by Riad Azar, Doctoral researcher in the LSE’s Department of Sociology “I still feel like a nurse, man.” Hugo heaved out a long sigh through his nose. We had been sitting in the kitchen of my flat for an hour. The tea he requested when the interview began had chilled; his back curved forward, resting his elbows on his knees to make a nest for his head in his hands. After discussing at length Hugo’s childhood, his dreams and desires, anecdotes of his father, his journey to London and the life he lives as a trained and experienced ICU nurse pouring beer at a pub in King’s Cross, I moved the interview forward by presenting him with a hypothetical: I: Have you ever had to use your skills, as, say someone falling down on a bus? H: Not yet, actually…[sigh] I would maybe not be the best, because that’s one year and a half I haven’t been practising…No, I’m losing my skills man, [pause, to himself] I’m losing them definitely

Azar, Riad

LSE Research Online

26/06/2017 Researching Sociology @ LSE – Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalshttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2015/09/28/brain-waste-the-deskilling-of-londons-migrant-professionals/ 1/5Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalsby Riad Azar, Doctoral researcher in the LSE’s Department of Sociology“I still feel like a nurse, man.” Hugo heaved out a long sigh through his nose. We had been sittingin the kitchen of my flat for an hour. The tea he requested when the interview began had chilled;his back curved forward, resting his elbows on his knees to make a nest for his head in his hands.After discussing at length Hugo’s childhood, his dreams and desires, anecdotes of his father, hisjourney to London and the life he lives as a trained and experienced ICU nurse pouring beer at apub in King’s Cross, I moved the interview forward by presenting him with a hypothetical:I: Have you ever had to use your skills, as, say someone falling down on a bus?H: Not yet, actually…[sigh] I would maybe not be the best, because that’s one year and a half  I haven’t  been practising…No, I’m losing my skills man, [pause, to himself] I’m losing themdefinitely… Hugo is a character that has become common in the cafés, fast food restaurants, taxi cabs andhotels of Great Britain: the deskilled migrant professional. London is swallowing immigrants as itgrows to take its place in the hierarchy of global cities, strategically positioned as the EuropeanUnion’s largest metropolis and with a colonial history that has carved avenues across the globe. Adeciding factor in this position is the ease with which new immigrants have been able to find work,with employment levels now higher among new migrants than British born whites (Demireva,2011). Considering these numbers, the scholarly literature has begun to focus around how manyof these jobs are being taken by migrants who possess a higher skill set and who are undertakingsignificant downward mobility (Anderson, 2006), some going so far as to claim the dawn of a new“migrant division of labour” (May et al., 2007). Recent research has begun to probe how thisdownward mobility has taken its toll on migrants’ identities, subjectivities, and aspirations for thefuture. My research seeks to continue this discussion by asking the question: How do downwardlymobile migrant professionals experience deskilling.To answer this question, I interviewed nine deskilled migrant professionals between April and Julyof 2014. My interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes, depending on the participant. As theinterviews were in-depth, qualitatively rich and steeped in ‘thick’ descriptions, the sample sizereflects my preoccupation with depth rather than breadth in seeking an answer to my researchquestion. My research finds its place at the conjunction of the sociology of labour and thesociology of migration, interpreted through the lens of symbolic interactionism.Work and LabourClassical research in the field focused around industrial relations and management. Proponents ofMarxist conceptions of working life stressed alienation and class conflict between labour andcapital, while contrarian positions regarding the proper organisation of work for the smoothoperation of an organisation divided themselves into Fordist and Taylorist camps. What is at stakein this debate is how workers can be embedded into the modern economy. Marxist interpretationssee this in light of the contest of power surrounding capital as a social relation, while the Fordistand Taylorist positions are contrasted as methods of good management. Within this debate, wesee the emergence of a literature regarding the conciousness of the worker, both in regards to theskills that a worker can or cannot utilise in relation to the drive towards automation and work as asocialising space for modern individuals. Harry Braverman’s (1975) research into his ownexperience as a worker on a factory floor ties the two to create a synthesis between a working lifeand an individual identity. Skills, a symbol that distinguished man from machine, influenced theindividual and how she saw herself within the larger organisation. Work began to be viewed as a26/06/2017 Researching Sociology @ LSE – Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalshttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2015/09/28/brain-waste-the-deskilling-of-londons-migrant-professionals/ 2/5deeply personal experience, one which held a certain pride and status leading to a growth indemands for representation to management, (Freeman and Rogers, 1999) and also shaped theindividuals’ dispositions towards feelings of self and others (Lane, 1959; Sennett and Cobb, 1972).I began by asking the respondents to describe how they came to their working lives and theirspecialised fields of knowledge. Ali, who spent the better part of a decade as a Farsi languagejournalist in Afghanistan, traced his motivation from