Residential mobility and the spatial dispersion of personal networks: Effects on social support

Using a representative national sample of personal networks, this article explores how the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and social support are linked. Three issues will be addressed here. Firstly, how is the spatial dispersion of personal networks related to individuals’ social characteristics, network composition and residential mobility? Secondly, how do the spatial dispersion of networks, residential mobility and their combined effect influence the number and (thirdly) the structure of emotional support ties? Results showed that the extent of the support was affected neither by the geographical distribution of the networks nor by residential mobility. Living far from one's birthplace, however, exerted two distinct, and opposite effects on the support network structure. On the one hand, mobility led to high spatial dispersion of personal contacts, which in turn favored a sparsely knit network centered around the mobile individual. On the other hand, by controlling for the effect of distance between the contacts, we found that individuals that cited long-distance ties tended to be part of more transitive support networks than those that cited local ties. We interpreted the latter effect as evidence that transitive ties may survive greater spatial distances than intransitive ones. These findings are discussed in view of spatial mobility and social network research.     

Contesting transnationalism? Lessons from the study of Albanian migration networks from former Yugoslavia

Abstract Recent studies have questioned the concept of transnationalism, showing that transnational ties do not always have the weight attributed to them in the first studies conducted on the topic. Using a case study of social networks of Albanian migrants from former Yugoslavia, in this article I discuss the significance of transnational ties in the context of: the decision to migrate; social support networks of Albanians in Switzerland; and reintegration on return. The results raise questions about the factors that determine the existence and form of transnational social spaces as well as the social relevance of transnational ties. While the transnational perspective brings interesting insights to the study of migration processes, it is argued that transnational ties and social relations must not be presumed but rather carefully analysed, and that structural as well as cultural aspects must be introduced in this analysis.     

Local migrant kin or floating grandmother? Reflections on mobility and informal childcare support strategies among Polish migrants in Ireland

This study investigates mobilization of social support for informal childcare among working Polish mothers in Dublin. The research incorporates 61 semi-structured interviews and maps of ego-centric networks built around the support and childcare organization. Embedded in a support network and transnational family configuration perspective, this study assesses how migrant mothers use the local and transnational connections to mobilize informal child-minding strategies. The results show a great reliance on strong ties, especially partners whose support constitutes a backbone of the family being together. Beyond that, floating grandmothers have proven to be a significant provider of childcare from a transnational perspective. The heavy reliance on the local migrant kin and friends is crucial in providing ad hoc crisis support when transnational ties cannot be mobilized. This in turn demonstrates that distance matters, and while strong ties are not available, the local weak ties are more likely to be relied on.     

Refugee resettlement,social media and the social organization of difference

Social media platforms allow refugees separated by distance to share information, provide support and exchange resources across borders. This connection has the potential to transform resettlement experiences as people maintain significant and ongoing relationships with transnational networks. Yet, since refugee resettlement programmes generally only scale up to the national imagination, integration remains a normative framework in most policy spheres. This article presents a 12‐month digital ethnography of 15 refugees settled in New Zealand with a view to examining their transnational practices of social media and its influence on integration and belonging. Drawing on a conceptual framework based on the social organization of difference, it contains a discussion on how online global networks increasingly inform the domains of encounters, representations and configurations. The role of social media for refugee resettlement futures and its implications for integration at times of rapid political, technological and social change concludes the article.     

Multiple Migration and Use of Ties: Bangladeshis in Italy and Beyond

This article analyses previous multiple migratory trajectories of Bangladeshi first generation migrants before their arrival in Italy and within Italy. It also uncovers the role of social networks and transnational ties in their multiple migrations. The findings show that their first international migration was mainly shaped by their family’s socio-economic condition and transnational kinship networks. They already had someone from their family or close relatives in the preferred country with whom they were connected. Their onward relocations until arriving in Italy, in most cases, was to achieve the socio-economic success and legal status that they had failed to attain in their first and subsequent destinations, but the transnational connections with friends or acquaintances are a key resource facilitating these remigrations. Bangladeshis who arrived in Italy from various countries mostly had networks, either with someone from their local district in Bangladesh or with their earlier fellow migrants who moved to Italy before them.     

