Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work

ABSTRACT Research continues to emerge on the role of Brexit on migrants’ belonging in Britain, and this article contributes to the scholarship in related ways. The article draws on belonging as an analytical frame to examine how Polish migrant women in professional occupations challenge and negotiate their belonging at work. The article uses qualitative narrative interviews collected pre-Brexit (2015/2016) with Polish women living in Greater Manchester to examine their belonging strategies. Despite these migrant women’s shared whiteness, Europeanness, and professional status, these signifiers do not prevent them from encountering non-belonging. Nonetheless, the women’s narratives show they use various active and complex strategies (ethnicised, classed, and individualized) in their workplaces to conceal, recast and uplift their position to forge belonging. The findings enhance our understanding of workplace belonging processes, including Polish professional women’s strategies during a challenging period. Additionally, they contribute to the development of future workplace policy on belonging research.

debates about the nation, sovereignty, immigration and belonging (Virdee and McGeever, 2018).Accordingly, this article focuses on Polish migrants, a particularly instructive group, to examine belonging processes during this tense political moment, given their population in the UK has grown considerably since the EU admitted them post-2004.In particular, Polish migration has sparked debate about Britain's continued membership of the EU (alongside asylum seekers and other EU accession migrants).This has been driven by the pejorative ways in which the media, political, and public discourse have vilified Polish migrants and represented them unfavourably as unskilled, lowpaid workers, creating unfair job competition and drawing the welfare state (see Botterill and Burrell 2019;Rzepnikowska 2019).
Potential gaps remain despite the growing literature examining the nexus between Brexit, the referendum, and belonging, especially among Polish and other EU nationals.First, most research has focused on Polish and other migrants' belonging post-Brexit (e.g.Guma and Dafydd Jones, 2018) despite the period before the referendum offering fertile ground to examine belonging processes during a period when the outcome remained unknown.For example, most Polish migrant belonging research has focused on the period immediately after EU accession (c.2004) (f.e. Brown 2011) and post-Brexit (Lulle, Moroşanu, and King 2018).Second, most researchers have focused on the 'neighbourhood' as the primary site in which belonging processes occur, despite the large body of research implicating workplaces as equally valuable and instructive for understanding how migrant belonging is structured (although, see Rzepnikowska 2019).Third, studies have tended to focus on migrants' narratives of (non-) belonging without giving equal weight to their agency in processes of belonging vis-à-vis the complex strategies they deploy to forge belonging or mitigate harms during times when their identities are contested, or status undermined (f.e.Morosanu and Fox 2013;Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2015).Finally, studies examining Polish migrant belonging have tended to concentrate on the experiences of low-skilled workers, despite patterns of upward mobility beckoning how those in professional occupations forge a sense of belonging.Therefore, this article addresses these knowledge gaps by examining Polish migrants' contested identities and belonging at work in the run-up to the EU referendum (2015)(2016).The article unpacks the migrants' strategies to shape their belonging in these contexts, drawing on narrative interviews from 22 Polish women living in Greater Manchester, England.

EU referendum and challenges to migrant belonging in Britain
Brexit, as it is colloquially known, marked the moment the British electorate voted by a margin to discontinue its membership of the EU.Since then, many studies have documented how the politically fraught atmosphere has unsettled migrants and settled ethnic minorities belonging to the country (Guma and Dafydd Jones, 2018;Lulle, Moroşanu, and King 2018;Botterill and Burrell 2019;Rzepnikowska 2019;Shankley and James 2020).These studies have tended to outline how rival political campaigns' rhetoric (Vote Leave and Remain) on matters such as sovereignty, immigration, and belonging struck a chord with voters.The atmosphere polarized views on Britain's future and further defined who was perceived as (non-) belonging (see Allen and Ögtem-Young 2020) against the broader frame of the nation, which Anderson (1983) instructively described as the country's imagined community.Studies examining migrants after Brexit found that many reported feeling their status and belonging was questioned (Ranta and Nancheva 2019), others felt unwelcome (Sredanovic 2020), and many reported an increase in hostility, xenophobia, and racism (Rzepnikowska 2019;Shankley and James 2020).Moreover, right-wing media has exacerbated public disquiet and anxieties over immigration by targeting groups such as the Polish, Romanian and asylum seekers, depicting them as economic and cultural threats and pariahs (e.g.Ranta and Nancheva 2019).
