Los espacios sociales de la transnacionalidad. Una tipología de la integración relacional de los migrantes

• Published in: Redes : revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales Vol. 7; p. 4
• Main Author: de Federico de la Rúa, Ainhoa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 01.10.2004
• Subjects: globalization; meso structures; personal networks; Transnational communities; typologies
• ISSN: 1579-0185

Following the classical community studies, Ferrand (2002) reminds the importance of "local communities" as a meso social intermediate agency for social regulation between the macro social level of national regulation and the micro social level of interpersonal regulation. An important caracteristic of local communities is its level of delocaliztion or its degrée of openness: social networks go beyond borders, they can be dual, simoultaneously local and non-local. The duality local/non-local can be expressed in structural terms through the concep of "bridge". A tie can be called a bridge when it links two different and unrelated sub-networks. Based on the idea that the efficiendy of bridges depends on the type of cliques that it connects (Lin 2001), it is possible to define different types of micro-structures. The distribution of these micro-structures are herzatz * sucedaneous * indicators or approximations for the different meso structures of relational systems as combinations of local and non local networks. These concepts are particularly interesting to caracterize the modalities of relational integration of migrants, typical local and non-local actors. We propose a triple distinction of their ties: local ties (with people coming from the hosting society), national ties (with people having their same nationality) and transnational ties (with people having other origins). The identification of the elementary structures of relational integration allows to caracterize simultaneously the modalities of integration of actors with different profiles of integration and, by looking at the combination of profiles of integration in a given social space, the caracterization of different types of transnational communities.