Moving Through Social Networks: The Case of Armenian Migrants in the Czech Republic

This paper brings attention to the role of social networks in the migration of asylum seekers and explores how the embeddedness of the migrants in social networks both facilitates and constrains their mobility in different phases of the migration process. It reconstructs the migration paths of eight Armenian migrant families who arrived in the Czech Republic as asylum seekers during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty‐first century. By examining the narrated stories of the Armenian migrants it shows that social networks formed an important context for employing various migration strategies in all phases of the migration process, and that the meaning and character of migrants’ social networks changed over time. In the initial phase of decision‐making about migration as well as on their journey, it was mainly weak ties of random acquaintances that played a dominant role. The position of the migrants in those networks was rather insecure. They held a little control over the information they received, but in these vulnerable situations they had to rely on their weak ties, which strongly influenced their mobility. In the arrival and settlement phases the social context of the refugee camp hindered the cultivation of social ties outside the migrants’ circle on one hand, and facilitated development of bonding ties among the migrants on the other. Bonding social networks enabled inclusion of the Armenian migrants into various social spheres especially at the beginning of the settlement process. However, the bounded character of these networks was also recognized as excluding them from access to resources of the dominant society and preventing their social mobility in later phases of their settlement. Thus, bridging networks that provide access to certain resources of the dominant society were sought.     

Network social capital as an outcome of social movement mobilization: Using the position generator as an indicator of social network diversity

In the social mobility literature, the position generator (PG) has been used to examine the relationship between the structural location of individuals, and outcomes such as obtaining a high status job. Diversity of occupational ties (as measured by the PG) is also a significant predictor of an individual's cultural capital. A great deal of work has also been done in the field of social movements examining the relationship between networks and mobilization. However, only limited attention has been given to the position generator in this literature. Also, while past research has demonstrated that prior network ties to activists is one of the most important predictors of current activism, relatively little research has been devoted to examining network structure as an outcome of activism. The present paper builds upon these insights by utilizing data collected with the position generator on a sample of environmental movement members, and examining the relationship between individual activism (as an independent variable) and diversity of occupational ties (as a dependent variable). The result of key theoretical significance is that those who are more active in the environmental movement develop a greater diversity of occupational ties to other environmentalists. Results suggest that this process occurs over time. These findings provide evidence that social capital (as indicated by network diversity) is one outcome of social movement mobilization.     

Mobile phones,communities and social networks among foreign workers in Singapore

Transnational mobility affects both high‐status and low‐income workers, disrupting traditional assumptions of the boundedness of communities. There is a need to reconfigure our most basic theoretical and analytical constructs. In this article I engage in this task by illustrating a complex set of distinctions (as well as connections) between ‘communities’ as ideationally constituted through cultural practices and ‘social networks’ constituted through interaction and exchange. I have grounded the analysis ethnographically in the experiences of foreign workers in Singapore, focusing on domestic and construction workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. I examine the cultural, social and communicative role that mobile phones play in the lives of workers who are otherwise constrained in terms of mobility, living patterns and activities. Mobile phones are constituted as symbol status markers in relationship to foreign workers. Local representations construct foreign workers as users and consumers of mobile telephony, reinscribing ideas of transnational identities as well as foreignness within the context of Singapore. Migrant workers demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the various telephony options available, but the desire to use phones to communicate can overwhelm their self‐control and lead to very high expenditures. The research highlights the constraints – as well as possibilities – individuals experience as subjects and agents within both social and cultural systems, and the ways in which those constraints and possibilities are mediated by a particular technology – in this case, mobile phones.     

A network centrality bias: Central individuals in workplace networks have more supportive coworkers

Combining the results of two empirical studies, we investigate the role of alters’ motivation in explaining change in ego’s network position over time. People high in communal motives, who are prone to supportive and altruistic behavior in their interactions with others as a way to gain social acceptance, prefer to establish ties with co-workers occupying central positions in organizational social networks. This effect results in a systematic network centrality bias: The personal network of central individuals (individuals with many incoming ties from colleagues) is more likely to contain more supportive and altruistic people than the personal network of individuals who are less central (individuals with fewer incoming ties). This result opens the door to the possibility that the effects of centrality so frequently documented in empirical studies may be due, at least in part, to characteristics of the alters in an ego’s personal community, rather than to egos themselves. Our findings invite further empirical research on how alters’ motives affect the returns that people can reap from their personal networks in organizations.     

