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During the frequent restructurations within multinational groups, employees experience these professional transitions differently according to their hierarchical position. Taking the example of the closure of a pharmaceutical research centre in the Rhône-Alpes region, one can distinguish three different transitional patterns: mobility for managers, reconversion for technicians and unemployment for technical workers. But the closed world of the enterprise is not sufficient to explain this selective operation. To understand why only management personnel accepted the move to Paris, this needs to be related to how families arrange their internal space and are themselves geared to mobility. For a laboratory worker, moving in order to keep in work cannot compensate for the sacrifice of home and family life built up over years as a compensation for the dissatisfactions of work – “moving, that’s OK for management”.