International Student Mobility and Transnational Friendships

Kenneth A. Loparo, Ba?ak Bilecen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349487677
  9781137405241
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137405258
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

Friends play a crucial role in international students' lives. This book explores the characteristics of the friendship networks of international doctoral students by analysing the relationships between these students and their friends, both in the country of education and across several national borders.

1

Transnational Friendships and Supportive Practices: An Introduction

If you get to know people, there is obviously a link between these Mexicans [who belong to already settled immigrant groups] and myself [an international doctoral student from Mexico]. We make reference to the same culture, we miss sort of the same things, and so on. But when these memories and these things are exhausted, then you must find something in common with the other person. And if there’s nothing, then it’s hard to make friendship out of that, and I think you cannot become friends with another person just because you come from the same country.

(Teresa,¹ Mexican, 26)

When the interviews with 35 international doctoral students from 20 different nationalities in Germany were conducted to hear about their experiences studying abroad, their activities and practices, all of them were as blunt as Teresa about the fact that friendship is not just about the other person’s nationality or ethnicity, but that there must be something else, something common on which to build the relationship. But what is this ‘something else’? What causes individuals to make friends in this increasingly mobile world if it is no longer just about nationality? How do individuals ‘do’ friendships across borders?

Friendship is a facet of social life, and friends no doubt play a crucial role in many people’s lives. The voluntary, less standardised and non-hierarchical nature of interaction it involves makes friendship a unique type of relationship. Despite the overstated, pessimistic claims that the social relationships as well as their quality are weakening and that individuals have become lonely, isolated, self-interested, uncaring and lacking in trust as a result of the ‘individualisation’ of contemporary ‘Western’ life, relationships today are far more subtle, complex and multifaceted (see, e.g., Spencer and Pahl 2006). According to the individualisation proposition, Western societies experienced an important shift after adopting capitalist market principles and the growth of urbanisation. This led to a decline in traditional social structures and resulted in interpersonal relationships in which individual choice has become the primary element in most areas of one’s life, including consumption, education and living place and space, as well as with whom to be friends. However, friendships in particular are far from being peripheral or fleeting in a world where such choices shape personal biographies; rather, they play a significant role in individuals’ lives. Contemporary friendships are defined more by ‘doing’ things friends do and less by ‘being’ a friend. Therefore, this book not only explores the ways in which international doctoral students do friendships by looking at their supportive practices within and across borders – not only “[b]ecause friends tend to be most similar in personal characteristics, experiences and values … [and] tend to be most effective in providing support that benefits from similar norms and roles” (Plickert et al. 2007: 409) – but also considers contemporary social and economic transformations and their implications for individuals and their social relationships.

International doctoral students are an ideal group for the discussion of the complex interplay of wider mobility, transnationality, culture and educational discourses. They make up an understudied group in a state of transformation from being consumers of knowledge to also being producers of knowledge. In other words, being a doctoral student represents a transitional stage in one’s life. As students, they orient themselves toward studying and writing their dissertation in the pursuit of a degree, but at the same time it is their first foray into the role of a professional researcher in a given academic field. In today’s so-called ‘knowledge society’, these young and well-educated individuals represent the group most desired by any country, yet there are many aspects which must be examined in detail, such as their friendship relationships with individuals not only in their country of education, but also in other countries. The empirical data used in this book were collected from interviews conducted with 21 female and 14 male international doctoral students² enrolled at two graduate schools that were recently established under the Excellence Initiative³ in Germany. Even though as a group these students are not representative of all international doctoral students in Germany, it is important to study their relationships to understand the meanings and patterns of transnational friendships across the world.

Graduate education today is not only being internationalised – in the sense that it incorporates all aspects of higher education systems or institutions (Throsby 1991) – it is also being transnationalised. Scholars who take a transnational perspective position mobile individuals in social spaces which connect various national territories, rather than consider them to be moving back and forth in a binary manner between two restricted states. To put it differently, cross-border formations are viewed through a transnational lens, which allows us to consider the wide variety of regular ties that simultaneously exist at various geographical locales. Thomas Faist defines ‘transnational social spaces’ as consisting of “combinations of ties and their contents, positions in networks and organizations, and networks of organizations that can be found in at least two geographically and internationally distinct places” (Faist 2000: 197). In this sense, transnational social spaces provide contexts for interaction and transaction, as well as for the organisation, construction and reconstruction of social networks, flows of ideas, identifications, knowledge, goods and practices. Thus, studies which use a transnational lens are sceptical about methodological nationalism, that is, “the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 302). However, transnational studies almost always consider only those ethnic and diasporic relationships between home and host countries, despite transnational phenomenon being a rather broad concept which could also have been used to study a variety of cross-border relationships, such as those forged and maintained by international doctoral students across several state borders. To fill this gap in the research, this book contributes to the literature in two ways: (1) by displaying how friendship is ‘done’ across borders by the interesting group of international doctoral students, and (2) by giving empirical evidence of transnational phenomena and practices across the world while avoiding the kind of dichotomous analysis of home and host countries commonly performed in this area.