Crucially, Brexit unsettled the status and belonging of different groups of migrants.However, certain groups such as the Polish featured prominently in the referendum debate and were pivotal to opposing positions towards pro-EU immigration (Virdee and McGeever 2017).Thus, the fraught political atmosphere directly impacted their experiences of belonging (Guma and Jones 2018).However, before examining the particulars of Polish migration and belonging, it is essential and instructive to unpack an understanding of belonging.Like many concepts in social sciences, belonging has remained debated, contested, and multi-dimensional, which scholars such as Yuval-Davis (2006) have carefully unpacked.Migration is inextricably linked to the very act of moving from one place to another, forging ties in new communities to fit in.Belonging is unquestionably a dynamic process that Probyn (2015, 19) clarifies 'captures more accurately a person's desire for some sort of attachment, be it to other people, places, or modes of belonging, and how individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is fuelled by yearning, rather than the positing of identity as a stable state'.Migrants are thus in a constant state of forging and longing to belong.Fortier (2020, 2) adds that migrants are constantly in a state of enacting 'practices of group identity [. ..] manufacturing cultural and historical belonging that mark out terrains of commonality, through which the social dynamics and politics of "fitting in" are delineated'.In this sense, migrants are constantly trying to engineer a group identity to fit into a new frame of reference on arrival at their destination.Despite its fluidity, Wood and Waite (2011, 201) draw attention to the emotive aspects of belonging, whereby they articulate it as 'a dynamic emotional attachment that relates individuals to the material and social worlds that they inhabit and experience.It is about feeling "at home" and "secure", but it is equally about being recognized and understood'.
Therefore, belonging is central to migrants' experiences in a new place.There are various ways to examine belonging, including migrants' active participation in their new society (e.g.Ehrkamp and Leitner 2006) and the strategies they use to forge a sense of belonging (e.g.Morosanu and Fox 2013;Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2015;Halvorsrud 2019).Focusing on the latter, Halvorsrud (2019) found how white South African migrants living in Britain mobilized their whiteness and shared ancestry through a variety of verbal techniques to forge belonging among the majority white British population.Meanwhile, Moroşanu and Fox (2013) found that Romanian migrants deflected challenges to their status and identity onto the Roma minority, whom they believed held a lower status.Thus, the strategy deflected unwanted hostility and prejudice and accentuated their status.By examining Hungarian and Romanian migrants living in Britain, Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy (2015) found that they commonly used two strategies.First, many migrants claimed a higher social status by relying on meritocratic values in contexts to belong.Second, migrants mobilized their shared whiteness and Europeanness through various verbal and discursive techniques to elevate their status.The strategies worked to (re-)position the migrants more favourably along Britain's migrant and ethnic hierarchies.They showed how migrants used ethnicised and de-ethnicised strategies to contest, restyle, and forge a sense of belonging.These studies are instructive in understanding how the run-up to Brexit shaped migrants' belonging processes.

Fragile and unstable belonging: polish migrants in a liminal space
Studies focused on the anti-Polish sentiment that characterized the EU referendum remind us that Poles' status is conditional and their belonging occupy a shifting and sometimes liminal space.On the one hand, they are privileged because of their whiteness and Europeanness (McDowell 2009).On the other hand, they are disadvantaged because of how the media and political and public discourse have represented them (Erel 2011;Fitzgerald and Smoczyński 2021).The representations have focused predominantly on migrants occupying low-paid and unskilled employment positions (e.g.Polish men as construction workers and women as domestic and care workers), thus creating unfair job competition for British workers and draining state welfare resources (Erel 2011;Fitzgerald and Smoczyński 2021).Thus, Poles' unstable status might have important implications for their sense of belonging.Guma and Dafydd Jones 2018 further postulated how Poles' and other EU migrants' belonging was complicated by the relatively unique framework in which they migrated to Britain.The framework is conceptually and legally distinct from other flows of migration, not least because EU legislation permitted member state citizens free movement rights to move between countries for employment, education, and lifestyle reasons (Guma and Dafydd Jones, 2018).
Moreover, the porous borders of the EU space caused many of those researching intra-EU migration to believe EU migrants would be less willing to undertake belonging maintenance and make an effort to fit in due to the context enabling migrants to make short-term, transitory, and circular migration (Guma and Dafydd Jones, 2018;Lulle, Moroşanu, and King 2018;Rzepnikowska 2019).While scholars found Poles did make these types of moves, they also found migrants made long-term moves (Ryan 2018) and the EU framework did not diminish or dilute Poles' desire to belong but transformed it.For example, Ryan (2018, 233) found among Poles living in London that they 'negotiate [d] attachment and belonging as dynamic temporal, spatial and relational processes'.The novel EU context and the polarized perspectives on the economic and social cost of continued intra-EU migration shaped the debate on immigration in the EU referendum, the electorate's perspectives on future intra-EU migration, and thus, the status and belonging of EU migrants living in Britain.
