Caribbean transnational migration behaviour: reconceptualising its ‘strategic flexibility’

Abstract

Abstract Building on a considerable body of extant literature, and critically assessing its strong and weak (or overlooked) conceptual explanations and observations, this reconceptualisation of Caribbean transnational migrant behaviour updates the theoretical account of what is now an increasingly prevalent mobility process in the region. Utilising a structuration construct in which a key conceptual base is a behavioural (agency) notion of strategic flexibility, transnational migrants operating within Caribbean family networks are situated in their multi‐local transnational social fields and resultant distant‐but‐linked community structures. A ‘moorings’ construct (first offered by Moon in 1995) further enables the portrayal of transnational migrants' personal interactions and migration behaviours in multicultural contexts. It allows the examination of their aggregate outcomes in relation to the micro‐ and mesostructural contexts of institutional/familial/communal decision‐making and action as they play themselves out in continuous time. ‘Homes’ and ‘homes away from home’ provide the microgeographical ‘roots’ of migrants' transnational existence, of their experiences, identities, and degrees of national and transnational consciousness. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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