Cosmopolitan life, identity and future of work

Today’s world strongly challenges the assumption that people would live in a single place throughout their lives. Global mobility of people is increasing and it has permanent consequences on who we are and where we belong to. This phenomenon spans geographical, cultural and societal boundaries and calls for us to understand how (new) forms of identity, belonging and nationhood emerge. COVID- 19 pandemic caused a temporary standstill in global mobility and although a full return to pre-pandemic levels of travel and migration is unlikely, there is a need to rethink global mobility for the long haul. We respond to this call and take a viewpoint, which is often forgotten, of the globally mobile individual. In order to build a sustainable and inclusive society, which offers meaningful life, and work for globally mobile individuals, we need to understand the phenomenon on the grassroots level. Our multidisciplinary research project brings together a unique combination of scholars with knowledge on digitalization, emotion arousal, entrepreneurship, future studies, identity formation, migration, new forms of work and organizing, labour law and language skills. This allows us to contribute to a human centred understanding in business and management studies but the findings are of interest to a broader audience in social sciences. The aim of this project is to investigate how to build sustainable, inclusive and meaningful life and work from the viewpoint of globally mobile individuals. In particular, we focus on cosmopolitans, i.e. individuals that voluntarily move from country to country in pursuit of self-fulfilment in both life and work, and construct a cosmopolitan identity in the process.
This research project answers the following questions: (WP1) How globally mobile individuals form and maintain a transnational sense of self? (WP2) What is the future of work and what are its implications to globally mobile individuals? (WP3) What kind of personal emotions are accompanied with global mobility and how do they shape the life course of cosmopolitans? and (WP4) What is the relationship between language skills and cosmopolitan disposition? COSMO will be carried out through four independent but closely related Working Packages. The project employs a triangulated research strategy, where data is collected with several methods and it forms a shared, rich dataset, which enables us, study the phenomenon longitudinally over time.