Globalising Swedish countrysides? A relational approach to rural immigrant restaurateurs with refugee backgrounds

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of the article is to connect rural immigrants’ business ventures and development in Sweden to relational perspectives on their proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks at structural and individual levels. Accordingly, the authors employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth interviews. In the context of urban–rural relationships’ meanings for the restaurateurs’ business benefits and constraints, they address two questions: (1) What does embeddedness in proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and for their businesses? and (2) How do previous and anticipated transitions in the restaurateurs’ families influence their business decisions and migration trajectories? The results suggest that the interviewees employed transnational dimensions in their social embeddedness and that they maintained material and emotional relationships with their countries of origin. This relational approach thus contributes to a better understanding of what the studied businesses mean for the entrepreneurs and the selected localities. The restaurateurs contribute to a globalisation of Swedish countrysides, but their socio-economic potential for countering rural depopulation in Sweden is not fully realised. Additionally, the study illuminates how individuals influence, and are influenced by, place-to-place mobilities on a daily basis and during their life course.

EDITORS:

• Arnt Fløysand
• Catriona Turner

KEYWORDS:

• embeddedness
• entrepreneurship
• refugees
• rural depopulation
• social networks

Acknowledgements

The work on this article was supported by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS (grant number 2011-72), and through funding for the project Planning for Rural-Urban Dynamics: Living and Acting at Several Places (PLURAL). The authors are grateful for the constructive comments provided by three anonymous reviewers. Many thanks are owed to Judith Rinker Öhman for professional reading, to Magnus Strömgren and Martin Hedlund for the cartography, and to the interviewees.

Notes

1 Linda Lundmark's proposal, written in 2010, for a Formas grant for the project ‘Mobilising the rural: Post-productivism and the new economy’ at Umeå University.