Polish migrant belonging research has tended to focus predominantly on the period immediately after EU accession in 2004.Subsequently, studies have captured shifts in sentiment towards migrants' (non-) belonging against significant economic and political changes (e.g. the financial crash of 2008/ 09) (e.g.Ryan 2018).These studies gleaned increasing anti-Polish sentiment over time, whereby Poles had become positioned as not quite white and racialized subjects, and their identity, status and belonging in Britain were up for debate (Fox 2013).Botterill and Burrell (2019, 23) suggested that 'the Brexit vote, and the volume and nature of anti-Polish sentiment, which preceded and followed it, offer an important reminder that being white, even with all the privilege it does confer, can sometimes offer only limited protection against anti-immigrant agitation and migration regime insecurity'.Crucially, these studies highlighted how challenges to Poles' belonging in Britain stretched back to EU accession, yet the referendum intensified these challenges (Nowicka 2018;Rzepnikowska 2019Rzepnikowska , 2020)).
However, rather than passively accepting challenges to their belonging, Nowicka (2018) observed how Poles used various strategies of racial and cultural logic to forge belonging.For example, some migrants emphasized their role as vital workers to resist hostility and racism and reinforce their positive qualities.Others tried to rationalize the racism they experienced, believing it was every citizen's right to challenge the status of foreigners.In some ways, the migrants' strategies were attempts to ally themselves with white British people by emphasizing commonalities (shared Europeanness), downplaying their differences while amplifying the differences of others (e.g.Africans, Muslims, Asians).Rzepnikowska (2019) corroborated these findings among Poles living in Manchester, finding that they used similar strategies, such as avoiding displaying characteristics that racialized them as other (i.e.speaking).Although these studies are instructive in shaping our understanding of belonging processes among Poles, they overwhelmingly focused on Poles working in low-skilled sectors or higher education (Andrejuk 2011;Nowicka 2018) without examining the specific challenges and tensions that migrants in professional positions experienced.In addition, most studies focused on the post-Brexit context without examining the run-up to Brexit, negating the usefulness of this period before an outcome was known.Although the lack of focus might have been because before scholars knew the outcome, the possibility of Britain leaving the EU seemed improbable, the period remains interesting.Finally, most studies focused on neighbourhoods as the dominant site where belonging occurred (Nowicka 2018;Rzepnikowska 2019Rzepnikowska , 2020)).This dominance focus continued despite parallel research implicating workplaces as an equally important site where migrants' status and belonging are challenged and forged (Rzepnikowska 2019;Basok and George 2021).

The saliency and significance of workplace belonging
Studies have identified workplaces as equally significant for belonging as neighbourhoods, given opportunities for encounters with diversity to occur (Estlund 2003;Rollock 2019).Most studies focusing on belonging concentrate on low-skilled Polish migrants and their workplaces.For example, Cook, Dwyer, and Waite (2011) noted many of these workplaces offered migrants minimal opportunities for diverse encounters especially with white British people, given the industries (e.g.construction) and occupational position (unskilled workers) they worked in were primarily dominated by migrant labour.Nonetheless, Janta et al. (2011) found that despite Poles disproportionally working in jobs classified as low-or un-skilled, a segment of Poles had moved up the occupational hierarchy, obtaining mid manager and professional occupational status (e.g. in the hospitality sector), and thus, new workplace dynamics.
According to Rzepnikowska (2017), Poles moving into more professional occupations encountered specific tensions and challenges to their belonging, not least because the occupational positions and associated workplaces presented more opportunities to engage with white British people.Context is important as Leitner (2012, 827) argued, 'more educated and well-off whites are better able to control forms of racial signification than are workingclass whites', and therefore Poles working in these positions might experience and respond to challenges to their belonging in different ways.Meister, Sinclair, and Jehn (2017) added that women in senior positions might also experience challenges relating to their gender.The author examined women in senior leadership positions in engineering, finance, and construction and found they regularly had to overcome tensions arising from their gender intersecting their professional status, undermining their leadership position and acting as an issue for Polish women in these positions.Additionally, Rzepnikowska (2017) found from Poles working in Manchester that workplaces are governed by specific diversity policies and employment legislation that might be important for reading belonging.For example, Rzepnikowska (2017) found that Poles deployed complex language strategies to appear playful yet developed meaningful friendships with colleagues under the banner of conviviality.Other migrants benefited from forced conviviality that mitigated prejudicial encounters where they experienced involuntary and superficial interactions framed by employment legislation.Despite the growing interest in the significance of workplaces in Polish migrant belonging research, understanding the referendum's context remains underresearched.
