Transnational Communities

Workshop, April 17–18, 2008

Introduction

Workshop Exposé [PDF]

The objective of the workshop is to work towards an edited volume which will explore the role of "transnational communities" in the contemporary structuring of economic activity and economic actors. Transnational communities can be built upon and reflect ascriptive characteristics but they can also be "imagined." Transnational communities can be "imagined" or constructed around common practice, common projects, a common interest, a common discourse or episteme.

In earlier contributions, we attempted to connect the literature on comparative economic organization with the preoccupation for and the literature on transnationalization (see in particular Djelic and Quack 2003, Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, Djelic and Quack 2008 but more generally the list of publications in the two curriculum vitaes). We documented, in the process, the multi-layered social embeddedness of economic behaviour and organizational forms. Historical and ongoing processes of internationalization and transnationalization make it plain that the social embeddedness of economic action is not structured and defined only at the national level anymore. Rather, economic forms, actions and interactions increasingly set themselves in complex layers of transnational, national and subnational institutional frames or rules of the game and reveal network patterns that cross over multiple boundaries.

The complexities of such a multi-layered socio-economic world manifest themselves through the interaction, recombination and hybridization of various institutional orders. This was explored already in many of our earlier contributions (see in particular Djelic and Quack 2003, Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006). Those complexities also raise intriguing questions as to the ways in which both economic actors and those actors that contribute to the structuring of economic activity are currently being constituted and/or transformed. In this volume, we propose to explore those questions and we do so by introducing and focusing on the notion of "transnational communities." We suggest that economic actors are increasingly part of, enmeshed in and constituted by transnational communities. We are also interested by the role different types of transnational communities play in the constitution, construction, re-construction and transformation of institutional rules of the game at the transnational as well as at the national and subnational levels.

By "transnational communities," we mean social groups with a transnational scope in which participating actors or members engage in interactions sufficiently close and regular to provide them with a sense of community and to some degree also of shared transnational identity. Transnational communities can be built upon and reflect ascriptive characteristics but they can also be "imagined" or constructed around common practice, common projects, a common interest, a common discourse or episteme. Close and regular interactions can take many different forms and, in particular, they need not be only direct and physical.