Session Information
28 SES 05, The Transformation of Academic Practice in Europe
Paper Session
Contribution
Portugal is identified as one of the European countries where the brain drain is more pronounced in the last decade. The proportion of workers with higher education degree who emigrated in recent years is 19.5%. That is to say, that since the 1990s Portugal will have lost about a fifth of their more skilled workforce (Docquier & Marfouk, 2007).
On this paper, it is our aim to discuss the outcomes of twelve sociological portraits of high qualify Portuguese that to Europe to exercise professions in scientific systems or higher education. Drew on the research project BRADRAMO (Brain Drain and Academic Mobility from Portugal to Europe) one takes up a set of analytical hypotheses of this phenomenon and discusses the use of sociological portraits (Lahire, 2002) in an attempt to unravel contradictions of social reproduction.
Our hypothesis consist in assuming that the different migration flows as well as the contexts, projects, the paths of life and how biographical expectations are constructed and therefore can be understood by the concurrent models. The literature identifies five main theoretical hypotheses with different levels of empirical evidence. The hypothesis of brain drain: since human capital is not made profitable in the same society or country where it was generated there is a loss of capital invested in the training of these individuals and, therefore, a potential loss of externalities that result from this investment in the medium and long term. The hypothesis of a beneficial brain drain: since the emigration of skilled individuals results in higher individual income and this is made possible through their investment in education, then more individuals will be available to invest in their education and their children education and this will eventually increase the return rate to education in developing countries (Mountford, 1997). The hypothesis of latent brain drain due to the mobility training: as mobility training, or for graduate studies or post-graduates, worsened in the last decade, the outputs to study abroad, with or without grants, originally planned as temporary, may become permanent due to the insertion in the labor market of developed countries or less affected by unemployment of young workers (Pizarro, 2005). This research aims to make a pioneering study of this type in the Portuguese context, still innovating in conceptual and methodological terms: first, refusing the logic of globalizing assumptions of human capital theory, guessing that migration can be caused by factors other than not pay gap by analyzing the set of factors of attraction-repulsion; on the other hand, guessing that the international job system is not a space entirely free and therefore is not only dependent on the free play of supply and demand, is also necessary to observe the biographical trajectories in order to understand the reasons and destinations of migration.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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