'Home and Away': Female transnational professionals and their construction of home

Abstract

Transnational professionals can be regarded as the elites of a growing global migrant population. These transnational elites are the archetypal transmigrant, the embodiment of flows of knowledge, skills and a new cosmopolitan identity in cross-border spaces. They are able to take advantage of the flexibility in global labour markets, the ability to live and work in different places, and with these, increased leisure time in affluent societies and flexible working lives. Their transnational mobility has prompted new ways of thinking beyond traditional models of assimilation in theorising and empirical investigation in the field of migration. This paper is based on the preliminary findings from the 'Home and Away: Female Transnational Professionals in Hong Kong' research project funded by the Hong Kong Central Policy Unit. The paper considers what flexible geographical mobility mean for different types of female expatriates and the way they construct the notion of ‘home’ in mobile locations. Their stories offer important insights into new fluid living patterns and suggest that ‘home’ can best be understood not as a fixed location but as a set of social relationships that bind people and places in late modern societies.