Financial and emotional support in close personal ties among Central Asian migrant women in Russia

This study advances research on the role of personal networks as sources of financial and emotional support in immigrants’ close personal ties beyond the immediate family. Because resource scarcity experienced by members of immigrant communities is likely to disrupt normatively expected reciprocal support, we explored multi-level predictors of exchange processes with personal network members that involve (1) only receiving support, (2) only providing support, and (3) reciprocal support exchanges. We focus on an understudied case of Central Asian migrant women in the Russian Federation using a sample of 607 women from three ethnic groups—Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek—who were surveyed in two large Russian cities-Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. The survey collected information on respondents’ demographic, socioeconomic, and migration-related characteristics, as well as characteristics of up to five individuals with whom they had a close relationship. Multi-level multinomial regression analyses were used to account for the nested nature of the data. Our results revealed that closer social relationships (siblings and friends) and greater levels of resources (income and regularized legal status) at both ego and alter levels were positively related to providing, receiving, and reciprocally exchanging financial and emotional support. Egos were more likely to provide financial assistance to transnational alters, whereas they were more likely to engage in mutual exchanges of emotional support with their network members from other countries. Personal network size and density showed no relationship with support exchanges. These findings provide a nuanced picture of close personal ties as conduits for financial and emotional support in migrant communities in a major, yet understudied, migrant-receiving context.     

Transnational lifestyles among Russian Israelis: a follow‐up study

Despite the expanding use of the transnational perspective, grounded qualitative research on everyday expressions of transnationalism has been scant. In this article, I explore the economic and social ties with former homelands among three categories of former Soviet immigrants of the 1990s in Israel, namely ethnically mixed families split by emigration; young professionals and entrepreneurs; and retirees who keep two homes – one in Israel and the other in Russia or Ukraine. To follow temporal changes in transnational lifestyles, I interviewed the same informants twice, in 2000 and 2010. The findings suggest that transnational activities reflect life‐course changes and can evolve in several possible directions. These are (1) an attrition of ties with former homelands with increasing integration in the host country; (2) a steady or ascending pace of transnational activities eventually leading to return migration; and (3) permanent low‐grade ties with former homelands and networking with co‐ethnics in other countries of the post‐Soviet diaspora. I conclude that relatively few migrants can sustain intense transnational lifestyle over many years; there are several critical life‐course points when most transnational migrants have to decide where their home is.     

Do transnational brokers always win? A multilevel analysis of social support

Migrants often maintain relationships with significant others located in their countries of origin, which results in having transnational interpersonal ties in addition to local ones. The majority of previous studies indicate that financial and social remittances flow from countries of immigration to the countries of emigration through migrants and their networks. However, less is known about who is involved in those exchanges, what kind of supportive resources flow within and across nation-state borders, and what level of individual cross-border engagement of migrants is related to those flows. We ask whether and how transnationality as an individual attribute, together with other personal, dyadic, and supradyadic characteristics, explain received social support. Drawing on data from 100 ego-centric networks collected from Turkish migrants in Germany, the results indicate that not only the dyadic level but also network structure, the position occupied by individuals in the network and their level of transnationality explain supportive resource flows within and across borders.     

The boundaries of transnationalism: the case of assisted voluntary return migrants

Few studies on transnationalism have focused on migrants who return to their country of origin with insufficient resources and limited mobility. This study sheds light on the transnational connections of those who went back to Georgia and Armenia from Belgium on a voluntary assisted return and reintegration programme. Using Boccagni's (2012) analytical framework, we reveal the returnees' interpersonal, institutional and symbolic transnational ties. Although these ties were often limited and had little effect on their daily lives, and although the migrants' desire to participate in the transnational field rarely matched their ability to do so, they nonetheless attached great value to them symbolically and emotionally. Our findings question current conceptualizations of transnationalism and the focus on the home country as the sole context in which transnational ties should have an impact. We believe that there is a need to pay greater attention to the subjective and symbolic dimensions of the return–transnationalism field, including the relationship between integration and return migration policies.     

Neighbourhood social ties: how much do residential,physical and virtual mobility matter?

Following up on the prediction by classical sociological theorists that neighbours will become irrelevant as societies become more mobile, this research examines the strength of people's social ties with neighbours and the associations thereof with residential, physical and virtual mobility using longitudinal data for Germany. Unlike previous studies, the research considers the three forms of mobility simultaneously and contrasts its effects on social ties with neighbours to those with family. The results show that residential and physical mobility are negatively associated with social ties to neighbours and positively with ties to family. Virtual mobility does not weaken social ties with neighbours but ties with family. The positive association between mobility and social ties with family may not be strong enough to ascertain that people maintain as close social ties to others in the future as it does not outweigh the negative association with visiting neighbours.     

Salvadoran Migrants in Australia: An Analysis of Transnational Families’ Capability to Care across Borders

In this paper, I focus on the transnational care practices of Salvadoran refugees living in Perth (Western Australia) and who care for their ageing parents who have remained in their home country. The analysis is based on a conceptualization of transnational care as a set of capabilities that include, but are not limited to, mobility, social relations, time allocation, education and knowledge, paid work and communication (Merla and Baldassar, 2011). I focus in particular on the impact of Salvadoran refugees’ difficult access to, and use of, these capabilities on their capacity to fulfil their culturally defined sense of obligation to care for their ageing parents. Results show that extended transnational kinship networks play a major role in helping migrants overcome obstacles to transnational caregiving.     

