Immigrant Networks and Social Capital

Carl L. Bankston

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745684598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Demographie

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 In recent years, immigration researchers have increasingly drawn on the concept of social capital and the role of social networks to understand the dynamics of immigrant experiences. How can they help to explain what brings migrants from some countries to others, or why members of different immigrant groups experience widely varying outcomes in their community settings, occupational opportunities, and educational outcomes?

This timely book examines the major issues in social capital research, showing how economic and social contexts shape networks in the process of migration, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the study of international migration. By drawing on a broad range of examples from major immigrant groups, the book takes network-based social capital theory out of the realm of abstraction and reveals the insights it offers.

Written in a readily comprehensible, jargon-free style, Immigrant Networks and Social Capital is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes in international migration, networks, and political and social theory in general. It provides both a theoretical synthesis for professional social scientists and a clear introduction to network approaches to social capital for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in contemporary social trends and issues.

1

Social Networks in Immigration

The questions of how individual people are connected to each other, what these connections enable them to do, and how these connections limit what they can do are some of the oldest in the discipline of sociology. The issues of how people are bound together and how their ties serve or diminish their collective and individual efficacy continue to be central to social theory today. Network theory is a way to examine those ties as patterns of links among people. To prepare to look at how networks may be considered as resources for immigrants, this chapter will provide a general discussion of network concepts, as these relate to immigration.

Network Communities and Communication

The word “community” may be one of the most over-used and contentious terms in the social sciences (Brint, 2001). In discussing the use of the word as it relates to immigration research, Wierzbicki (2004) has suggested that it has three main senses. One of these refers to the community as a physical location, a sense that has been common within community studies. Many of the immigrant communities that the present book will consider have a grounding in physical location. For example, the set of social ties that comprise the Vietnamese community discussed by Zhou and Bankston (1998) takes shape within a physical location that enables group members to have and maintain contacts. The organizations that can serve as focal points for network ties among people often do so by bringing people into the same geographical space for at least temporary periods. Thus, although we can think of a place as some sort of “community” merely because people live in it, which is what Wierzbicki means in speaking of it in this first sense, when we think about a community as a network, the physical location is important only because it establishes relationships among the people in it. In this sense, a physical community conceived of as a network can be defined as a set of social ties that can be located on a map. Even geographically extended networks can be thought of as communities in space in this sense. One could, for example, place on a map the relationships among Asian Indian motel owners along interstate highways, and conceive of this as a spatial community, if one stretched out across some very wide spaces (see Dhingra, 2010; 2012).

A second sense of the word “community,” Wierzbicki points out, is a group of people who have something in common, without necessarily knowing each other, such as “the Republican community” or “the African American community.” This is the loosest sense of the word. It can, however, have some relationship to the idea of a network as a community. Homophily, or the tendency of people to form social connections on the basis of common interests, backgrounds, and identities, can make social categories bases for interpersonal associations. Alternatively, repeated transactions can produce and maintain categorical identities for groups. Thus, Charles Tilly (1978) described a set of people who are members of both a social category and a social network as a “catnet.”

Community as network is a third sense of the word (Wierzbicki, 2004). Along these lines, Barry Wellman (1999) argues that the network is the contemporary answer to the question of what constitutes a community in a society in which social relations can no longer be looked at solely in terms of place. A network links people in an identifiable set of relationships. These relationships have an internal organization. This organization has the property of density: when all those within it have relationships with each other, this is high density. When most of the people in the network are connected to others indirectly, through shared associations, this is low density. It has the property of strength or weakness of ties. While there is some debate about just what a strong or weak tie might be, in general we can take this to refer to the intensity of relationships. We have strong ties with our family members and close friends and relatively weaker ties with mere co-workers or occasional associates. A network characterized by strong ties is one in which most people maintain close relationships with each other. Frequency of contact is a property often confused with strength of ties because people often have frequent contacts with their close associates and because repeated contacts can promote strong ties. Nan Lin (1999) has observed that individuals possess both strong and weak ties, and that combining these may enable them to obtain the greatest range of resources.

In addition to internal organization, networks can differ in their linkages with the world outside of them and in size. The network may be relatively closed or open. A closed network is one in which most social relationships in a community are with other members of the community. An open network is one in which people have many links to people outside the community. Networks can, finally, be large or small, containing many members or comparatively few.

Because I am concerned primarily with immigrant groups, rather than with individuals, in this discussion and in these figures, I am looking at what Wellman (1999) calls whole networks, rather than at networks as personal communities, understood as the ties that link a given individual to others.

