Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market, University of California Press, 1999, £40.00, paper £14.95, xvii+444 pp.

Brian Owensby, Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil, Stanford University Press, 1999, £27.50, ix+332 pp.

Stephen Alomes, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999, £35.00, paper £12.95, xiv+320 pp.

The studies that form the basis for these three books all take a historical and longitudinal approach, with varying foci, on processes which can be seen to be entwined with globalisation, marketisation and internationalisation as they explore identity formation in response to changing world and economic conditions. Within these global processes each book demonstrates the scope for individual action within three rather different institutional contexts. In this review I focus on a single theme to examine the manner in which the ties of family and personal networks impact upon the ability of these actors to forge their identities. I begin by providing an extremely brief introduction to each of the studies as a context for exploring how we can see the role of family networks and personal connections as significant influences on the experiences of the actors involved.