in the genre of travel literature where host communities rarely make an appearance and the migrants remain rooted in their countries of origin as they pass through stunning scenery. Recent books, such as Eat, Pray, and Love, construct travel and movement as spiritual and personal awakening in exotic locations where wise and colorful natives appear to help protagonists along the path of self-actualization but have little personhood of their own. This metanarrative of journey as self-knowledge has deep roots in western literature, but is generally distinct from the literature of migration which deals with the socio-cultural collisions relocating in a new and unfamiliar territory. The recently published Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences is a small gem of a book. It is well written and offers interesting perspectives on stories of relocation and the diversity of hopes amongst émigré groups. Like a stereoscopic viewer, each of the ten chapters provides a unique view into communities of seekers who migrate voluntarily in search of a more fulfilling lifestyle. The communities represented in the book range from British retirees in Spain to the Anglo wives of Italians living in Florence to westerners living in India for extended periods to Americans from the metropolitan centers of the Northwest migrating to the Midwest. During a year of ethnographic research, Michaela Benson, for example, explores the desire for difference amongst British residents in the south of France. Finding that many Brits have been attracted to moving to the region to follow a fantasy, in many ways, Benson reveals a deep ambivalence in the community about identity and the social class that has traveled with them across the Channel. The complexities of marriage between Anglo wives and Italian husbands are examined by Catherine Trundle through the narratives of the women. A more theoretical introduction and summary of the eight separate cases nicely bookend this collection.

Migration Studies, 2015

This article argues that analytical concepts used in migration (and other) research are most effectively employed empirically when their methodological underpinnings, and the nature of their development, are fully understood. Inductively designed conceptual frameworks developed through long-term qualitative research are a useful way of (re)thinking migration that can free researchers from the constraints of externallyimposed frameworks, categories and conceptualisations. In order to make this argument, we use the concept of lifestyle migration and consider closely the ways in which this term was developed, not to capture a discrete or homogenous category of migrants, but rather as an analytical tool and an alternative way of thinking about migration. Drawing impetus from a close examination of a specific attempt to operationalise lifestyle migration in quantitative research, we are led to consider the political and governance implications of using (migration) labels, and the overlaps and synergies between types of migration understood as practices informed by meanings and understandings. Here, we specifically explore, on the one hand, how economic factors intersect with lifestyle in migration and, on the other hand, the role of lifestyle as imagination, aspiration and way of living in other migration processes not necessarily labelled lifestyle migration.

Ashgate eBooks, 2009