Theoretical Approaches to Migration and the Quest for a Better Way of Life
Edited by Michaela Benson and Nick Osbaldiston
Key themes in the book include:
The motivations for lifestyle migration: Lifestyle migrants are motivated by a desire for a better quality of life, which may include factors such as climate, access to amenities, cultural attractions, and a sense of community.
The challenges of lifestyle migration: Lifestyle migrants often face challenges adapting to a new culture, language, and way of life. They may also experience cultural differences, social isolation, and a lack of stability.
The rewards of lifestyle migration: Lifestyle migrants often report feeling happier, healthier, and more fulfilled after migrating. They may also experience a greater sense of belonging and connection to nature.
The impact of lifestyle migration on destination countries: Lifestyle migration can have both positive and negative impacts on destination countries. On the one hand, it can boost the economy and create jobs. On the other hand, it can also lead to increased pressure on resources, strain infrastructure, and contribute to gentrification.
1. Michaela Benson and Nick Osbaldiston
New Horizons in Lifestyle Migreation Research:
Theorising Movement, Settlement and the Search for a Better Way of Life
Abstract
In 2009, Benson and O’Reilly (2009a and b) noted a burgeoning field of research investigating what they labelled lifestyle migration, the migration of ‘relatively affluent individuals, moving either part-time or full-time, permanently or temporarily, to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life’ (2009a: 621). This is a migration phenomenon distinct from other more-documented and researched forms of migration (such as labour migration and refugee movements) that has some similarities with elite travel and migration (see, e.g., Amit 2007; Birtchnell and Caletrío 2013), and has developed into a healthy field of scholarly enquiry, generating its own corpus of literature. As Knowles and Harper succinctly define it, ‘[These] are migrations where aesthetic qualities including quality of life are prioritized over economic factors like job advancement and income’ (2009: 11). The centrality of such aesthetic qualities both to the decision to migrate and experiences of post-migration life results in explanations privileging the socio-cultural dimensions of the decision to migrate. As we demonstrate in this introduction, these explanations, developing out of the research traditions of sociology and social anthropology, are often underpinned by a strong commitment to social theory.
Lifestyle migration
On a kind of personal quest, life-style migrants seek places of refuge
that they can call home and that they believe will resonate with idealized
visions of self … the ‘potential self.’
The definition of lifestyle migration as a social phenomenon is intended
to capture the movement and (re)settlement of relatively affluent and privileged populations in search of a better way of life.
The study of lifestyle migration – as opposed to the related studies of
counterurbanisation and amenity migration (cf. Moss 2006; Halfacree
2012) – has taken an interest in these latter dimensions of the decision to
migrate, questioning how we can understand the quest for a better way
of life, approaching the existential and moral concerns embedded in the
decision to migrate through a notably sociological lens.
The better way of life sought by these
migrants is presented as distinct and of its time, a migration trend
notable precisely because it is reminiscent of Giddens’s (1991) quest
for ontological security, Beck’s (1992) risk-avoidance strategies or
Bauman’s (2007, 2008) pursuit of happiness. In this rendering, migration
represents a lifestyle choice that should be considered as a stage
within the reflexive project of the self (Hoey 2005, 2006; Benson and
O’Reilly 2009a).
2. Mari Korpela
Lifestyle of Freedom?
Individualism and Lifestyle Migration
Abstract
The current era is often called the age of individualism: individuality is expected, even demanded, of us. Within this discourse, lifestyle migrants seem to be ideal subjects. Lifestyle migration is often described as an individual’s search for a better life abroad and lifestyle migrants often present themselves as active agents who have improved their lives by way of their own unmediated choice; they have taken their destiny into their own hands by escaping unsatisfactory circumstances and do not expect others (or societies) to act on their behalf. As the interview extract above suggests, the emphasis is on ‘what I want’. Since the individualised self is a central figure in our times and lifestyle migration a common phenomenon, it is reasonable to look at lifestyle migration in the light of individualisation theories.
