Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The main purpose of the study was to investigate how highly educated (university-educated) Taiwanese women acquire, transfer and transform their cultural capital through their middle-class habitus to seek a self-acceptable social position in Finnish society. The study s theoretical frameworks have drawn on Bourdieu s concept of habitus, capital, field, and practice, and incorporate an intersectionality perspective into the data analysis. This study employed a feminist standpoint epistemology in terms of epistemic commitments and used narrative inquiry with thematic analysis as the methodological strategy. Narrative inquiry as a methodological approach was used to elicit the stories of ten Taiwanese women who married Finns and immigrated to Finland. The data were produced through life-story interviews conducted in the women s first language, Chinese or Taiwanese in 2006. The discussion of the findings has been organized according to the three key themes: employability, underemployment, and mothering. The common pattern of downward social mobility for first generation immigrants was found to repeat among these highly educated Taiwanese women, a pattern is not independent of questions of race/ethnicity in the Finnish labor market. Despite the weak link between cultural capital and employment outcomes, many of them have had no choice but to stay optimistic by improving their never-good-enough Finnish language skills and acquiring more education or training. Some of the women have turned to care work beyond their previous training and formal qualifications; they have made compromises, have retrained and work as practical nurses due to a lack of employment opportunities in their fields. Acculturation and maintaining their heritage within the Finnish context have become problematic for many of the women and their mothering practices. In order to secure and maintain a better position for their children, the women raise their children as Finnish children by distancing themselves from their Taiwanese cultural heritage and espousing Finnishness. Paradoxically, these highly educated Taiwanese women are confined to a marginal position in the Finnish labor market, but on the other hand, middle-class privilege is identified in their mothering practices in terms of parental involvement in their children s education. Their home-based and school-based parental involvement hold the greatest hope for their children s realization of their full potential and ultimately maintaining their status as middle-class members of the dominant group. The stories of these Taiwanese women disclose how the intersections of social class, gender and race/ethnicity (re)produce inequalities in a Finnish context.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Chia‐Chien Chang
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1608407707