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Transnational friendships and supportive practices: an introduction -- The contemporary meaning of friendship -- Friendship as "emotional work" -- Friendship as trust and reciprocity -- Friendship as solidarity -- A relational examination of distance, meanings and practices

AbstractThrough qualitative personal network analysis from an intersectional perspective, this article contributes to the debate on the salience of ethnicity as a defining, yet essentialized, category in transnational migration research. The article includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of qualitative personal network analysis as a means to alleviate the risks of overemphasizing ethnicity over other categories, which provides the background to the empirical analysis. Drawing on 20 personal networks and qualitative interviews with Chinese international students who were studying in the United States, the findings of this study indicate that ethnicity, as a precursor to culture, along with gender and class, is important in friendship formations but not necessarily for job‐relevant issues. Moreover, through an intersectional personal network analysis, transnational family ties were problematized based not on their ethnicity but on gendered expectations and social norms.

This study investigates the extent to which migrants' embeddedness in two formal social protection systems (country of origin and host country) influences the resources they exchange in their informal supportive relationships. I analyze the support networks of a matched sample of Turkish migrants in Germany and their significant others in Turkey to illuminate the conditions and meaning of reciprocal resource exchanges, finding that both migrants and nonmigrants perceive formal social protection offered by Germany as superior to that of Turkey. I show that those perceptions have implications for how financial support is exchanged with the family but have less impact on friendships. These implications for family included unequal power relationships, changes in equity among siblings and family, different valuation processes of resources, and thus, (reciprocal) exchanges.

AbstractResearch on the cross-border practices that underpin the spatial dimension of personal relationships involves also the study of protective resources (e.g. care, information exchange and financial assistance). However, studies that examine such transnational practices within migrants' personal networks face methodological challenges at both the data collection level and the data analysis level. For a comprehensive analysis of migrants' life worlds, new methodological approaches to transnational practices and resource flows within personal networks are essential. Thus, this article aims to illustrate ways to study social protection by empirically capturing such practices. In addition to demonstrating that the combined use of personal network analysis and qualitative interviews is a fruitful approach, this study used a mixed-methods design contributing to capture the interrelationship between transnational social protection patterns and migrants' strategies, as well as their meanings.

Objective: We investigate the relation between having online and offline personal networks and employment for male and female migrants in the Netherlands. Background: Previous research diagnoses an alarming gender gap for migrants in their employment patterns. Although social networks are identified as being crucial for migrants' labor market participation, we know very little about how migrant men and women differ in their social networks and how these differences translate into varying employment opportunities. Method: Drawing on the Dutch Immigrant Panel of LISS (Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences) dataset, we examined migrants' employment patters who have arrived to the Netherlands under different migration streams by conducting logistic regression models. Results: We identify two major findings. While contrary to our expectations, migrant women tend to be connected with those who are employed and with a Dutch background, less connected to men and have a rather dense network structure. Nonetheless, women's personal networks do not significantly account for their unemployment, but rather their less use of LinkedIn than migrant men. Conclusion: Our findings have implications in understanding network inequalities for female migrants in their labor market participation.

AbstractIn this article, we examine the role of brokerage, the knowledge that brokers transfer and the social conditions of that transfer. Previous research suggests that highly skilled migrants spanning multiple locales have the advantage of being able to transfer knowledge as they move from one place to another. In this study, using a network perspective, we look at the activities of international doctoral students in their transfer of knowledge and illustrate the underlying social conditions of knowledge transfer through transnational friendship networks. Using a qualitative methodology, we examine the research questions and 35 in‐depth interviews, as well as egocentric network analysis conducted in Germany. In the findings, we explore the social conditions of knowledge brokerage, including trust, reciprocity and solidarity. Finally, we discuss the implications for further research on knowledge sharing among brokers and international students.

AbstractAcknowledgement of the prominent role of social networks in migration studies marked a significant departure from earlier studies, suggesting that social networks determine migration decisions, trajectories, and outcomes. While social network analytical tools have not always been used in empirical investigations of migratory phenomena, studies on migration that use relational approaches also show an inherent network thinking. In this paper, we review the state of the art of the literature on migration and social networks, highlighting the advances made by empirical research using network thinking, particularly in different stages of migration and for operationalizing transnational phenomena related to migration. Based on this review, we detect the role of networks in different stages of migration, and we reflect on the remaining challenges for future research regarding the role of social networks within migration scholarship.