3 - TRANSFORMATIONS OF TRUST NETWORKS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
Summary
“Dear Mother,” wrote sisters Edith and Sara Pilap from their New York home to their native Polish village of Rypin in 1891,
do not think that the country here is like a village at home. Many people from Rypin live here and that is why Sarah [sister] wants to be here … With God's help, we shall send a steamship ticket for father even before Passover. And I hope that after our dear father will arrive here, we shall be able to send for our dear mother and our little brother, even before the summer.
(Morawska 1996: 29)Yet another migration chain was drawing people linked by kinship, ethnicity, and religion across the Atlantic to America. Polish villagers vigorously fashioned new social lives in teeming New York City.
Chain-linked, long-distance migration provides a privileged laboratory for study of transformations in trust networks. Long-distance migration poses serious risks. Those risks dispose potential migrants who do not have extensive professional connections to rely on members of their trust networks for information and advice. The same risks inhibit potential migrants who lack the mediation of trust networks from migrating at all. Instead of a broad distribution across destinations as a function of economic opportunities at those destinations, chain migration channels long-distance moves into a few origin-destination streams; large numbers of people from the same village end up in the same towns or urban neighborhoods thousands of miles away. Networks persist in the process, but change structure and geographic distribution.
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- Information
- Trust and Rule , pp. 52 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005