Anna Ferro

Migration studies analysing firms' recruitment behaviour are quite limited.This article, built around and examining a demand-driven labour migration hypothesis, explores how recruitment decisions by companies can affect international migratory flows. The study focuses on the construction industry, where a foreign (nondomestic, or expatriate) labour force forms a major component. Through a cross-country comparison, we highlight the impact of the characteristics of the sector and of labour market conditions on recruitment decisions impinging on foreign (non-domestic, or expatriate) labour.The article finally suggests a typology of strategies that construction companies may adopt in order to recruit foreign workers, and it analyses those factors that influence the different decisions in each national context. By considering in depth the relationship between recruitment strategies and patterns of international labour mobility, it is then explained why a company's behaviour can either produce immobility or mobility of foreign workers.

Among the aspects discussed within the globalisation process, the international mobility of professional workers assumes considerable relevance. This paper focuses on migratory aspirations among knowledge workers within the context of economic globalisation and market restructuring in Romania. Due to a lack of literature dealing with these issues, the originality of this study consists in its attention to the stage immediately preceding migration: how highly skilled potential migrants plan their labour migration, as well as frame their personal and professional aspirations in their country of origin. The background of this research is then represented by the international outsourcing strategies of firms (the flow of capital and companies) to foreign countries and by the new employment opportunities offered by information technologies. In general, personal aspirations could be explained either in the form of committed plans for mobility or immobility or a desire to remain immobile. What influences aspirations to migrate is a mixture of pressures from the social environment, market and immigration conditions and personal traits and attitudes. The global outsourcing slightly influences brain drain outcomes, but it introduces brain circulation, virtual brain mobility and the emergence of a net bourgeoisie as features of globally relocated knowledge work.