Ruby Gropas

Voting with their feet: highly skilled emigrants from southern Europe

In this article, the authors present new empirical data on highly skilled emigrants from two southern European countries, Italy and Greece, which have been particularly hit by the global financial and Eurozone crisis. The data have been generated by an e-survey conducted in late spring and summer 2013. Through analyzing the responses of Greek and Italian citizens who have chosen to emigrate, the authors present new insights on their educational backgrounds, the conditions that have motivated their decision to emigrate, and the way in which they have defined their migration project. It is argued that the decision to migrate is driven by a sense of severe relative deprivation as a result of the crisis and a deep frustration with the conditions in the home country. The crisis seems to have magnified the “push” factors that already existed in Italy and Greece and that now nurture this migration wave. At the same time, however, this migration is also framed within a more general perspective of a vision of life in which mobility and new experiences are valued positively and also seen as part of one’s professional identity.

Drivers of highly skilled mobility from Southern Europe: escaping the crisis and emancipating oneself

ABSTRACT Since the outbreak of the crisis in Southern Europe, young highly educated Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Greeks have been taking their talents and expertise to other countries in search of a better quality of life and career prospects. This paper explores the characteristics of these new emigrants, the reasons for which they are leaving, and whether these reasons are shaped by the economic crisis, by pre-crisis grievances, or by other factors. We analyse original data from 6377 questionnaires collected in 4 countries through an e-survey we ran in 2013. We refer to the existing literature on the drivers of highly skilled emigration and the (un)employment situation in the four aforementioned Southern European countries which have been hardest hit by the economic crisis. We suggest that while gender is not important, age, marital status, education and satisfaction with current employment (both income related and with regard to future prospects) are important factors predicting emigration. Non-economic factors, notably career opportunities, quality of life and future prospects supersede all other considerations in the decision to emigrate for these highly educated Europeans.

Creative resistance in times of economic crises : community engagement, non-capitalist practices and provoking shifts at the local level : from Catalonia to experiences in Greece

Crises, and even more so their aftermath, are transformative experiences for democracies and their citizens. In times of crisis, we see efforts aimed at protecting the status quo that is challenged by the crisis; we also see attempts aimed at transforming institutions, processes, behaviours and narratives in order to address the causes that led to the crisis, address their consequences or create new, more adaptable or resilient conditions. Existing power structures and relations may be further consolidated through these processes or they may be fundamentally altered.

From One-directional to Multi-directional Paradigm Shift

In the existing literature, the concept of paradigm has traditionally been interpreted as a one-dimensional phenomenon with a potential impact on other dimensions which are not intrinsic to the paradigm. For example, in the view of Kuhn paradigms are ‘universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’.

Has the Financial Crisis Led to a Paradigm Shift

Before the outbreak of the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007, the ways in which financial markets, institutions and actors functioned reflected, to a great extent, specific paradigms about how financial markets and institutions ought to work and how investors behave. Markets were perceived as informationally efficient, and financial innovation was considered an effective tool of risk management and economic growth (see also Greenspan 2000). Equally, self-regulation of the markets by the financial industry was considered an effective regulatory tool. The pro-self-regulatory approach of policy-makers before the crisis was patent in the opposition of the US Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Reserve to the attempts of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to strengthen the public regulation of over-the-counter derivatives in the late 1990s (Nutting 1998). Gradually, in the last couple of decades, politics had come to be seen as subordinate to the markets. Ever since Francis Fukuyama’s post-1989 ‘end of history’ idea became prevalent (Fukuyama 1992), suggesting that Western-style liberal democracy combined with capitalism had prevailed over other socio-economic paradigms, the neoliberal version of free market economy with a limited role for the state became the dominant one. In the second half of the 2000s, markets were increasingly less subject to political scrutiny while regulatory institutions and mechanisms were further relaxed. Nobody questioned the entanglement of vested interests within such institutions and mechanisms, and financial rating agencies became hegemonic in making the day or predicting doom and gloom for entire countries and economic activity sectors. International organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did little to effectively contest this subtle erosion of their power in favour of more private and even less accountable private actors such as banks, multinationals and rating agencies. The roles of the IMF and of the World Bank before the GFC generated much dissatisfaction among global civil society (Higgott 2012: 20).

Toward an Anthropology of the European Union: Insights from Greece

How is Europe perceived by its citizens? What does Europe mean for European Union (EU) citizens? In what ways does ‘Europe’ materialize in our everyday life? How does it manifest itself and what do we feel about what ‘Europe’ represents? In what ways do European citizens experience their individual, or their collective belonging to the EU in the quotidien, in the simple every day?