Moving People and Knowledge: Scientific Mobility in an Enlarging European Union by Louise Ackers

‘The book can be seen as a welcomed contribution to this field of study. . . [it] raises some important questions and problems of scientific mobility.’ — Hogni Kalso Hansen, Papers in Regional Science

‘This is a very timely book looking at East-West migration, which has recently become a hot political issue in various West European countries. It does an excellent job in laying out the intricacies of mobility that affect different groups, particularly “knowledge migrants”. The book successfully shows that “knowledge migrants” follow different motivational routes than other groups of migrants in their choice of mobility between institutes and nations. It makes a valuable contribution to a growing body of research that seeks to change established thinking and rhetoric about migration and to shift it from a dualistic thinking of migration in terms of economic vs. non-economic migrants. What this book shows is that the professional identity of people often supersedes their nationalities in relation to why and where they move.’ — Sami Mahroum, NESTA, UK

‘Based on excellent empirical research on migrating scientists from Poland and Bulgaria to the UK and Germany, this book follows an innovative agenda which is crucial to the world today – the movement of people and the movement of knowledge. It achieves this by a creative blend of analysing personal stories, embedded in their professional and family networks, on the one hand, and macro-scale discussions of brain drain, brain gain and national and European policy implications on the other.’ — Russell King, University of Sussex, UK

‘This book makes a timely contribution to understanding the circulation of scientific knowledge via international mobility. It skillfully combines an analysis of structural and institutional changes, with a focus on individual circumstances, life courses and motivations. The outcome is a compelling account of the role of international migration in the transfer of knowledge across borders, and in shaping the careers of individual scientists. This places people and human mobility at the heart of the debate about how the knowledge economy is produced and reproduced.’ — Allan Williams, London Metropolitan University, UK