Although migration and transnational studies have been concerned with a variety of issues in social, economic, cultural and political contexts, international students have not been thoroughly researched, let alone using a transnational lens (Bilecen 2012). Friendship relationships are always mentioned in studies in this area, but they have not been systematically analysed to the same extent as family, kinship or ethnic relationships. However, friendship relationships are just as significant because mobile individuals like international students leave their families and friends behind in their home countries, and they start their own families and make friends in other locales. In the literature, the postmodern world has been described as being “disembedded” from time and space (Giddens 1991) and as lacking psychological depth or anchoring (Jameson 1991). As a result, friendship ties and the practices that constitute them must adapt to continue to exist and to enable individuals to initiate new friendships. Extensive use of new social media, particularly of online social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, have come to complement or even substitute for face-to-face friendship interaction, especially for those who cross nation-state borders. For this reason, the main aim of this book is to illustrate the meanings and practices of friendships challenged by today’s interdependent and mobile world.

As individuals become mobile, their lives can become so divergent that after a while their friendships may no longer be what they once were. Increasing globalisation, migration and mobilities create new challenges for individuals and their friendship relationships, which are particularly vulnerable because they are less institutionalised than family and kinship ties. Changing patterns of employment and leisure, and family, household and domestic life, as well as increasing individualisation and the declining importance of locality for solidarity in our time pose challenges to friendship relationships as well. Some scholars have argued that these general and global transformations emancipate individuals from the confinements of locality and thus facilitate choice and selectivity over sociability in which the significance of friendship ties increases (Allan 1998a; Wellman 2001). Others have noted that sociability has decreased, especially at the local level and, as a result, so has willingness for responsibility-taking and community participation (Etzioni 1997). Under the changing conditions of our postmodern era, friendship relationships are of utmost importance to mobile individuals because in some cases friends may even replace family relations, particularly when it comes to supportive practices. For example, when international students start their own families in their country of education, they might choose to rely on their friends to help with household-related activities such as decorating and buying furniture, and even with taking care of each others’ children, activities which are usually considered to be family related. These relationships then become more important, not only due to geographical proximity, but also due to the changing nature of friendship.

Further investigation is required into the negotiation and patterning of friendship relations or “the actual ways in which people ‘do’ friendship” (Jamieson et al. 2006) – as well as into the meanings the individuals under study attach to their shared practices (Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Giddens 1979, 1984). Generally speaking, “friendship is a practical and emotional relationship of mutual and reciprocal goodwill, trust, respect, and love or affection between people who enjoy spending time together” (Badhwar 1993: 2f.). In other words, friendship is both about concrete interactions and transactions as well as symbolic characterisations such as understanding, liking, solidarity, reciprocity, trust and loyalty. Moreover, friendship is considered to be flexible, more open to individual negotiation and reliable and, thus, a major source of support (Allan 1979, 1989, 2008; Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954; Marsden and Campbell 1984; Paine 1974). However, to treat terms such as ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ as all-encompassing ideas would be to miss the opportunity to disentangle the various configurations, patterns and practices involved and, thus, the opportunity to understand the meanings of such relationships (Mohr 1998). Perceptions of friendship and the ways in which friendship is actually performed differ from one culture to another (for extensive discussions see Adams and Plaut 2003; Paine 1969). This book focuses on the understudied aspect of how friendship is ‘done’ within and across borders among a variety of friendships.

A relational approach

Rather than focusing on individuals, dyads and their attributes within friendships, this book uses the relational approach to study friendship because friendship “is socially patterned” (Allan 1998b: 71). Individuals are not only structurally embedded in broad social, economic and political frameworks, they are also influenced by these networks through the ways in which their personal networks are patterned. For instance, gender affects friendship ties (Adams and Ueno 2006), as do class (Walker 1995), ethnicity (Liebow 1967), culture (Krappmann 1996) and age (Pahl and Pevalin 2005). Friendship is a social relationship in which individuals share life events such as having a common hobby, playing tennis, watching a football game, gossiping or just chatting over a cup of coffee. Individuals turn to their social relationships for assistance when they try to find a job or a scholarship, search for opportunities to migrate or engage in recreational activities together. However, everyone has different relationships, which they can mobilise depending on the circumstances. A female individual might only want to talk about personal matters or to go shopping with her female friends, but might prefer to watch a hockey game with her father. Friendship might exist between spouses, partners, cousins or siblings. In addition, relationship types can also overlap. Colleagues can also be friends, and relatives can also be neighbours. The types of relationships, both in the composition and in the structure of relationships, are very important in studying the quality of interpersonal relationships, supportive practices and the meanings attached to them. Therefore, we need to investigate those personal relationships in depth by keeping in mind that they do not happen in a vacuum but rather are socially embedded within wider structures and different interpretations of individuals.

