Everyday life and social structures increasingly span long distances and several places. Transnationalism has become one of the most important and relevant approaches at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book focuses on new transnational social spaces; it conceptualizes the new relation between the Social and the Spatial which has emerged with the new communication and transportation technologies, alongside the massive transnational movement of people.
Terms such as globalization, virtual reality, cyberspace, or tele-management indicate that the reciprocal exclusivity of geographic and social space is changing in two ways: first, different social spaces with no previous geographic overlap or relationship to one another can become "stacked" within one and the same geographic space; second, one social space can now expand over several geographic spaces.
Transnational social spaces are pluri-local, durable and dense configurations of social practices, systems of symbols and artifacts that span places in different countries. This important cutting-edge volume brings together completely up-to-date theoretical and empirical research, focussing on international migration and international business. It presents significant social and political challenges for social scientists -- in international relations or business; sociologists, anthropologists and geographers -- as well as for politicians, professionals and practitioners.
