Izabela Grabowska

Transnational Multisited Qualitative Longitudinal Research in Investigating Social Remittances and Change

This chapter analyses the methodological considerations taken into account in our study. Specifically transnational multisited longitudinal research is taken into account as an underexplored approach in migration studies. This relates to repeating ethnographic visits to the sites and repeated in-depth interviews with information-rich individuals both in the UK and in Poland, filtered and selected from a wider set of interviews with local observants, return migrants and circulating migrants. The qualitative panel helped us to position social remittances in relation to time and space. Only through time were we able to discern the different stages and modes of social remitting and the roles of individuals in this process.

Observing, Acquiring, Resisting: Migrants’ Agency in the Web of Social Remittances

The process of social remitting is complex, multilayered and involves numerous social actors that at each stage face several choices of action. By definition, the process of socially remitted ideas, codes of behaviour and practices starts with the migrants themselves and their social context in the destination country. This chapter traces in detail what happens when migrants are exposed to new settings, how they make sense of this logic of novelty and unfamiliarity, what they choose as beneficial and potentially valuable or not, once they get to know the details of British social life. Faithful to our understanding of social remittances as ultimately a process where individual agency is the dominant determinant, we follow the routes, ideas, practices and values that travel within the transnational social field between Britain and various localities in Poland.

Collective Outcomes of Social Remittances: Reactions of Local Communities (Acceptance and Resistance)

The outcomes of social remittances and their spillover depend on the one hand on the content and modes of transfer, but on the other hand on characteristics of local inhabitants who are potential receivers of social remittances. Our research shows that local inhabitants see migration as a general social phenomenon and not as a new pattern, with examples brought by other people to be eventually followed and adopted. The impacts of migration are perceived in a biased way; on the one hand as modernising local towns (e.g. creation of new work places, better quality of life); on the other hand as adverse to local communities (e.g. breaking family life). In addition, the general attitudes to ideas and behaviours brought from abroad are rather ambivalent among local inhabitants. Migrants manifest what social remittances they acquired abroad with their own behaviours and activities. Less often, they disseminate them to the others. The range of local spillovers of social remittances depends on the social position of a migrant and on a range of his contacts with different categories of local inhabitants. At the same time, social remittances are often resisted by local inhabitants, which is connected much more to the general conservatism of local communities than to the content of these transfers.

Process of Transfer of Social Remittances in the European Union

The concept of social remittances, coined by Levitt (1998 and later), evoked many scholarly reactions, but its mechanisms are rarely clearly defined or operationalised. This chapter attempts to reconstruct the mechanisms of social remitting in a transnational European context. The aim is to discuss the primary factors of the mechanisms of social remitting—acquisition, transfer and outcomes and their diffusion, triggering three identifiable modes: resistance, imitation and innovation. By distinguishing the stages of social remitting mechanisms and its modes, we develop some hypotheses, in constant dialogue with theory and empirical findings, about how the mechanism of social remitting operates within the European context.

Researched Communities in Poland and in the UK: Transnational Spaces of Diffusion and Social Remittances

The chapter introduces the reader into the ethnographic context of the communities under study in the Polish regions of Podlasie, and Upper and Lower Silesia. Through the eyes of migrants in the UK, returnees and stayers, mental maps of the communities are reconstructed, which give “a double insight” perspective helping to uncover the relation between migration and social change. The chapter identifies important milestones in the history of each community, presents economic conditions and migration culture and focuses on contemporary transnational spaces that can serve as a channel of transfer of social remittances. Various sources are drawn upon in the chapter—not only official data or historic analysis, but also ethnographically grounded analysis, such as observations and in-depth interviews.

Migrants as Agents of Micro Social Changes

The chapter brings evidence that migrants, under certain conditions, may act as local agents of change by circulating social remittances. Firstly, migrants need to act actively and daily in given opportunity structures both of community of origin and destination. Secondly, they need to have a local social recognition for spreading out forms of social change to such ideas and practices. Thirdly, they need to have a wide network of contacts. The chapter is based on selected nodes of key individuals and their followers from three translocal communities, filtered out from a general sample of 124 in-depth interviews collected in the transnational multisited longitudinal research. At the end of this chapter, we come up with the typology of migrants as ordinary agents of micro social changes in their local microcosms.

Introduction: Social Remittances and “Hand-Made” Change by Migrants

In the introductory chapter we set the scene of social remittances in an enlarged European Union (EU). We relate here to the migration-development nexus and the roles of social remittances within that. We also check for validity of this migration-development reasoning for the “new” EU countries that are all classified as “developed economies”. Then we characterise the aims of the book and briefly sketch a picture of post-accession migration as based on the migratory flows between Poland and the UK. In this chapter we also formulate research questions and announce the methodological approach based on transnational multisited longitudinal research.

Migration in Working Lives: Looking Back after Return; a Structure and Agency Approach

In the first decade of the new millennium, circular and temporary labour migration trends reached a climax in Europe, as an increasing number of migrants began to engage in more fluid forms of mobility (Castles et al. 2014). The European Union (EU) offered numerous new job opportunities and enhanced migrants’ abilities to engage in temporary circulation, particularly following its enlargement to include Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, in 2004 and 2007 (Glorius et al. 2013). Fassmann et al. (2014) calculated that, by 2011, almost 5 million citizens from CEE countries were living in the ‘old EU’. Furthermore, 2011 Polish census data revealed that over two million Poles resided abroad for at least 3 months (Gozdziak 2014, p. 1).