At the time of writing, Britain has formally dissolved its EU membership.Nevertheless, we must examine Polish migrant belonging processes among professional migrants at work to help shape integration and social cohesion policy going forward.The significance of understanding belonging relates to many studies showing that migrant non-belonging has devastating effects on their mental health and well-being (Bhugra 2004;Basok and George 2021).Hence, despite an increase in scholarly appetite for studies on migrant belonging after Brexit, this study focuses on Polish migrant belonging during the run-up to the EU referendum (2015-2016), focusing on Polish professionals and how they forged their belonging at work during this period.The article draws from narrative interviews with 22 Polish women (professionals and non-professionals) to examine their belonging during this fraught time.

Data and methods
Data were drawn from narrative interviews collected from Polish migrant women living in Greater Manchester between 2015 and 2016.The study used purposive sampling, recruiting Polish women who at the time lived in Greater Manchester, migrated to Britain after 2004, were over 18, and identified as Polish.Greater Manchester was selected as the research site given 2011 census data indicated it received a significant proportion of post-2004 migrants outside of London and East England.As such, the sample included interviews from 22 Polish women who varied in age, educational background, marital status, housing tenure, and place of origin in Poland.While the sample varied with respect to occupational background, 14 women worked in professional or semi-professional occupations, including solicitors, business managers, accountants, and teachers.The additional 8 interviews were gathered from those working in routine industries to contrast the experiences of those in professional occupations.All narrative interviews were carried out between 2014 and 2016 and were conducted in English.
The study conducted interviews using a narrative approach (see Jovchelovitch and Bauer 2000) and examined the Polish migrants' experiences of living and working in Britain.Respondents were asked a series of open-ended questions, including: 'Tell me about your residential decisions since arriving in Britain, and where did you work during this time?'Additional probes were asked at various points in the interview cycle to delve into and clarify points.
The researcher used thematic analysis to examine the narrative interviews.The narrative format of the interviews allowed the researcher to understand the temporalities of the migrants' experiences living in Britain and different junctures of their working lives.The accounts provided a crucial frame in which to unpack their belonging processes at work (e.g.Jovchelovitch and Bauer 2000).Narrative interviews are an instructive method of storytelling as they are relatively simple and permit the interviewer to prompt the respondents to describe actions and experiences in sequence, which is vital to an analysis of how the pre-Brexit frame intensified the migrants' (non-) belonging at work and relating to their occupation.The researcher then used thematic analysis to examine the women's experiences of (non-) belonging and the types of strategies they used at work to forge a sense of belonging.According to Braun and Clarke (2019), thematic analysis enables various questions to be addressed using existing material to shape the methodological framework.The method involved coding the interview data for common themes, amalgamating the coding into broader themes and creating super themes, which form the central spine of the analysis.At all analysis points, the researcher kept in mind how the themes fitted against the broader sequence of events.The method contextualized how and when the events and feelings occurred.The researcher subsequently refined how the themes fitted against the broader question of belonging, which formed the foundation for the subsequent analysis section.

Polish migrant women's belonging strategies at work
The following section discusses significant themes the researcher identified were important to Polish women's belonging processes and the related strategies that deployed to belong against the polarized political backdrop.

The importance of workplaces in (non-) belonging
Most women described being acutely aware of the growing hostility against Polish migrants in Britain.Most spoke of specific cases where their colleagues, customers, or service users contested their identities and undermined their belonging, thus underscoring the saliency of workplaces to their sense of (non-) belonging.For example, Sophie, a thirty-year-old management consultant moved to England to study at university in 2004.After finishing her undergraduate studies in management, she proceeded onto a master's course in occupational psychology before training as a management trainer.After being promoted, she secured a job as a management consultant.Nonetheless, she described that despite her academic and professional success, she felt she did not belong, a feeling she described had grown during the past couple of years.
Most days things are good, but with some colleagues, you feel they take issue with you because of your background.I hold a master's degree and am equally qualified as them, but [I feel] because I'm Polish, they treat me differently.It doesn't help that they expect me to be a cleaner or domestic worker, you know, but I've worked hard.It's so frustrating, but it makes sense given how many Poles have come here [. . .] this dislike of Polish people, you know, it's increased recently.
