Title:	Understanding Lifestyle Migration
Authors:	Nick Osbaldiston Michaela Benson
Keywords:	Lifestyle
Issue Date:	2014
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	In 2009, Benson and O’Reilly (2009a and b) noted a burgeoning field of research investigating what they labelled lifestyle migration, the migration of ‘relatively affluent individuals, moving either part-time or full-time, permanently or temporarily, to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life’ (2009a: 621). This is a migration phenomenon distinct from other more-documented and researched forms of migration (such as labour migration and refugee movements) that has some similarities with elite travel and migration (see, e.g., Amit 2007; Birtchnell and Caletrío 2013), and has developed into a healthy field of scholarly enquiry, generating its own corpus of literature. As Knowles and Harper succinctly define it, ‘[These] are migrations where aesthetic qualities including quality of life are prioritized over economic factors like job advancement and income’ (2009: 11). The centrality of such aesthetic qualities both to the decision to migrate and experiences of post-migration life results in explanations privileging the socio-cultural dimensions of the decision to migrate. As we demonstrate in this introduction, these explanations, developing out of the research traditions of sociology and social anthropology, are often underpinned by a strong commitment to social theory. Understanding Lifestyle Migration builds on this commitment, to develop further conceptual and theoretical models for understanding the phenomenon. The intentions of the volume are twofold: contributions reflect on and question the theoretical underpinnings of current research in this area, while also developing further our understandings of these social phenomena through the application of social theory. Through a discussion of both, we hope to produce opportunities for reflection not only on the movement itself, but how lifestyle migration inputs into contemporary debates in social theories not only of migration, but also consumption, identity and culture. Following this agenda, the volume follows the agenda for migration research laid out by van Hear, ‘the potential of re-embedding conceptual approaches to migration in wider social science theory’ (2010: 1536). In this respect, the contributions to the volume recognise the value of social science debates to understanding lifestyle migration, in particular, the dialectic between structure and agency.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53110
ISBN:	978-1-137-32867-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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