Trust Networks in Transnational Migration

The sheer volume of migrant remittances to relatively poor countries, including those of Latin America and the Caribbean, nicely dramatizes the genuinely transnational social ties created by long-distance migration. The evidence underlines that migration flows are serious business, not only for the individuals and families involved, but also for whole national economies. Thinking about remittances also allows us to identify some crucial social processes of which most migrants and first-hand students of migration are well aware, but for which we have neither well-established theories, carefully crafted concepts, nor extensive evidence. I mean the creation, use, and transformation of interpersonal trust networks within migration streams.     

The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities

In this article I consider the relations between historical and contemporary forms of transnational political networks. I contest accounts that counterpose a networked present against a more settled and bounded past, arguing that this contrast rests on a problematic temporalization of difference in the construction of political identities. I consider how this temporalization produces particular accounts of relations between space, politics and identity. Drawing on the insurgent imaginative geography of resistance in C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, I argue for a focus on the dynamic geographies of connection formed through transnational networks. I develop this position through a discussion of the relations of the London Corresponding Society, formed in London in 1792, to transnational routes of political activists, organizational forms and ideas. This account highlights the multiple political identities crafted through transnational political networks. I conclude by outlining elements of a ‘usable past’ for contemporary counter‐global struggles.     

Transnational practices of Albanian families during the Greek crisis: unemployment,de-regularization and return

The outbreak of economic crisis in Greece in 2010 and the austerity measures adopted have dramatically altered the economic and social conditions throughout the country and consequently deeply impacted the migrant families. With Albanian regular migrants losing the legal status and lapsing back into irregularity due to the high unemployment rates, the reverse process of de-regularization and social disintegration has emerged. As a result, many migrants drew on family and social networks to pursue work opportunities either back home or elsewhere, while maintaining their formal ties/residence in Greece. This article explores the impact of the Greek crisis and de-regularization phenomenon on the transnational practices among Albanian families. Our aim is to go beyond the general theories on transnationalism and look at what exactly is the impact of the crisis on the families, as well as individuals' dilemmas of return and negotiations between transnational mobility and staying put, between different levels of belonging and their orientation to the present and future. The empirical analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 70 Albanians of first and second generation living in Greece.     

The construction,composition and rationale of immigrants’ network: The support strategies of Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto,Canada

In this article, we investigate the construction, composition and rationale behind the personal networks of recent immigrants to Canada. Drawing on egocentric-network analysis and interviews with 172 Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto, we reveal their networking strategies during their integration. First, we identify social locations that help create ties with different groups: workplaces and schools offer access to ties with non-immigrants and other immigrants alike, while religious and ethnic organizations facilitate ties to co-nationals (i.e., Ghanaians). Second, most individuals within immigrants’ network are co-nationals whose relationship began in Canada, followed by sustained transnational ties in the origin and diaspora and few ties with the non-immigrant. The nature of this network is explained by examining the migration project of immigrants together with the context of reception in Canada, which suggests a desire by immigrants to stay in Canada and make Canada their second home. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Who “Fills in” for Siblings and How? A Multilevel Analysis of Personal Network Composition and Its Relationship to Sibling Size1

In the midst of widespread fertility decline, I examine the relationship between sibling number and support network composition using multilevel regression on data from 25 countries. A fundamental structural effect of having fewer siblings is that individuals have a smaller pool of available close‐kin alters with whom to construct support networks. Consequently, networks of people with fewer siblings should be composed of different sorts of relations. Results confirm that such compositional adjustment occurs in systematic ways. Compared to those with three or more siblings, adults with none to two siblings (as separate categories) are more likely to expect support from parents, extended kin, and close friends but not more likely to do so from spouses/partners and children. Single children are also more likely to include neighbors and have smaller‐sized and/or impersonal networks. These findings contradict the primacy of familial ties in social support networks. Moreover, adjustment of support networks towards nonsibling ties occurs in culturally expected ways. Those with fewer siblings are generally only more likely to turn to ties for the types of support typically associated with those relations—parents for instrumental and financial support and friends for emotional support. Single children, however, also violate institutionalized expectations of social support by turning to ties for a wider range of social support. The results suggest that continuing declines in fertility could bring about both reinforcement and rearticulation of the sociocultural framing of close personal relationships. Moreover, consistent with recent research, the results show that personal networks are influenced more by individual‐level than country‐level factors.