Managing Migrant Workers : moral economies of temporary labour in the Swedish IT and wild berry industries

Sammanfattning: Temporary migrant workers and circular migration constitute a growing global phenomenon as the management of migration becomes increasingly important to policymakers. This thesis takes academic discussions on citizenship and migration as its starting point, and examines the role of employers in terms of defining temporary migrant workers and their role in the Swedish labour market. The concept of moral economy is applied in particular to analyse the justifications and negotiations through which working conditions of migrant workers, and their role in local and transnational economies, are established and contested.The role of capital in migration management is studied through ethnographic fieldwork and through interviews with managers in the Swedish wild berry and IT industries; two very different industries that are, however, both shaped by particular structures of seasonal labour and international outsourcing and that increasingly rely on temporary foreign workers from Thailand and India respectively. The conceptualisation of supply chains in these industries offers a particular framework through which relations, as well as management discourses, can be analysed.The study explores how notions of circularity, nation, cultural difference, and transnational economic difference, are managed by private sector actors. It also explores how managers relate to public discourse and emotions in the face of global economic restructuring and changing citizenship, which situates temporary migrants as part of, yet different from, Swedish labour.