Allan M. Williams

Although there has been increasing focus on the employment mobility associated with migration and return, a number of important research gaps can be identified. First, there has been greater focus on occupational mobility than on changes in economic activity, although it is their interaction which determines welfare outcomes. Moreover, most studies of economic activity have focused on either self-employment, or the simple dichotomy between being employed versus unemployed, neglecting the shifts between full-time, part-time, and casual employment. Secondly, research on the determinants of these different types of employment mobility has been relatively narrowly focused on individual economic factors. Most studies have been fragmented, especially lacking a comparative element. To address these gaps, descriptive statistics and Bayesian multilevel models are applied to a pan-European panel survey of 3851 young returned migrants. The findings disclose that positive shifts in employment mobility are more evident in economic activity than in occupations, and for those with a lower occupational status prior to migration. Although a range of significant determinants of employment mobility are identified, the findings also demonstrate that education is a major driver of occupational mobility, while marital and family status are important influences on economic activity shifts.

Market economies are often characterised by a failure to self-regulate. One of the most enduring of these ‘market failures’ is the ability to maximise the entrepreneurial potential to generate growth. Within this context, gender remains one of, and probably, the most prevalent dimension of this perceived failure to maximise entrepreneurial potential. Feminist political economy provides a starting point for understanding this reproduction of inequalities via policy interventions that have sought to address perceived market failure. This paper analyses how such gendered inequalities are reproduced. Through the critical assessment of Spain’s Emprendetur funding scheme, active from 2012 to 2016, 996 applications were analysed, through a content analysis, applying a gender perspective. The findings, including a decision tree analysis, demonstrate not only that women participate less as applicants in the funding scheme but are also less successful. This can be partly explained because women apply via business typologies that are less successful in relation to the dominance of ICT and technologically informed innovations. However, the barriers extend beyond these typologies; for even when controlling for critical success factors like project size, women are less successful, experiencing a double gender gap, that underlines the need for a gender lens policy approach.

The paper explores how second-generation Turkish-German ‘returnees' benefit from their “inbetweenness” in their ancestral homeland and initiate a process of re-inventing themselves as ‘transcultural mediators'. A thematic-narrative analysis was undertaken on 43 in-depth interviews with second-generation Turkish-German ‘return' migrants to Antalya who had acquired jobs in the tourism sector. The paper unpacks how this tourism hub provides “third spaces” distanced from prominent national and diasporic identities, and the ways in which these liberating spaces encourage the lifestyle-oriented, cosmopolitan second-generation ‘returnees' to re-position themselves in their translocal social fields. The findings illustrate how the second generation, who formerly endured “being twice a stranger” in Germany and Turkey, undertake a process of transculturation in Antalya, and utilize their “transcultural capital” (i.e. bilingual skills, bi- multilingualism, translocal habitus) to perform different aspects of their multiple and hybrid identities, gain economic independence and build social relations.

Originality is an important goal of research. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics and motivations of individual researchers or about the facilitating or hindering factors that, in combination, can lead to original research outputs. This is a gap this study aims to fill. Interviews with 20 highly original academics (identified by their peers) active in the field of tourism identify four shared main traits among such researchers—nonconformism, commitment, self-confidence, and interdisciplinarity—and the importance of situational factors. The findings also show that there is no single optimum way of “becoming original” and, therefore, efforts to “replicate” originality may constrain rather than enable originality. From a managerial perspective, this suggests that it is easier to remove barriers than to positively facilitate original research.