How do professionals constitute their homes under conditions of extensive mobility? The study is based on interviews with professionals working for an international organization who are chronically mobile. Despite their high mobility, they describe little difficulty constructing homes. Home can best be understood here not as a fixed location, but as a set of relationships, to both humans and non‐humans. There are elements of spatial proximity, but also of distance, and homes may be defined by both objects present and excluded. They may be a focal point, but at the same time part of a heterogeneous network that spans localities as well as binds past and present. Home is therefore territorially defined, but only as an extended network rather than as a bounded location.

Conviviality across a number of disciplines now conveys a deeper concern with the human condition and how we think about human modes of togetherness. This collection of essays illustrates some of the ways conviviality can be used as an analytical tool to ask and explore the ways and conditions for living together. This introduction surveys a number of key ideas and meanings of ‘conviviality’ across various disciplines providing the readers with an overview of usages and understandings of the term. It identifies gaps in the existing literature, proposes how a comparative perspective elucidates the concepts and shows how the articles within this Special Issue contribute analytically to our understanding of conviviality.

This article presents an in-depth study of how Polish entrepreneurs in Munich, Germany, make use of their economic, social and cultural capital acquired in Poland and in Germany to position themselves transnationally. The article studies these migrants’ life courses and draws attention to cross-border intersections between their cultural, social and economic capital with roots in different places. The article also throws light on the subjective evaluation of economic capital of migrants in a transnational frame. Three types of transnational social positioning of the migrants are discerned (single space, bi-local and overlapping), which suggest a new reading of Bourdieu’s work that is better adapted to the theoretical challenges faced by researchers who study people in transnational spaces.

Notions of skill are geographically and historically specific; migration regimes, professional regulations and national policies influence possibilities of effective validation of migrant knowledge abroad. Migration scholars convincingly demonstrate how migrants actively circumvent national requirements to fit into the dominant culture of the society of residence while preserving their own identities. Yet, without exception, social inequalities research exclusively addresses the integration of migrants into the receiving context, taking skills as a fixed attribute migrants simply ‘bring with them’. I argue that the context of origin of migrants for skill acquisition and validation during the migration process needs to be considered as well. The way skills are defined, acquired and valorised in the country of origin has an influence on how migrants mobilise them in the receiving society and on how they perceive their chances for negotiating strong positions in the labour market of the host country. The article draws on a study of Polish migrants to the UK with secondary and tertiary educational certificates who work in routine or semi-routine occupations.

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The article discusses how post-2004 Polish immigrants in Great Britain narrate success and failure in their lives. It identifies and analyses inter-related narrations specific to the transnational form of migration. It considers migrants' transnational orientation as a resource for narratively producing a successful biography. The article makes use of a biographical perspective and embeds the analysis in theories of biographical action, while adding new knowledge to the scholarship of migration. It argues that failure is relative to a normatively, locally fixed expectation of success.

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