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Migrant workers' employment pathways are mainly analysed by observing their behaviour in receiving societies. In dialogue with critical studies of mobility, migration, and skill, we argue that the 'transnational mixed embeddedness' approach, used to analyse migrant businesses, should extend to include migrant workers. Based on multi-sited ethnography, we discuss the phenomenon of Chinese migrant workers in Italy who exploit the transnationally embedded opportunities to access training courses in China. We analyse the transnational workers' agency in circumnavigating socially constructed notions of training and skill, and stress the transformative logic of the migrant trajectories as transnational mobility influences the trainees' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on long‐term fieldwork in multiple locations, our article questions the approach that posits a Chinese model of work and employment relations as increasingly exporting its form of labour management and dominating worldwide. It does so by focusing on Europe and discussing two labour regimes considered as typically Chinese: the Chinese fashion workshops in the Italian fashion industry, and the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic. Our findings bring new insights to bear on issues for which research is still thin on the ground and challenge the hypothesis of a 'Chinesisation' of work and employment practices in Chinese small firms and MNCs operating in Europe. We move the focus away from the simple analysis of firm management prevailing in the literature and suggest that, in order to understand the firm's behaviours, the role of the state, the unions, the migrant workers and the role of temporary work agencies should all be taken into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars, mainly focusing on Asia, consistently describe the im/mobility of workers living at work as orchestrated from above. This article bring to the forefront forms of workers' mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks. Focusing on Europe, the article shows that the mobility of workers is the outcome of the interplay of both employers' strategies and workers' agency. Based on extensive fieldwork among migrant workers in Europe – Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrant workers at the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic – the article offers a new approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, it adopts a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union, the article highlights the way the growing frequency of factories cum dormitories to a certain extent empowers the workers as their horizons extend to other sites within Europe and are not limited to a single firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]