Similarly, Joanna a forty-two-year-old research scientist migrated to Britain in 2011 to work for a pharmaceutical company.Joanna had come to the UK from Germany after completing her postdoctoral studies.She spoke of her surprise at the unequal treatment educated Polish migrants encountered at work and where she lived in Britain.I felt discriminated not directly but indirectly[. ..]I sometimes have the impression there is a model nationality, and English people and other nationalities that are from Western Europe, are not interested in what is going on in central European countries.We are Europeans, and I say that to them.I think they treat me differently because of it and even though we all have PhDs, but it's the little things that sometimes hurt me.[. ..]I feel the hostility against us Poles is growing more and more, you see it every day on the news.
Likewise, Alicia a thirty-three-year-old supermarket manager spoke about her frustrations at work.Alicia had previously worked as a solicitor in Poland, but despite her advanced qualifications, she could not convert her legal qualifications to enable her to practice law in England.Consequently, she obtained an manager position at a supermarket because of her English language skills, However, despite her achievements, she described colleagues regularly showed her a lack of respect, and customers devalued her, which intensified feelings of non-belonging.
What is wrong with [supermarket]?I work so hard there.[I'm] feeling bad because it's like 'oh you work in McDonald's' working in retail and you hear from customers' oh she speaks with Eastern accent, she's shit, and she's got a shit job, shit pay and shit things to do.[. ..]Even though I'm manager, some staff are rude and don't listen to me, maybe it's because I'm Polish or a woman, I can't tell exactly.
A reading of the women's accounts suggested that anti-Polish sentiment was present before the EU referendum announcement but grew over time.Workplaces also acted as significant sites where Poles belonging was challenged.Sophies and Alicia's accounts could be read as their colleagues undermining their belonging based on classed and gendered stereotypes of Polish migrants in Britain.Interestingly, the women seem surprised how despite their tertiary qualifications, professional status, and proficiency in the English language, they were not immune to belonging challenges and hostility.The finding corroborated the view amongst those Poles and EU nationals who believed shared whiteness, Europeanness, and meritocracy would aid their belonging and offer them a veil of protection at work (see Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2015;Nowicka 2018).
The professional women's surprise at facing hostility could be interpreted as these experiences dismantling the myth of meritocracy and how despite their professional status and educational achievements, they still faced othering like their co-ethnic migrants working in low-paid positions (see Nowicka 2018).It is clear from their accounts that their professional status did not protect them from others contesting their belonging.Joana's interview especially highlighted the fragile and unstable position Poles (even professionals) faced along Britain's ethnic and migrant hierarchies.The tense political atmosphere intensified orientalist assumptions about the women that continued to cast their whiteness as a different shade, undermining their belonging not only in the broader nation, but also in their workplaces.

Mobilising shared whiteness and Europeanness strategies
Most of the women described a transformation in their colleagues' regard for them and Polish migrants, which grew increasingly negative with the debate leading up to the referendum.Most women's accounts revealed that rather than being passive social actors, they deployed a variety of complex strategies to challenges to their status and belonging.Some women described how merely disclosing their Polish origin resulted in tense and awkward encounters where they felt they did not belong.Subsequently, some women deployed complex verbal and discursive strategies to mobilize their shared whiteness and Europeanness to conceal or recast their Polishness through a fear it could spark further non-belonging and help them fit in.For example, Joanna described an encounter with fellow research scientists at the pharmaceutical company where she worked.
I try not to say where I'm from because, you know, these people, they say, there are too many of you here, you're taking our jobs and living on benefits [. ..] even on the news every day they are saying bad things about Polish.All the time it gets more and more.So, you ask why I never say, this is why.
Similarly, Oliwia, a thirty-two-year-old accountant, arrived in Britain from Eastern Poland to study.After graduating, she spent four years working in the hospitality sector across rural Scotland and recounted varying experiences working and living in these remote hotels.She described how once her English proficiency improved, she moved to Manchester in 2013 to pursue a career as an accountant in a firm in the city.She immediately felt she did not belong with her new colleagues once they learned she was Polish.Like many of the women, although Oliwia recognized the increasing anti-Polish sentiment in the country, she believed her qualifications and work experience would protect her from any hostility and challenges to her belonging as her workplace espoused meritocratic values.Nevertheless, she described a strategy she used to fit in at work after previous challenges to her status and belonging.
Sometimes [I] prefer not to say my nationality because I feel . . .some colleagues they following some stereotypes . . .I do feel that, if I would say 'oh I'm from Sweden!' they have a little bit different attitude than from Poland, so I do this sometimes.I do not feel comfortable with it.
