CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Kopanska, Magdalena |
|---|---|
| Title | "It is such a crazy country, where everything happens at the last minute". Approaches Towards Chance of Polish Workers in Icelandic Tourism. |
| Summary | This thesis is concerned with the lives and work of young Polish people in Icelandic tourism, where the increasing percentage of jobs are performed by migrant workers. This qualitative research conducted with the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork contributes to the fields of migration studies, infrastructure, and tourism geography and specifically to the bodies of work dedicated to the labour migration of Poles to Iceland. The semi-structured interviews and participant observations were made during work at the hotel and visits to places of employment of the study’s participants in summer 2024. The sample concerned consists of twenty Poles employed in the sector. The current shape of the Icelandic job market is marked with the demand-driven work arrangements, high labour turnover, substandard employment, and fluctuating demand for labour force. This results in precarious working and living conditions of migrants in low strata jobs. This research offers a novel and original framing of mobility and is placed within the debate around post-accession migration from Poland, especially in relation to the concept of liquid migration. This study aims at identifying how those who work in the sector conceptualise and approach volatile employment in reference to their personal temporalities, that is individually experienced past, present and future. A concept of chance is developed to indicate a common approach of young Poles to work in Icelandic tourism. Chances emerge at the intersection of structural traits of a flexible job market and individual actions of working and migrating subjects. The framework of Different Approaches Towards Chance is developed to address people’s attitudes towards their mobility experience. The analysis of research’s data offers an avenue to advancing the scholarly debate on tourism-worker nexus, temporality as an axis of inequality, migration and tourism infrastructures; as well as presenting a case study of those debates in the context of Polish labour in Iceland. |
| Supervisor | Dafinger Andreas; Markkula Johanna |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/kopanska_magda.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University