Social network analysis,⁴ as part of a mixed-method design, is better suited than other approaches to such an endeavour because it helps one to investigate interpersonal relationships more systematically and in much greater detail. “In the sociological traditions, networks are often assumed rather than assessed” (Deaux and Martin 2003: 115); however, it is important to combine a network approach with qualitative methods in order to fully depict international students and their friendships in a systematic manner (Bilecen 2012). By so doing, I was able to understand not only who these international students considered their friends, but also with whom they preferred to engage in what type of supportive practices. The network approach alone does not tell us the ways in which individuals ‘do’ friendships or the lines of their practices they follow. The empirical findings in this book are rather qualitative in nature; and network approach was combined with interviews because the research questions posed in the beginning of this chapter required not only a mapping of friendships but also in-depth investigations to determine how international doctoral students do friendships by eliciting their definitions of who they considered to be a friend and the meanings they attach to such relationships.

For the purposes of network studies, interviewees are usually asked to list all their friends to determine the size of the network size along with other variables. Alternatively, they are given a roster of the names of other students with whom they study in the same class or school so they can map certain friendships together with different questions, such as finding out their deviant behaviour or transitivity of ties, and so on. Similarly, the interviewees are asked to define their personal relationships which are already pre-categorised as friends, family members, neighbours and the like without going into detail about the meanings they have attached to certain relationships. Moreover, in some studies of friendship, the interviewees are given a list of activities and are asked to indicate which of their friends share which activities with them. In addition, they are sometimes asked to describe what they mean by the term ‘friend’ and to make a list of the qualities they associate with friendship; “however, these qualities refer to some general or idealized concept, or to cultural stereotypes, rather than to actual flesh-and-blood relationships” (Spencer and Pahl 2006: 4). Therefore, through in-depth interviews, I was able to investigate friendship relationships among these international doctoral students.

The use of social network analysis proved to be useful in specifically illustrating these networks, but it also brought systematisation to the study – that is, the respondents were first asked about their friendship relationships with other international students whom they considered friends. While they were naming their friends, they were also asked to specify each friend’s personal characteristics, such as age, gender, level of education, frequency of contact, and duration of their relationship, as well as the meanings to them behind those categories. Later, questions were asked about social support that corresponded to each friend they named; this allowed an analysis not only of the patterns of supportive practices by means of quantitative logic, but also of the meanings of those practices as well as sociological notions underlying their friendships. The results of the traditional variable analysis are reported in the Appendix, and those recurrent patterns that were identified are illustrated in the following chapters by means of qualitative examples, particular crucial cases and analytical concepts.

International student mobility

International students constitute a growing percentage of the world’s mobile population. They account for as much as one third of all temporary migration within the OECD countries (OECD 2010) and play a significant role in Europeanisation. According to the OECD, by 2008 the number of students enrolled in universities in other countries had increased from 1.5 million in 2000 to more than 3.3 million, and had increased by 8.2% from 2007. “Since 2000, the number of foreign tertiary students enrolled worldwide has increased by 99%, for an average annual growth rate of 7.1%. The number of foreign tertiary students enrolled in OECD countries doubled since 2000, for an average annual growth rate of 7.2%” (OECD, 2012: 24). Although international students represent a significant mobile population whose numbers steadily increase, in “migration and mobility studies, international students are undoubtedly an under-researched phenomenon. Indeed, they are almost a blind-spot on the research map of social sciences” (King et al. 2010: 46; see also Findlay 2011). However, the increasing presence of international graduate students at institutions of higher education, and in societies all over the world, calls for a closer examination of their multi-faceted lives and cross-border friendships.

The higher education system in Europe is heavily influenced by the trend of internationalisation. While the term ‘internationalisation’ suggests an increase of cross-border activities among national higher education systems, the term ‘globalisation’ – which refers to competition, market-oriented, transnational education and commercial knowledge transfer – indicates that borders and national higher education systems will be obscured. In other words, globalisation highlights worldwide flows, whereas internationalisation focuses on relationships “between and among nations, people, cultures, institutions, and systems” (Knight 2012: 5). The third term, ‘Europeanisation’, is the regional interpretation of internationalisation, which is mostly associated with mobility, academic collaboration, academic transfer of knowledge and international education. Europeanisation is used to include collaboration and mobility, as well as integration, unification of contexts, structures, substance such and creation of a European Research Area (ERA), European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the ‘European citizen’.

All three concepts – internationalisation, globalisation and Europeanisation – have a common viewpoint, that is, that the relatively closed national higher education systems are changing toward an increasing role for knowledge transfer and a more complex framework of actors at different levels, and other factors are becoming much more significant. In addition, all three concepts address, on the one hand, the changing setting, which puts pressure on higher educat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Transnational Friendships and Supportive Practices: An Introduction
• 2 The Contemporary Meaning of Friendship
• 3 Friendship as ‘Emotional Work’
• 4 Friendship as Trust and Reciprocity
• 5 Friendship as Solidarity
• 6 Conclusion: A Relational Examination of Distance, Meanings and Practices
• Appendix: Research Design and Methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index