Abstract
ABSTRACTThe main purpose of the article is to connect rural immigrants’ business ventures and development in Sweden to relational perspectives on their proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks at structural and individual levels. Accordingly, the authors employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth interviews. In the context of urban–rural relationships’ meanings for the restaurateurs’ business benefits and constraints, they address two questions: (1) What does embeddedness in proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and for their businesses? and (2) How do previous and anticipated transitions in the restaurateurs’ families influence their business decisions and migration trajectories? The results suggest that the interviewees employed transnational dimensions in their social embeddedness and that they maintained material and emotional relationships with their countries of origin. This relational approach thus contributes to a better understanding of what the studied businesses mean for the entrepreneurs and the selected localities. The restaurateurs contribute to a globalisation of Swedish countrysides, but their socio-economic potential for countering rural depopulation in Sweden is not fully realised. Additionally, the study illuminates how individuals influence, and are influenced by, place-to-place mobilities on a daily basis and during their life course.
Highlights
Changing rural populationsAcademic interest in changing rural populations in ‘more developed’ societies has recently increased (Smith 2007; Woods 2007; 2011; 2012; Hugo & Morén-Alegret 2008; Bell & Osti 2010; Milbourne & Kitchen 2014; Hedlund et al 2017)
In the context of urban–rural relationships’ meanings for the restaurateurs’ business benefits and constraints, they address two questions: (1) What does embeddedness in proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and for their businesses? and (2) How do previous and anticipated transitions in the restaurateurs’ families influence their business decisions and migration trajectories? The results suggest that the interviewees employed transnational dimensions in their social embeddedness and that they maintained material and emotional relationships with their countries of origin
In connecting our empirical data with urban–rural functional linkages (Zonneveld & Stead 2007), social networks (Mitchell 1969), and concepts of embeddedness, based on the work of Granovetter (1985), we address two research questions: 1. What does embeddedness in networks of proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and their businesses?
Summary
Changing rural populationsAcademic interest in changing rural populations in ‘more developed’ societies has recently increased (Smith 2007; Woods 2007; 2011; 2012; Hugo & Morén-Alegret 2008; Bell & Osti 2010; Milbourne & Kitchen 2014; Hedlund et al 2017). Migrants’ motives for migration related to necessity and choice are relevant themes in further studies of rural mobilities and population change (Milbourne 2007; Stockdale & Catney 2014; Findlay et al 2015). This relates to the fixity and fluidity of globalising rural places (Milbourne & Kitchen 2014), meaning that places of origin and destination are socially constructed and ‘never completed’ (Thrift 1999), as they consist of intersecting power relations (Massey 1994; Hudson 2004). Due to rules, regulations, and strong loyalty to in-group members at the destinations, immigrants living on the margins of Swedish and Nordic societies can experience
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