Successful Earners and Failing Others: Transnational Orientation as Biographical Resource in the Context of Labor Migration

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.