Soziologie

Spiegel, Anna (2021): ‘Permanent provisionality: The homes of mobile managerial professionals between temporariness and permanence’, Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 5:2, pp. 89–108, https://doi.org/10.1386/tjtm_00034_1

This article ‐ based on ethnographic research on German and American managers conducted in China, Germany and the United States between 2011 and 2014 ‐ examins how mobile professionals make sense of the transience of their current homes and how transience is reflected in their homemaking practices. The article argues that for mobile professionals the home becomes a critical place not only because of new multilocal spatialities but also because of new transient temporalities. Due to the corporate practice of giving successive temporary contracts, the mobile managers’ everyday life is characterized by a ‘permanent provisionality’, that is, an incongruence of the initially imagined and the actual time horizons of their mobility. The article shows how this ‘permanent provisionality’ is worked into the material and social textures of expatriate homes.