Ambivalent Precarity: Career Trajectories and Temporalities in Highly Skilled Sports Labor Migration from West Africa to Northern Europe

Abstract

Transnational migrants are often considered to be the core of the new global precariat. On the one hand, migrants are particularly likely to become precariats, due to the outsourcing of precarious work to migrant workers and the attribution of precarious citizenship status to migrants. On the other hand, labor migrants’ accounts show that this precarity is not exclusively based on oppression, misery, and exploitation, but that labor migration is also driven by hope and the imagination of a better future; hardships may even open up new opportunities. This article aims to scrutinize the ambivalence of precarity and the ways in which precarization processes also appear in highly skilled labor migration (in this case sought‐after jobs as transnational athletes). The article draws on material from multisited field studies among aspiring and current soccer migrants. The experiences and conditions are described for female and male soccer players who originate from various West African settings and move to Northern European locations. The analysis finds ambivalent precarization processes at various points of the career. The temporality of precarization processes becomes apparent when comparing the large number of young men and women who strive to migrate to the few individuals who become professional players abroad but often struggle with occupational challenges after their careers. The article ends by suggesting an engagement with the ambivalences of precarious work in future studies, both in sport and other vocational sectors.

A Social Negotiation of Hope: Male West African Youth, ‘Waithood’ and the Pursuit of Social Becoming Through Football

“…This aspiration among boys and young men to become professional athletes can be found throughout the world and also in other sports as the case of young men in Fiji dreaming of a similar professional career abroad in rugby reveals (see Besnier 2015). Yet this dream is considered particularly problematic for young men and boys in West Africa because a handful of high profile cases depicting upward career paths are argued to conceal far more common occurrences of downward career trajectories and unfulfilled dreams (Agergaard and Ungruhe 2016;Darby et al 2007;Poli 2010).…”

Precarization of Work and Migration: A Review of the International Literature

“…Precarization of migrant workers, then, may be ambivalent (Agergaard & Ungruhe, 2016). If, on the one circumstances, people migrate to another country looking for better living conditions and end up living in precarious conditions, on other hand, these same people in some cases get access to benefits and social protection that they did not have in their home countries (Österle & Bauer, 2015).…”

Precarity, Imagination, and the Mobile Life of the ‘Trailing Spouse’

“…; Schierup et al. ; Agergaard and Ungruhe ). The concept has long been associated with the socioeconomic conditions of vulnerability of contemporary labor market dynamics and with various peoples under threat of marginalization and exclusion (e.g., poor people, minorities, working and middle classes, women).…”

“…Later in the 1980s, the term (précarité, precarietà) was used in politics across different European countries in order to describe the conditions of those employed in temporary jobs and lacking social security (Pierret 2013). Recently, precarity has been receiving an increased interest across the social sciences (Bourdieu 1999;Neilson and Rossiter 2005;Ettlinger 2007;Fudge and Strauss 2013;Millar 2014;Standing 2014;Della Porta et al 2015;Schierup et al 2015;Agergaard and Ungruhe 2016). The concept has long been associated with the socioeconomic conditions of vulnerability of contemporary labor market dynamics and with various peoples under threat of marginalization and exclusion (e.g., poor people, minorities, working and middle classes, women).…”