3. Michaela Benson
Negotiating Privilege in and through Lifestyle Migration
Abstract
One of the core tenets of lifestyle migration is that the people undertaking these forms of migration can be considered as relatively affluent, with migration made possible by the position of privilege occupied by these migrants in relation to local populations within destinations (Benson and O’Reilly 2009; Croucher 2009; O’Reilly and Benson 2009). In this rendering, relative affluence and privilege is mobilised to bring about migration and inextricably linked to the quest for a better way of life. Beyond this, however, privilege needs to be understood in terms of the role that it might play within the migrant experience. The comparison of two cases of lifestyle migration — the British in rural France and North Americans in Panama — presented in this chapter draws attention to how different contexts of migration influence the articulation of privilege and the migrants’ awareness of their position of power in relation to local communities.
4. Brian A. Hoey
Theorising the "Fifth Migration" in the United States:
Understanding Lifestyle Migration from an Integrated Approach
Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of relevant theory for examining both rural and urban lifestyle migration in the United States. Specifically, I explore key explanatory models born of research into what has been called ‘non-economic migration’ occurring since the early twentieth century as context for encouraging an integrated perspective combining elements of each. I highlight changes in how some Americans appear to negotiate calculations of personal and collective quality of life engendered by an emerging economic order based on principles of flexibility and contingency — the effects of which are experienced by individuals, families and entire communities. Through a focused review of relevant literature from a range of social science disciplines and drawing on data from my own ethnographic encounters with lifestyle migrants in their everyday lives, I suggest the need to combine macro- and micro-levels of analysis. Finally, I intend to identify immediate and long-term prospects for lifestyle migration at a time of protracted fiscal and social insecurity and what this might suggest about not only challenges but also opportunities faced by persons and places in the United States.
5. Keith Halfacree
Jumping Up from the Armchair:
Beyond the Idyll in Counterurbanisation
Abstract
The rural features centrally within the wide spectrum of experiences that comprise the attempts to ‘escape to the good life’ that are signalled by lifestyle migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2009). More specifically, though, this is a rural framed theoretically as a social construction, informed strongly by social science’s late twentieth century ‘cultural turn’ (Nayak and Jeffrey 2011) and its foregrounding of the role of the socio-cultural realm within everyday life. This perspective — the chapter cautiously labels it a paradigm,1 such has been its influence within rural studies from the late 1980s — has sought to articulate ‘the fascinating world of social, cultural and moral values which have become associated with rurality, rural spaces and rural life’ (Cloke 2006: 21). It is these cultural values that lifestyle migrants frequently seek to experience (e.g., Benson 2011; Hoey 2005, 2009). However, this chapter argues that understanding the place of the rural within such lifestyle migration must not end with these values; even if it may usefully start with them. Its place is argued to exceed any such socio-cultural framing.
6. Noel B. Salazar
Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life...
Until Paradise Finds You
Abstract
Lifestyle migration has become a popular term to denote ‘voluntary relocation to places that are perceived as providing an enhanced or, at least, different lifestyle’ (McIntyre 2009: 4). Of course, virtually all forms of migration are related to aspirations of a ‘better life’. The focus of lifestyle migration is on ‘the lifestyle choices inherent within the decision to migrate’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b: 609). David Conradson and Alan Latham (2005) describe the motivations behind such migratory moves as self-realisation involving self-exploration and self-development, with career advancement only a distant secondary concern. Enabled by wider economic and political conditions, lifestyle migrants are ‘often, but not always, well educated. They may come from wealthy families, but more often than not they appear to be simply middle class’ (Conradson and Latham 2005: 229).1 They typically possess ‘high levels of cultural capital derived from education, professional skills and cultural knowledge’ (Benson 2012: 6). The classificatory box of these more ‘privileged travellers’ (Amit 2007) encompasses types as different as ‘residential tourists’, ‘rural idyll seekers’ and ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b: 611). Technically speaking, they are expatriates living outside their ‘fatherlanD’. However, not all lifestyle migrants retain their original citizenship and not all maintain regular transnational family, social, financial or professional ties. Many officially change their domicile, clearly intending to live their professional and personal life ‘elsewhere’ indefinitely.