Although Oliwia identifies as white and in other contexts might have been able to pass, her accent acted as a key signifier of her otherness at work.Similarly, other professional Polish women (Ania, Marysia and Elzbieta), who worked as office managers and a solicitor, described how their strong Polish and Eastern European accents revealed their otherness during exchanges with colleagues, destabilizing their sense of belonging at work.Consequently, Oliwia verbally recast her ethnic and national identity by stating she came from Sweden, which she assumed granted her a higher status than whiteness from another European country along Britain's implicit migrant and ethnic hierarchies.In doing so, she mobilized her whiteness and Europeanness to sanitize important signifiers of difference (such as her accent) as being a European with a higher and more privileged status to forge a sense of belonging among her colleagues.Her choice of Sweden sheds light on the differential shades of whiteness that European nationals have access to, but also how the women's accents reinforced orientalist racial logic against migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, where they remain less well-regarded than socially constructed forms of whiteness from Western Europeans.The status of Poles in some workplaces echoes historical readings on Britain's immigration policies towards European migrant workers immediately after the Second World War, preferring Western Europeans over Eastern Europeans in recruitment (Tannahill 1958).
Moreover, Lena, a 35-year-old solicitor, moved to the UK after marrying a British man whom she met in Poland.She described that despite retraining as a solicitor in English law, being married to a British national, and working at a renowned city law firm, she felt constantly like she did not belong in the eyes of her colleagues (especially senior colleagues).She believed these feelings stemmed from her accent operating as a significant cultural marker, which delineated her Polishness and sometimes resulted in a racial response.
You know, it's funny, no matter how long I've been in Manchester and worked with English solicitors, they still acted surprised that I'm Polish and work as a solicitor and not a domestic worker or care worker!I trained like everyone else!Even some of the clients are often strange with me when I say I'm Polish, that is apart from the Polish clients where I speak Polish and it's a benefit.[. ..]I think sometimes they hired me just to speak to the Polish people who need legal help.
Lena described how her occupation conflicted with dominant gendered representations of Polish women.However, she also highlighted how her language, specifically her accent, was fundamental to her sense of belonging at work.To combat the non-belonging her colleagues triggered, she started elocution lessons to disguise her accent.Lena's account showed that she used a dual strategy of disguising her accent and emphasizing her individual skills and qualifications.Her strategy emphasized belonging as a complex process.Elocution lessons take time to disguise people's accents and backgrounds, yet Lena's immediate strategy of accentuating her qualifications and work experience had the immediate effect of casting herself as a professional.Moreover, it discursively operated to separate her individual achievements away from stereotypes levelled against Polish women in Britain, such as being low-skilled domestic workers.Ania, Marysia, and Elzbieta also spoke of using similar strategies, albeit more informally, and described how they softened their accents in work settings to facilitate their sense of belonging.
It is noteworthy that although most of the respondents came from professional backgrounds and held advanced qualifications, it was noticeable that these verbal and discursive strategies seemed unavailable to Polish women who held a lower occupational position, especially those working in routine low paid employment, such as in factories or domestic or industrial workers.Natalia, for example, worked in a factory packing food and described: In this factory I surrounded by hundreds of other Polish women and others.[. ..]Tired all the time -working long hours [. . .]When asked what she liked to do in her spare time, Natalia laughed and said: I don't have no time for anything.No learning English IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER She went on to explain how her shift patterns and unsociable hours prevented her from upskilling and meeting British people, thus illuminating the structural barriers to these women using these belonging strategies.
Similarly, Katie worked in the storeroom of a packing company and supported Natalia's account of never having the opportunity to speak to English people at work.As a result, they did not experience some of the challenges faced by professional women.The women's contrasting accounts could suggest that the verbal and discursive strategies mentioned above were exclusive to Polish women working in professions with a certain level of cultural capital.For other Polish women, like Katie and Natalia, structural factors related to work restricted their chances of conversing with white British people or improving their language skills.As a consequence, they were unable to use these strategies in their workplaces.It is important to consider these barriers when interpreting these encounters, particularly since they occurred in the lead-up to the EU referendum.

Polish names: a final frontier of non-belonging in the workplace
Some of the women, notably the most integrated, described how in their professional contexts, their names acted as a significant marker, or final frontier of otherness, that was likely to trigger challenges over their belonging at work and during the politically tense atmosphere.Several of those working as solicitors, accountants and managers described situations where, despite their qualifications, proficiency in English and neutral accent, their names commonly disclosed their Polishness.Kasia, Maria, Jadwiga, Anna, and Magda all spoke, to varying degrees, of changing their names to conceal their identity and facilitate a sense of belonging at work.For instance, Jadwiga described working as a business manager and how she felt her Polish sounding name undermined her status as a manager and the respect her employees showed her.Similarly, Maria and Kasia described anglicizing their names to 'Mary' and 'Kat' to sanitize the difficulties others had at pronouncing their Polish sounding names and thus reducing the potential for friction.Additionally, Sophie (mentioned above) decided to legally change her name after several uncomfortable workplace exchanges with colleagues where she felt her belonging and status were put into question.