youth:You know [pause] from my childhood, I really loved news. Every night, every night, we, allfamilies together we listened to BBC radio station. Because the BBC at that time was the onlynews station [pause] trusted news station for Afghan people, that we could have Afghanistannews from Afghanistan, from BBC. And I think I grew up with, with news, news. Hmm, that’swhy I learned very quick how to  [laughs] work as a journalist.My respondents not only took personal gratification from their working life, it also influenced theway they carried themselves as social actors. As they came into their roles, they expressed to meimages of their selves that were deeply ingrained in the personality of their working life. Whenspeaking about gaining confidence Frederic, an ABD PhD student, said:You will see, in a class you will see five hundred students in front of you, so if you can speakin front of five hundred people, and then you go to another, you see two hundred people, ahundred people you see, OK, I’m used to it, so that gave me confidence, and then it gave mejust a love for this job.MigrationThe scholarly literature on the sociology of work and labour was viewed alongside theoreticaltypologies regarding the migration of professionals. However, these typologies all fail where myresearch begins, that is, within the cracks. They assume that the job those professionals wereintending to occupy (or one of equal stature) will actually be occupied by them. While deskillinghas become a known concept within the context of technological change in the sociology of work,literature on migration has come up short in analyses of this phenomenon. I therefore continuedmy interviews by asking my respondents how they became migrants. Due to a deterioration in civilsociety in Iraq, Salma, a professor and researcher in astrological physics, described to me herdecision to flee:You can spend the whole day doing nothing, doing nothing, and come back and just make,they make your life terrible, and just going there [to the university] itself was very dangerous,and then I started [pause] to receive some threat in my university so I just said no way I haveto leave, and then I left.The very institutions that are tasked with regulating new entries into the field failed, leaving amajority of the respondents with an acute sense of alienation and despair. Hugo spoke at lengthabout his frustrations with the Nursing and Midwifery Council who he claims had extended hisperiod of being unable to find suitable work for failing to explain to him what sorts of documentswere necessary to receive a PIN number:…so I came with these three papers and I was like ‘yea, look that’s my background can yougive me some help’, and she was like, ‘yea, you have to first do this form and then send this,and this’, and I said ‘yea but can you give me some help, and can you try to call the Frenchreference’, and everything, and she was like ‘no’, and but, ‘can’t you help me more?’, and shewas like ‘what are you expecting’, and that this sentence is something I really alwaysremember, ‘what are you expecting’, with this [laughs] with this moody face or whatever, and Iwas like ‘some help!’, and I just took this newspaper I in my, in my, just grabbed thisnewspaper I had in the tube, and I show her and the first page in this standard, eveningstandard shit newspaper, ‘look!, more than 95% going in the ANE they wait more than fourhours because there is not enough nurses’, and I told her like, ‘I’m a nurse, qualified, I come26/06/2017 Researching Sociology @ LSE – Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalshttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2015/09/28/brain-waste-the-deskilling-of-londons-migrant-professionals/ 3/5here in London, I’m, maybe I’m not the best English speaker, but I’m, I want to work with you,and you need some nurses, so why don’t you help me more!’ she said, ‘we can’t do nothingfor you’…I lost my motivation.Fixed Skills and Mobile SymbolsAs the CV becomes the way to document and display skills, it is a vital symbol in the struggle ofthe deskilled migrant professional to get back on their feet. The question becomes, who will lookover the CV and how will they interpret the types of credentials migrant professionals possess?Research in the field of how societies assign positions and allocate value has shown thatemployers have the final say, even when the skills they desire are not qualitatively related to theoccupation (Jackson, 2007). Hugo demonstrates what happens to those who are able to get face-to-face with a potential employer; others, because of language barriers, do not make it past theJob Centre, and the CV becomes a testament of a past life of accomplishments met with anuncertain future. Frederic’s experience at the Job Centre was one of stagnation: For people in the Job Centre, because they asked me, normally you would go to there OK,and they’ll say to you, ‘OK you can do a cleaning job, you can do this, whatever happens.’ Butwhen I hand them, all my, my CV, what I’ve been doing, they didn’t know from where to startbecause first of my English they couldn’t say go and look for some teaching jobs, at the sametime it was really embarrassing for the person, who I was dealing with, who was dealing withmy case to ask me to be a cleaner…He was feeling embarrassed, I could feel it, even thoughit became like, Oh I’m just going in and signing, signing every time. At one point he asked mejust to do my best, to learn more English, and to restart my career by going to UniversityTaking the fall from a successful professional life to becoming a benefit recipient took its toll on therespondents. Salma describes in detail:S: Yes, the problem here is not just with the job, the job and the benefit here, while you are onbenefit you feel yourself, like an, I don’t know how shall I say [pause] insect? I can’t tell that,so you don’t feel yourself normal.I: What does that mean to