Josef Kohlbacher

Business activities of immigrants from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia in Vienna

Migrants who came to Vienna as guest workers from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey during the 1960s still form the majority of the local immigrant population. Business activities of Turks and former Yugoslavs cover a multitude of diverse sectors; what was once a niche economy has now become an important part of Viennese business life. This paper combines official statistics for Vienna as a whole, survey material and expert interviews, to analyse business ventures run by migrant entrepreneurs on two commercial streets in Vienna. Our research shows significant local variation in the migrant economies of the two groups in the study areas, highlighting the importance of the local context as an additional determinant shaping the diversity of business activities of certain immigrant groups.

Network Embeddedness of Migrants: Exploring Variations across Three Neighbourhoods in Vienna

In recent years, social network theory has become a well-established field in migration research (Scott and Carrington, 2011) and a substantial number of recent studies have focused on the functionality of social networks in migration flows or their role in the process of integration for migrants into the receiving society (Gurak and Caces, 1992; Haug, 2008; Poros, 2011). The concept of social networks is based on relationships between individuals and refers to an individual’s social contacts, made through various personal relationships, including kinship, friendship and community (Boyd, 1989). Social networks typically involve issues of trust and norms or acceptable forms of activity and behaviour for how that network is organised (see chapter by Molina et al. in this volume). Social networks have a social and productive value, even for highly skilled migrants (see Ryan and Mulholland in this volume) and particularly for female migrants (Ryan and Mulholland, 2014b). Interest in social networks is further fuelled by the fact that migrants with larger networks have been shown to have greater socio-economic success, better access to economic resources and increased ability to deal with everyday tasks. Their life outcomes in general seem to be positively shaped by access to social networks (Hagan, 1998; Eisner et al., 2014). Access to social networks and how their characteristics vary between the majority population and migrants might therefore be an important factor in ethnic inequalities.