International lifestyle migrant entrepreneurs in two New Immigration Destinations: Understanding their evolving mix of embeddedness

Abstract

This article focuses on consumption and production in lifestyle migration to New Immigration Destinations (NIDs). The aim is to understand how and why lifestyle migrants' structural and individual peculiarities affect socio-economic changes in NIDs. Data are drawn from biographical interviews with lifestyle migrants in rural Slovenia and Sweden, adding issues of production to the otherwise prevailing focus on consumption in lifestyle migration studies. We ask how the ongoing quest for a better life and the lifestyle migrants' embedding processes in various contexts affect each other. Studying lifestyle migrants’ strives for better lives implies both an implicit and an explicit focus on temporality, which can result in a complex mix of embeddedness. Although our participants desire social relations with local populations, they establish them to only a limited degree, deploying multiple local and social networks in various locations for business purposes. As such, this article contributes to discussions on the incorporation of novel populations in NIDs and how to evaluate their contributions to local rural development.