feel like an insect?S: You don’t feel you are a normal human, you are like, because this benefit is especially forpoor people who are not able to work, not able to do anything, are you understand me, so mewith all these skills,      even my husband, and then sitting down and taking the benefit, it’sjust, really a horrible feeling. And unfortunately that’s something we will never ever get rid of it,unless a miracle happened. A sense of insecurity plagues those who I spoke to in the context of this research. Being unable toguarantee themselves a respectable position in their work, most feel themselves drifting. Whilesome have been lucky in going through the motions proscribed by the bureaucracies they havebeen assigned to, others encounter a much less promising future. Salma describes the feeling:I don’t know, I just don’t know, have you ever walked and you don’t feel you are walking on the[pause] floor? Do you have something like that? Could you feel something like that? Thesame thing…Sociological inquiry focuses on action, but at the heart of what the respondents related to me wasthe antithesis. Waiting compromised a majority of their time; whether it was waiting forbureaucracies to receive PIN numbers and certifications as in the case of Hugo, waiting to learnthe language such as in the cases of Salma, Sofia and Mahdi, and/or waiting to receive thebeneficial status of residency that would confer the privileges of cheaper tuition rates for thoseseeking to further their education like Frederic. It was in this slice of time that most of myrespondents felt that their skills began to decay, that they became unfamiliar with what once wastheir profession. Javier Auyero (2012) describes this process as becoming a patient of the state –26/06/2017 Researching Sociology @ LSE – Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalshttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2015/09/28/brain-waste-the-deskilling-of-londons-migrant-professionals/ 4/5being socialised into a role not as citizen, but one as patient whilst the waiting process takes a tollon expectations.The literature on the formation of professional identities is clear in detailing the iterative nature ofsenses of self as defined in an interaction with others. As my findings have shown, professionalidentity formation is a process that while basing itself in initial education and personal motivation(Ibarra, 1999), is further calibrated through the experience (or lack of experience) of working in thefield (Sims, 2011). With this interactionist viewpoint in mind Salma’s experience is definitive of themajority of my respondents, who felt that the non-recognition of their credentials which were soclose to their professional identities and senses of self was an act of symbolic violence, one strongenough to affect them socially and psychologically.In contrasting the oral histories and lifeworlds of my respondents with some of the major themes ofthe sociology of work and migration, my research illuminates where the scholarly literature fallsshort and from where a new framework to view this unique typology can be drawn from. Inparticular the sociology of work and labour, itself a product of the creation of the modernworkplace, casts a light on the creation of skills and later the relative valuing of those skills basedon categories of class, gender, and race. Respondents’ oral histories give credence to the idea ofskill as a socially constructed and contested category that engenders differing valorisationsbetween socio-cultural contexts. Through this trajectory of locating skills as a socially constructedcategory, the literature has also shown that working life is a socialising experience, and if skills areseen as aspects of an identity, then the removal or non-recognition of those skills is a personal,traumatic experience.ReferencesAnderson, B. (2006). Fair enough? Central and East European migrants in low-wage employmentin the UK. [York, England]: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.Auyero, J. (2012). Patients of the state: The politics of waiting in Argentina. Durham: DukeUniversity Press.Braverman, H. (1975). Labor and monopoly capital: a Degradation of work in the twentiethcentury. New York: Monthly Review Press.Demireva, N. (2011). New migrants in the UK: employment patterns and occupational attainment.Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(4), pp.637–655.Freeman, R. and Rogers, J. (1999). What workers want. Ithaca: ILR Press.Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professionaladaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), pp.764–791.Jackson, M. (2007). How far merit selection? Social stratification and the labour market1. TheBritish journal of sociology, 58(3), pp.367–390.Lane, R. (1959). The Fear of Equality. American Political Science Review, 53(01), pp.35–51.May, J., Wills, J., Datta, K., Evans, Y., Herbert, J. and McIlwaine, C. (2007). Keeping Londonworking: global cities, the British state and London’s new migrant division of labour. Transactionsof the Institute of British Geographers, 32(2), pp.151–167.Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1972). The Hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books.Sims, D. (2011). Reconstructing professional identity for professional and interprofessionalpractice: A mixed methods study of joint training programmes in learning disability nursing and26/06/2017 Researching Sociology @ LSE – Brain Waste: The Deskilling of London’s Migrant Professionalshttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2015/09/28/brain-waste-the-deskilling-of-londons-migrant-professionals/ 5/5September 28th, 2015 | Human Rights, Inequaltities, Student Research, Urban Sociology | 0Commentssocial work. Journal of interprofessional care, 25(4), pp.265–271.

Brain waste: the deskilling of London’s migrant professionals

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