Identities Journal Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Current Issue
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues >
      • Call for Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
    • Submit to Identities
  • Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blogs by Topic >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • More Blog Topics
    • Blog Series >
      • Gaza and Solidarity Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • Submit to the Blog
  • Podcast
    • The Identities Podcast >
      • Listen on Spotify
      • Listen on SoundCloud
  • Events
    • Next Events
    • Recorded Events
  • Contact
    • Contact Identities
    • Keep in touch >
      • The Identities Newsletter
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Current Issue
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues >
      • Call for Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
    • Submit to Identities
  • Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blogs by Topic >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • More Blog Topics
    • Blog Series >
      • Gaza and Solidarity Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • Submit to the Blog
  • Podcast
    • The Identities Podcast >
      • Listen on Spotify
      • Listen on SoundCloud
  • Events
    • Next Events
    • Recorded Events
  • Contact
    • Contact Identities
    • Keep in touch >
      • The Identities Newsletter

Polish migrant women and workplace belonging

16/8/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
Blog post by William Shankley, University of Nottingham, UK

​Nearly twenty years have passed since the expansion of the European Union (EU) led to the significant movement of Polish citizens to the UK. Despite the UK's subsequent departure from the EU, Polish migration assumes a prominent place in the country's migrant diversity.
 
Belonging is a crucial aspect of migrants' lived experience in another country, and previous studies on Polish migrant belonging in the UK have primarily focused on the neighbourhood context as this is contested, resisted and reshaped. Additionally, the majority of existing research has predominantly concentrated on Polish migrants' belonging among those working in low-skilled industries, which was the dominant occupational position most Polish migrants entered into. Nonetheless, Polish migrants' entry into a range of workplaces after their migration offers an equally important site in which to examine their belonging. Furthermore, there has also been a lack of research into Polish migrants working in professional occupations and their belonging at work.
Polish migrants' experiences of belonging have been further complicated by the contextual frame in which they migrated to the UK, which has occurred against an intensification of anti-Polish and anti-Eastern European sentiment, particularly accompanying debates about the country's EU membership and its continued relationship with the system. Underpinning these sentiments have been negative representations of the migrants as unfair job competition but also fears of cultural threats posed by unrestricted immigration and the perceived access of migrants to the welfare state. Consequently, Polish migrants' belonging has been challenged based on their nationality but also by their position in the workplace.
 
Accordingly, my Identities article, ‘Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work’, draws on narrative interviews with fourteen Polish migrant women working in a range of professional occupations, including solicitors, accountants, and business managers, to examine their belonging. The sample also included interviews with eight Polish women working in various low-skilled industries to contrast these experiences and unpack the types of strategies these women used in their belonging work in their workplaces and whether these were confined to those working in specific occupations.
 
Using thematic analysis to examine the rich accounts provided by twenty-two Polish women, the article found that the women faced numerous encounters in their workplaces that challenged their sense of belonging, and these were often contextually embedded in the types of work they undertook. Their stories showed that the women's belonging was challenged based on not only their nationality but also on their gender and occupational position. These challenges occurred among a variety of audiences, including their customers, service users, clients, but also their colleagues.
 
Rather than passively accepting these challenges, many of these women explained how they implemented multiple active strategies to not only resist attempts to undermine their belonging but also made attempts to elevate their status to avoid contestation in the first place. The strategies they used were verbal and discursive and included mobilizing their shared whiteness and Europeanness, accentuating their professional or academic qualifications and work experience, and changing their names to discursively pass as coming from another nationality with a more favourable status. However, these strategies seemed to be confined to professional women mainly because of the cultural capital they possessed, as migrant women working in lower occupational positions were constrained by structural factors relating to their work. Many of them explained that they did not have the time outside of work to improve their language skills or engage in conversations with native British speakers, thus preventing them from undertaking similar belonging strategies.
 
My Identities articles provides insights into the belonging work professional Polish women undertake in their workplaces and offers critical information for policymakers looking to address non-belonging among migrant communities in contexts other than the neighbourhood.

Image credit: Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash​

Read the Identities article:
Shankley, William. (2023). Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: ​10.1080/1070289X.2023.2218200   
OPEN ACCESS
Picture
Read further in Identities:

‘Paperwork or no paperwork, we are guests in this country’: mothering and belonging in the wake of the Windrush Scandal

Game of labels: identification of highly skilled migrants

Intimate citizenship: introduction to the special issue on citizenship, membership and belonging in mixed-status families   OPEN ACCESS
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.



    Explore the 
    Identities Blog

    All
    Activism
    Anti Racism
    Anti-racism
    Asylum Seekers
    Belonging
    Black Lives Matter
    Blackness
    Borders
    Boundary Work
    Cities
    Citizenship
    Colonialism
    Commentaries
    Conflict
    Cosmopolitanism
    Covid-19
    Cultural Memory
    Culture
    Decoloniality
    Diaspora
    Discrimination
    Displacement
    Diversity
    Ethnic Boundaries
    Ethnic Identity
    Ethnicity
    Exile
    Far Right
    Gaza And Solidarity
    Gender
    Global South
    Identity
    Immigration
    Indigenous
    Integration
    Intersectionality
    Islamophobia
    Justice
    Kinship
    Marginalisation
    Migration
    Multiculturalism
    National Identity
    Nationalism
    Nationhood
    Nativism
    Othering
    Palestine
    Policing
    Populism
    Postcolonial
    Race
    Racial Identity
    Racialisation
    Racism
    Radicalism
    Refugees
    Religion
    Resistance
    Special Issues
    Sport
    State Racism
    Stereotyping
    Stigmatisation
    Subjectivity
    Transnationalism
    Victimhood
    Whiteness


    Blog Collection

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019

Picture

Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE

Bluesky: @identitiesjournal.bsky.social
The views and opinions expressed on The Identities Blog are solely those of the original blog post authors, and not of the journal, Taylor & Francis Group or the University of Glasgow.