My original name is Magdalena Wiśniewsk [now Sophie Roberts] and I changed my name by deed poll.It would get mispronounced quite a lot . . .I think . . .tells your ethnicity and some people don't really like Polish people [. ..] [M]y name as it is at the moment is so much better to remember for people pronounce it and blend in.[. ..]So, when I [applied] for this job recently I changed it [because] my role was client facing, and I would be interacting with English people . . .and I do believe that that has an impact . . . on how I work and just didn't want to go through the discomfort of having to spell my name or having people spelling incorrectly.I had some very bad experiences before at work and this decision made it easier.While Sophie's past experiences triggered her to formally change her name, it would be incorrect to overstate the direct link between negative encounters and the decision to change her name.Instead, her strategy served an occupational purpose as it suited her professional status by facilitating communication by avoiding mispronunciation, which is important for management consultancy, and aiding rapport building should the client or colleague take issue with her Polishness.Sophie's decision to Anglicise her name operated to flatten the otherness attributed to her foreign sounding name as one of the last cultural markers of difference.
The women's name changes functioned by recasting their position as more ambigious placing them higher on the tacit ethnic and migrant hierarchies than had they left their names sounding distinctively Polish.Similar strategies have been found among the Polish disapora elsewhere, for example, Zagraniczny (1963, 12) research among Poles in the US.Here, the author found the most common reason Poles lodged legal petitions to change their name was because of 'spelling and pronunciation' issues that many felt prevented them from fitting into at work and in broder American society.The dual aim corresponded to belonging strategies observed among Hungarian and Romanian migrants, which had ethnicised and de-ethnicised dimensions (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy (2015).Importantly, unlike verbal and discursive strategies, changing one's name was not confined to professional migrants but to those across the occupational spectrum, though it seemed the importance placed on names was more apparent among those working in professional occupations.

Diverse friendship networks at work
Anna and Jadwiga described the benefits of forming diverse friendship networks with colleagues at work, which not only helped them improve their English and soften their accents but helped form friendships across ethnic and national boundaries.For example, Anna worked as a business manager and described: Similarly, Kathy worked as an HR consultant described encountering more discrimination recently despite working multiple jobs traditionally understood as 'low-skilled' before securing her current role.She described, [A]t work I have out with lots of people from everywhere.It's very international but I realised before when I hanging out with lots of Polish people, people always ask me: where do you come from?It's frustrating!Both women's accounts suggested how their friendship networks at work, consciously and subconsciously, operated to conceal their Polishness and actively helped them to integrate into their workplaces.The effect of these friendships could be read as actively helping the women to integrate more easily by softening the cultural symbols attached to her Polishness through her association with non-Polish people, important during such a turbulent time.

Discussion
The article examined the relatively under-researched phenomenon of Polish migrants' belonging processes in the workplace by focusing on the narratives of Polish women living in Greater Manchester.The article specifically investigated how Polish women responded to situations where their belonging was challenged and how these feelings played out against a tense political backdrop that accompanied the EU referendum in Britain.
Research showed that a significant element of the EU referendum debate focused on polarized positions concerning immigration (Allen and Ögtem-Young 2020), which challenged not only migrants' (including Polish migrants) status and belonging in Britain but also settled ethnic minorities (Rzepnikowska 2019;Shankley and James 2020).The women's accounts reinforced the conditionality and thus the liminal space that Polish migrants occupied during this period and how the tense political atmosphere challenged their status and belonging.The politically divisive period for many migrants amplified existing challenges or new threats to their belonging, which appeared to stretch back to debates on the implications of their migration since Poland's accession into the EU post-2004.Accordingly, the women's accounts corroborated the heightened feelings of non-belonging Polish migrants felt during this period (e.g.Rzepnikowska 2019, though focused on neighbourhood belonging).