In whole networks considered as relational structures, the central focus is on the participants as points of connection. If we map out a set of network contacts, we can represent the structure of the network community in terms of any of its properties. For example, a small Cambodian social network in Houston can be represented by drawing thick lines between all those who have especially strong ties with each other, somewhat thinner lines to represent those linked together by bonds of close association (such as friendship), and broken lines to represent more casual acquaintances. In the idealized map in Figure 1.1, for example, all of the individuals have social contacts, but those in the center (X₁ through X₅₎ are all strongly connected as members of a family. Here, X₁ and X₂ can represent parents and the others in the center children. X₆ through are non-family Cambodians, all linked to family members X₉ by ties of close association. The only ties to people who are not Cambodians (Y₁ and Y₂) are through non-family members of the ethnic group. A similar kind of map might represent frequency of contacts among members of this Cambodian community, with the thickness and continuity of the lines representing numbers of contacts in a period of time, rather than intensity of relationship. The design resulting from either could yield an approximation of how closed or open that community is, through the number and type of lines going outside the community, and an approximation of its size. It would also give an idea of how legitimate it would be to speak of a Cambodian community in Houston, rather than simply individuals of Cambodian ancestry settled there. If the lines were not concentrated among people of Cambodian ethnicity (again, the role of community as commonality of identity), then one could argue that Houston really has no Cambodian community, in the sense of Tilly’s “catnet,” even though it may have many individuals of Cambodian ancestry and identification. This idealized version shows a closed ethnically based network, since only two Cambodians have ties to non-Cambodians.

Figure 1.1 Networks as Structures of Relations: Strong and Weak Ties among Individuals

Notes:

= Family tie;

= Close association;

= Casual acquaintance.

X = Cambodian; Y = Non-Cambodian.

In the social networks literature, the concepts of network closure and density are related to the idea of transitivity, which exists to the extent that the individuals to whom two people are connected are also connected to each other (Flynn et al., 2010). Figure 1.1 shows complete transitivity among all Cambodians, since each individual in this categorically defined network is connected to all others. Multiplexity, a similar property, refers to the degree to which two individuals are tied to each other in different ways (Skoretz and Agneesens, 2007); for example, if two individuals are friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Within networks, the centrality of individuals deals with how key they are to connecting others. While technical approaches to network analysis define and measure centrality in a number of ways (see del Pozo et al., 2011), for simplicity we can consider centrality as the extent to which an individual is central in connecting other individuals.

Networks may be relatively egalitarian in relations among actors or they may involve hierarchies of power, prestige, and access to resources. Some authors have argued that multi-layering and hierarchy can promote the abilities of networks to coordinate activities among members and distribute information efficiently (David-Barrett and Dunbar, 2012). Figure 1.2 shows a simple network structured by unequal relations between a workplace supervisor and the workers, and equal relations among workers, where X = Cambodian.

This idea of lines among points suggests that we can look at networks in terms of what flows along those lines, or of what kinds of communication move through social connections. From this perspective, the focus in looking at the network would be on considering how the information about opportunities, resources, or such immaterial matters as norms and values can be conveyed through structures of relations. The idealized and simplified version presented in Figure 1.3 illustrates how a network can provide channels for communication of information about two resources: employment and housing. Here, members of the group are assumed to receive both kinds of information from those outside the group, with communications about housing entering the group as a result of the link between non-Cambodian Y₁ and Cambodian X₃ and communications about employment entering along the link between Y₂ and X₂. (Although idealized, this diagram is based on the real-world case of the Lao community discussed in Chapter 6.)

Figure 1.2 Inequality in a Network Structure

Note:

= Supervisor–worker relationship;

= Co-worker relationship.

There is a tendency in theorizing about networks, especially in thinking about networks as sources of more or less constructive social action, to emphasize the structural properties of sets of social relations. Thus, although James Coleman (1988; 1990) recognizes that networks serve as information channels, he tends to treat the functioning of social ties as a matter of properties such as network closure. Highly transitive, multiplex networks, moreover, can intensify the sharing of information and normative orientations, while also limiting the flow of new information inward. Individuals who occupy positions of centrality can facilitate communication among others, while hierarchical structuring can increase communicative efficiency. As I will attempt to demonstrate in the following pages, though, one of the reasons that sets of connections among people provide varying outcomes for different groups of people is that those connections contain different sorts of information. In addition to the geometric arrangement of contacts among people, one needs to consider what can be conveyed through those contacts. Culture, especially as expectations and norms, can be considered part of the available information. If members of an immigrant group have an expectation of upward mobility for themselves or their children, for example, close ties among members of the group that reinforce this expectation can contribute to realizing it. If group experiences have produced a general expectation that there is little possibility of mobility, then the same geometric arrangement of ties can actually limit chances.

Figure 1.3 Network as Communication Channels

Note:

= Employment information;

= Housing information.

X = Cambodian; Y = Non-Cambodian.

More material sorts of information can also be influential. If some group members know of the availability of job or housing opportunities, this knowledge can move along the lines of connection among other members. This means that the kinds of knowledge or norms that can be shared are critical, and the larger setting that determines what kind of information group members can access and share shapes the nature of networks as lines of communication. For example, the concentration of Mexican immigrants in semi-skilled and unskilled labor in specific industries is, at one level, a matter of individuals being channeled by the types of knowledge that move through their ethnic networks and, at another level, a matter of group placement in North American labor market demand, which limits and structures the information about jobs available, as well as expectations.

Networks Within and Across Group Boundaries

Social networks connect individuals to other individu...