Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective

Item

Title

Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective

Author

Teney, Céline

Deutschmann, Emanuel

Research Area

Social Processes

Topic

Globalization

Abstract

Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions. We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and “globals,” the need to go beyond the field's current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical advances in research on TSP, including network‐analytic approaches and geo‐tagged digital‐trace data.

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Identifier

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Transnational Social Practices: A
Quantitative Perspective
CÉLINE TENEY and EMANUEL DEUTSCHMANN

Abstract

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Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing
exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP
have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal
foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand
of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions.
We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the
relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and
“globals,” the need to go beyond the field’s current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical
advances in research on TSP, including network-analytic approaches and geo-tagged
digital-trace data.

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INTRODUCTION
Transnational practices refer to sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges
among nonstate actors based across national borders (Vertovec, 2009, p. 3).
The sociological approach to this topic covers mainly transnational practices
between individuals (hereafter transnational social practices, TSP), which has
also been referred to as the social dimension of transnationalization. Since
the early 2000s, this social dimension of transnationalization has received
a great deal of attention from scholars in the field of migration research.
Following an ethnographic approach, these scholars have been investigating the way particular migrant groups cross national borders in their everyday life (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007): owing to their assumed cross-national
everyday experience, migrants have indeed been embodying the ideal types
of transnational agents. By contrast, quantitative sociologists only started
to tackle the issue of TSP systematically in the last decade (despite earlier
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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roots in the field of international relations, see below). The new aim of this
emerging strand of research was to quantify and assess the relative importance of TSP among the overall population. Hence, within this quantitative
perspective, the research focus shifted from TSP in the everyday life of the
ideal types of transnational agents to TSP in the everyday life of the ordinary citizen. This quantitative perspective on TSP constitutes the topic of our
contribution.
The quantitative analysis of TSP among the general population can not
only make a significant contribution to the international academic debate but
may also have important societal implications. The overarching scientific
contribution of this research strand is to shed light on the human face
of transnationalization. While the political and economic dimensions of
transnationalization have already received plenty of attention from social
scientists (for instance in the fields of international relations or political
economy), the social dimension of transnationalization still remains understudied. The societal implications of TSP within the overall population
are manifold, but we will restrict the discussion to three implications
which are particularly relevant for the current societal development of
(Western) countries in a transnationalizing world. First, TSP are assumed
to go hand in hand with cosmopolitan attitudes, which we understand as
openness and attentiveness to the world outside one’s own community.
TSP may thus strengthen the public commitment not only to respect the
status of every human being as ultimate units of moral concern (moral
cosmopolitanism) but also to an institutionalized global order of the rule
of law and justice (legal cosmopolitanism) (Pogge, 1992). However, TSP
might also have downsides for social cohesion, which leads us to two
further implications: Some scholars argue that TSP constitute an emerging
dimension of social stratification. For instance, the accumulation of TSP
can act as a new status marker and thus become a novel form of social
distinction mainly among the upper middle classes. Furthermore, the
uneven distribution of transnational practices among the population might
contribute to the growing sociopolitical polarization of citizens into groups
of winners and losers who support antagonistic positions in respect of
the opening up of national borders: Globalization’s losers are citizens
who view the opening of national borders as a threat to their chances in
life, while globalization’s winners perceive opportunities in the opening
of national borders (Kriesi et al., 2008). Hence, the (non)involvement in
TSP might constitute a central behavioral component underpinning this
polarization.
In the following, we will develop these implications in more detail. But
we will first begin this contribution by briefly describing the foundational
quantitative studies of TSP. Then, we will present a subjective selection of

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what we consider to be the cutting-edge research in this field. Lastly, we
will conclude by highlighting some key issues for future research on this
topic.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH

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Precursory studies on TSP (which did not yet use this term) can be found
in the field of international relations from the 1950s onwards. Building on the transactionalist paradigm of Deutsch (1957), they examined
aggregated flows of people and their messages between countries as
indicators of cross-national integration. Nye (1968), for instance, proposed
to look at air passengers and students in neighboring countries as indicators of regional social integration. Puchala (1970) looked empirically
at cross-border tourism, student exchange, migration, and mail flows.
Typically, the number of country pairs examined in these early studies is
still rather low, individual-level data is missing, and analyses of sociologically
relevant questions (such as the social stratification of these practices) are
still rare.
One of the pioneering sociological studies of TSP among the general population is the one carried out by Steffen Mau based on a survey conducted in
2006 measuring the German population’s cross-border linkages and experiences (Mau, 2010). Mau’s study pointed to three main findings that have been
structuring the empirical debate on TSP ever since. First, TSP had become
a mass phenomenon—at least within the German population: about half of
the Germans surveyed stated they had physically crossed a national border
at least once during the year preceding the survey and that they regularly
communicate privately with persons living abroad. Second, these TSP tend
to be unevenly distributed within the population: Involvement in transnational social activities increases with the level of education and with the level
of urbanization of the place of residence but decreases with age. Lastly, being
involved in TSP is significantly associated with cosmopolitan attitudes, such
as openness toward foreigners or readiness to allocate more political authority to the supranational level.
Parallel to Mau’s national study, cross-national studies on the TSP of
the European population emerged in the mid-2000s. With these studies,
scholars intended to map TSP throughout Europe and to investigate the
segment of the European population most likely to demonstrate high levels
of involvement in TSP. These studies were all based on specific waves of
the Eurobarometer survey1 containing several items on TSP. Two particularly influential studies paved the way for the cross-national comparative
1. The Eurobarometer survey is a cross-sectional survey covering the population of all EU member
states which takes place several times a year and is commissioned by the European Commission.

