Capital without its field: educated Bangladeshi women in the British labour market

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper investigates the relatively underexplored field of educated first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant women’s labour market experience in Britain. Applying an intersectional lens using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘capital’, ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ [1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood] and Nira Yuval-Davis’s ‘situational intersectionality’ [2015. “Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality.” Raisons Politiques 2 (58): 91–100], the paper examines immigrant women’s employment barriers and their diverse strategies to deal with the barriers in the UK labour market. Analysing twenty-eight participants’ narratives into three categories: (i) Full-time professionals, (ii) Part-time wage earners and (iii) Economically inactive women, the paper highlights how the issue of capital mobilisation affected South Asian immigrant women’s employment choices. The participants’ situational differences within a complex nexus of unequal capital portability, non-recognition of skills, and their limited familiarity with British cultural capital, family’s economy and their lifecycle stages shaped the immediate and long-term choices they could make. The analysis emphasises the necessity to examine contemporary first-generation Bangladeshi as well as South Asian, Muslim women’s employment from a capital mobilisation perspective taking into account the situations within which they operate.