UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I analyze how formal organizations and institutions construct an international market for labor and a corresponding industry for migration-related services. Focusing on the migration industry, I scrutinize the sector that is comprised of private recruitment and placement agencies and its intervening role in the market for foreign-educated nurses. Much of the literature on international migration focuses on the role of informal social networks in furthering international labor flows. My study, however, brings in insight from economic sociology and organizational studies to show that the movement of international labor can also be understood as a market, comprised of several organizational fields that profoundly shape the recruitment and migration of workers. I thus show that intermediary organizations provide alternative solutions to resolving market challenges (e.g. property rights, governance structures, and rules of exchange) where other social structures, such as informal social networks, may not or cannot. The dynamic relationship between formal organizations, institutions, social networks, and migration is important to model as today's migration processes are becoming increasingly complex and bound together with business interests.

These conclusions are based on two years of fieldwork in the Philippines and United States, during which I conducted 98 in-depth interviews with nurses and leading representatives of several organizations and institutions. These organizations included nursing schools, sending and receiving governments, commercial recruitment and placement agencies, and employing hospitals. This research design allowed me to not only trace the social processes of the migration from origin to destination, but also to examine the migration system at different levels of analysis: from the individual decision making of nurses, to the meso-level organization of formal intermediaries and brokers in the system, and finally to the macro-level involvement of state institutions.