7. David Griffiths and Stella Maile
Britons in Berlin:
Imagined Cityscapes, Affective Encounters and the Cultivation of the Self
Abstract
In contrast to the overwhelming rural and coastal/regional bias in the lifestyle migration literature we are interested in the imaginative pull and attraction of one contemporary global city, Berlin. Since unification Berlin has become a magnet for an increasingly diverse European migrant middle class, fostered — as in other parts of Europe — by intra EU freedom of movement and the creation of a distinctive European migration space (Scott 2006; Verwiebe 2004). In keeping with the broader research on intra EU migration (Recchi 2008), it appears that a significant part of middle-class movement to Berlin is due to the cultural and lifestyle attractions of the city rather than the pull of employment (Verwiebe 2011: 14–15). Lifestyle migration to Berlin is nevertheless relatively unexplored in the literature, despite the increase in overall migrant numbers and the growth in tourism which the city has experienced in recent years.
8. Nick Osbaldiston
Beyond Ahistoricity and Mobilities in Lifestyle Migration Research
Abstract
Lifestyle migration is a complex phenomenon. There is no clear and precise theoretical model that is going to produce the sort of explanatory power that will help us understand all the facets of this modern-day movement. If we attempt to do so, such is the folly of macro social theory perhaps, we risk losing sight of the ‘other parts’ which O’Reilly (2012: 33) reminds us exist in most migration stories. As Favell (2008: 3) contests in his work on ‘Eurostars’, even concepts like freedom have distinct empirical flavours which different groups experience along the fractured social lines of norms, classes, statuses and other characteristics. In lifestyle migration, broad considerations of the movement usually couched as a middle-class quest for the better life, need to be mindful of the other end of the spectrum including gentrification of new areas (Moss 2006), consumer ethics and the visual appropriation of place (Van Auken 2010) and migration patterns of those low-paid ‘service’ workers who follow the wealthier for material and not lifestyle purposes (Nelson and Nelson 2011). Many of these faces of the movement are large enough to warrant not only their own research agendas but also their own theoretical footings.
9. Phllip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart
No Man Can Be an Island:
Lifestyle Migration, Stillness, and the New Quietism
Abstract
Islands throughout the world are known to attract exurbanites (not unlike me1; see, Vannini 2012) in search of a less hurried lifestyle. In part this is because they are generally inconvenient to reach and therefore provide residents with some remove from the rest of the world. And in part it is because they are places that give newcomers symbolic material for a fresh start: a clean slate of sorts (Baldacchino 2006; Peron 2004; Royle 2007). Situated on the Atlantic Coast of Canada, Prince Edward Island (PEI) is not known as a lifestyle migration Mecca, though it is not difficult to find many idyllic and secluded spaces there. Jon, Lindsay and I have found one for our fieldwork stay at an off-grid rental property near Goose River, on the northeastern end of the island.
10. Karen O'Reilly
The Role of the Social Imaginary in Lifestyle Migration:
Employing the Ontology of Practice Theory
Abstract
Academics in recent decades are developing diverse sets of concepts as part of the endeavour to understand, illustrate and systematically account for the interaction of structure and agency in the ongoing production of social life. The concept of the social imaginary, discussed by many of the authors in this volume, is one such concept. It is an attempt to grapple with the creative, individual and ever-changing nature of the imagination, with the socially shaped ways in which a place or lifestyle can be imagined, and with the social outcomes of people acting on their imagination in terms of both their own lives and the shaping of places (and new imaginaries). We have seen in this volume how the social imaginary is of central importance to lifestyle migration — a migration seeped in imaginings and romanticism. But ‘the social imaginary’ is an ambitious concept with an ambitious project, and it has the tendency to become what Billig (2013) has termed a ‘noun phrase’: imprecise jargon that reifies complexes of things, while discounting people and actions. I argue that scholars employing the concept would benefit from thinking through its various elements (and actions) more systematically. It is useful to examine the grand ideas, distant structures, sweeping changes, discourses and significations, that pre-exist given agents, and then to relate these to an examination of the level of the daily practices of agents, their tactics and negotiations, in the context of cultural communities. In turn, the concept of the social imaginary can be employed to understand the shaping of new material and social structures and significations, through the ongoing interaction of structure and agency.