The article concentrated specifically on the stories of professional Polish women working as solicitors, management consultants, business managers, and accountants using women working in other occupational positions to contrast their experiences.Although the professional women's occupational position does not map easily onto classed structures, migration processes foster a degree of occupational mismatch whereby the women's language skills, work experience, and qualifications on occasions prevented them from obtaining the same status in Britain.Their narratives provide an insight into belonging processes occurring in professional occupations rarely written about in the Polish focused literature.The women's accounts highlighted their awareness of anti-Polish sentiment widespread in Britain in the run-up to the referendum.Many valorized their professional status against a perceived framework of meritocracy, initially believing it made them immune to hostility directed against Polish workers in lower occupational classes.Nonetheless, like observations among Hungarian and Romanian migrants (Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2015), the women became aware that regardless of their occupational status, their names, accents, and language proficiency acted as cultural markers disclosing their otherness and shaping their nonbelonging.Their stories showed the women's awareness of the subtleties of belonging, which subsequently shaped a repertoire of strategies they deployed to conceal, recast or mitigate potential non-belonging and hostility associated with their Polishness, amplified by the political backdrop Put simply, the women learnt to 'talk the talk', deploying a variety of complex strategies that forged belonging through shared characteristics (e.g.mobilizing their shared whiteness, Europeanness and professional status) or recasting their identities via discursive verbal strategies (e.g.elocution lesion, anglicizing or renaming themselves) concealing their origins or claim access to a white national identity perceived to hold a higher status.
Significantly, the narratives from women working in non-professional, lowpaid and unskilled industries revealed how these complex strategies remained relatively exclusive to those professional women.For example, Katie and Natalia's accounts revealed how their factory jobs imposed specific structural barriers, such as a migrant only workforce, long and unsociable shift patterns, that prevented them opportunities to converse with the British population rendering the possibility of deploying such strategies ineffective or redundant.They also noted how their limited time prevented them from upskilling via ESOL classes necessary to deploy such strategies.However, these women recognized challenges to their belonging could be prevented by not speaking in other contexts, for example, their neighbourhoods.
Despite the contributions of this study, some limitations highlighted essential pathways for future work.First, although the sample included 19 male migrants, a relative novelty was many Polish migrant women interviewed worked in professional occupations.Their narratives documented a relatively under-researched area of Polish migration and highlighted specific issues associated with their belonging in the workplaces.A similar analysis was unobtainable among the Polish men as all but two of them worked in low-skilled and routine employment.Therefore the focus on the sample of women made it hard to determine if Polish men working in similar professions experienced the same feelings of non-belonging and deployed identical strategies to the women against the backdrop of the referendum.Second, the study focused on women working in multiple sectors (law and accountancy).Therefore, it is difficult to determine how specific workplace environments, regulations, and policies operated to reduce, mitigate, and shape migrants' feelings of (non-) belonging.

Conclusion
The findings demonstrate the significance of workplaces as an essential site for examining (non-) belonging processes among Polish migrants.The women's narratives are instructive as they implicate their ethnicity, nationality, and occupational status (and to a degree their gender) in disclosing their fragile identities and shaping the tense exchanges with colleagues and customers.These characteristics are also salient to the strategies they use to belong during fraught political times (e.g. against rising anti-Polish and migrant sentiment patterns) coalescing around Britain's EU referendum.
The importance of considering workplaces routinely in belonging research and policy has gained significance following Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.The article offers an empirical baseline for current debates in how these contextual changes have disrupted how the politicians and public view Poles position in Britain.The difference is due to political and public opinion shifting in response to the pandemic and Brexit, that have recast Poles and EU migrants as essential workers against increasing demand for migrant labour in employment traditionally deemed low or unskilled (f.e.Fernández-Reino, Sumption, and Vargas-Silva 2020).The changing context offers an arena ripe for investigation where the strategies available to Poles of different occupational statuses might have transformed (e.g.strategies exclusive to professional and highly assimilated migrant women) and offering new belonging opportunities for those on the margins of the labour market.
Furthermore, the post-Brexit context warrants the inclusion of workplaces and workplace exchanges in belonging policy, given studies documenting the departure of many Poles deserting Britain for friendlier and more welcoming conditions in EU countries with fewer regulations for entry into employment (Guma and Dafydd Jones 2019).However, ignoring the significance of workplaces exchanges risks overlooking them as a significant site for companies and industries that are dependent on migrant labour, to invest in, beyond purely legislative structures (f.e employment legislation), which are vital to ensure they retain migrant workers.Therefore, policymakers need to focus on workplaces similarly to concentrating on 'neighbourhoods' as a critical site for belonging and cohesion (e.g.Community Integration policy) to ensure workplaces remain inviting and inclusive places.
In sum, the findings suggest ethnicity, nationality, and occupation are highly significant in belonging processes based in the workplace and therefore justify inclusion in policy frameworks.
Often with clients, I start by telling them my qualifications and work experience to gain their respect that I know what I'm doing, so they feel reassured.[. ..]I never lead with my Polish background unless they are Polish client (laughs).

[
I had] a few Polish friends . . .I learned so much from my work friends, like how to be [. ..] and the big one 'how are you?', which doesn't require an answer, if you know what I mean.