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Most research on remittances focuses on economic motivations, with little emphasis on the social contexts in which the remittance economy operates. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with migrant workers in a London hotel and hospital, we examine how migrants' familial and social relationships in both sending and receiving countries inform the decision to send remittances. We suggest that remittances are a mechanism through which migrants are able to fulfil multiple obligations to families and places of origin, while also enhancing their own economic status and future. First, satisfying the cultural expectation of sending remittances helps migrants maintain their social worlds at 'home'. Second, we observed that both positive and negative changes in power and resources influence the decision to send remittances by motivating migrants to invest in their social position in either their home or receiving country. In sum, we argue that the migrants' social experience in the United Kingdom might be just as predictive of remittance behaviour as their economic and social status in the country of origin. We, therefore, call for a need to move beyond the often one-sided concern with development by concentrating on the overlapping social worlds of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to a call from Kerfoot and Korczynski to investigate the gendering of service sector employment. As a characteristic of many post-industrial economies in the global North is the growing significance of migrant workers, this article investigates the impact of migration for work on the gendering of service work. Taking the embodied and emotional labour of workers to be fundamental to service work, it describes how these are refracted and produced through migration. The article draws on 60 interviews with workers in a west London hotel who were born abroad and the human resources staff and managers who are responsible for the recruitment and promotion of the workforce. We argue that migration is an important process in the construction of the contemporary workforce in post-industrial service economies and that migration status should be understood as intersecting with gender in the production of a gendered performance at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An increasing number of low-status consumer service jobs in the UK are undertaken by economic migrants, who are often recruited through the aegis of employment agencies. This article explores the use of migrant agency workers by a London hotel and a hospital, looking at the ways in which such a labour force is recruited and assembled in parts of the service sector in Greater London. It argues that even in the most locally-based of service-sector jobs, typically involving face to face interactions, new sets of transnational connections are producing a globalized labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the working lives of young, single, middle-class Indian men employed in the increasingly global hospitality sector in London, UK. Using a case study of a single hotel, we investigate a particular form of Indian middle-class global mobility that differs from both the well-documented ‘low status’, unskilled migrant as well as the highly-skilled, science oriented migrants. We explore how their jobs both reinforce and challenge middle-class Indian notions of masculinity, as well as how the recruitment process is both gendered and economically selective. We suggest that the transnational formation of Indian middle-class identity is drawn from four main categories: a middle-class lifestyle in India, class-based motivations, the gendered and class based recruitment process of the UK hospitality industry, and the performance of class-based gender identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]