Abstract
Expats working abroad have been a familiar feature of professional life for a considerable time, but what human resource consultants now call ‘workforce globalisation’ is a breakaway trend in that it involves younger single people, and more women, who have two or more languages, and are able to work in multicultural teams. This globally mobile professional workforce are also globally interactive via social media, and such media are used to locate ways of meeting up with each other – at various sites and through various activities – wherever in the world they happen to be. In this book, Erika Polson explores these new professional migrants as a particularly middle-class phenomenon. It is based on offline and online ethnographic research into location-based social media in Paris, Singapore and Bangalore. The first two chapters examine digital expat clubs in Paris frequented by these new mobile professionals. It is within such milieu that they develop and perform a repertoire of international experiences, associations and tastes that is integral to their social and cultural capital. Polson then turns to the Singapore fieldwork, where there were both continuities and differences in expat meetup scenes, and to a gender-specific study of professional migration where she discusses the frictions faced by single expat women in Bangalore, a city where deeply conventional gender expectations have governed women’s identities and patterns of behaviour in public places. The final chapter in the book looks comparatively at the ethnographic data from the three locations, and sees the virtual communities of networked communications extending into expat meetups themselves, a development that is an effective gain for transnational corporations. This is an interesting study of current global mobilities, both because of its empirical data and because of its detailed examination of a newly emerged phenomenon. It will have considerable appeal across various academic disciplines and fields in the social sciences.