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research strand on TSP. First, Fligstein’s (2008) book Euroclash with its—at
the time—provocative thesis has become a classical work in the field of
European integration and political sociology. In this book, Fligstein showed
that only the most privileged social strata (i.e., highly educated young
Europeans occupying white-collar jobs) identify as European and make use
of its rights to free movement by regularly crossing national borders within
the EU. Thus, TSP and European identification follow a social class line.
Fligstein argued that the segment of the European population that benefitted
materially and socially from the EU, which he considered as prerequisites
for consistent and lasting support of the EU, is not broad enough to promote
a Europe-wide political integration project in a sustainable way. The second
influential study based on Eurobarometer data is the one by Diez Medrano
(2010). On the one hand, Diez Medrano made the same diagnosis as Fligstein
regarding the social class divide in TSP, pointing to a significant positive
association between having friends abroad and the occupational status and
educational level. On the other hand, by investigating the increase between
1985 and 2007 in the proportion of Europeans who traveled abroad at least
once a year, he showed that it was mainly citizens with a lower level of
education who took advantage of the democratization of travel means over
the past two decades.
Lastly, from the mid-2000s onwards, several international research consortia carried out ad-hoc quantitative data collection on TSP among Europeans
across various EU member states. The overall research agenda of these
consortia was to develop a sociology of the European Union (Favell &
Guiraudon, 2011). Of particular interest for the topic of this contribution is
the fact that these ad-hoc data collections helped overcome the limitations
of the Eurobarometer survey data, either by focusing on the trajectories and
everyday lives of intra-EU immigrants (e.g., the PIONEUR project, Recchi &
Favell, 2009), by providing more detailed and more encompassing measures
of TSP among the general European population (e.g., the EUCROSS project,
Recchi, 2014), or by linking it to many other aspects of society-building
beyond the nation-state, like intra-European solidarity, collective memories,
and inequality (e.g., the Horizontal Europeanization project, Heidenreich
et al., 2012).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
The studies discussed so far helped to launch a new research strand in
quantitative sociology by providing the foundation for measuring TSP with
quantitative analytical tools and by introducing puzzling research questions such as the link between TSP and social inequality or cosmopolitan
attitudes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
The idea that TSP are vertically stratified was introduced into the social
sciences debate well before the rise of quantitative studies on TSP. For
instance, Sklair (2001) discussed the rise of a “transnational capitalist class,”
while Calhoun (2002) criticized cosmopolitanism as the class consciousness
of the frequent travellers, “easily entering and exiting polities and social
relations around the world, armed with visa-friendly passports and credit
cards” (p. 872). The analysis of representative quantitative data on TSP has
nevertheless enabled a more thorough assessment of the stratification of TSP
within the overall population.
We would like to introduce two different types of studies on the stratification of TSP in particular: (i) studies on the unequal distribution of TSP among
the European population and (ii) studies investigating the accumulation of
TSP as a form of transnational human capital.

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Studies on the Unequal Distribution of Transnational Social Practices among
the Population Several scholars aimed to refine or challenge Fligstein (2008)
diagnosis that the involvement in TSP follows a class dividing line. An
example of a study refining Fligstein’s findings is that of Kuhn (2015),
which corroborates Fligstein’s diagnosis by analyzing a larger number of
TSP with a special wave of Eurobarometer data. According to Kuhn, the
Europeans most involved in TSP are predominantly highly educated, young
and working in higher status occupations. She argues that highly educated
citizens have greater opportunities to interact across countries, better skills
(such as language skills or intercultural communication) and more financial
resources for getting involved in TSP. Similar mechanisms are likely to be
at play for the association between higher occupational status and TSP.
Regarding the role of age, the fact that young citizens tend to be transnationally more active is likely due to both cohort and age effects. The younger
generations were socialized in times in which transnational activities such as
traveling abroad were highly democratized and perceived as normal—the
so-called transnationalization of everyday life. Besides this cohort effect,
younger citizens tend to have fewer responsibilities and constraints in their
private and professional lives, which make the involvement in TSP easier
for them than for older citizens.
An example of a study challenging Fligstein’s diagnosis is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, and Cirlanaru (2015). They argued that interpreting
the unequal distribution of TSP solely in terms of vertical stratification
is too narrow: While differences in the involvement in TSP according to
education and occupational status indicate a vertical stratification, differences related to age or migration background should be understood as

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horizontal forms of stratification or heterogeneities. In their analysis, they
assessed the power of vertical inequality (i.e., operationalized among other
things with the occupational status, education and self-placement in society)
and of heterogeneities (measured by the migration background, gender,
age, and the urbanization level of the place of residence) in predicting the
volume of transnational activities of citizens across EU member states.
While their analysis confirmed the relevance of vertical inequality, they
also relativized its prominence as horizontal heterogeneities do play a
similarly important role in predicting Europeans’ volume of transnational
activities.
Besides these studies focusing on the unequal distribution of TSP at the
micro level, other scholars investigated the remarkable between-country heterogeneity in the propensity for transnational social activities. Based again on
Eurobarometer data, Mau and Mewes (2012) investigated country differences
in the probability that citizens have visited another country and have socialized with people from other countries in the year preceding the survey. They
found that cross-national disparities in the population’s propensity for TSP
can be explained above all by economic and political macro factors: Citizens
are more likely to be engaged in transnational social activities in countries
with a high level of economic development and political integration (Kuhn,
2015 for a replication of the findings).
The abovementioned study of Delhey et al. (2015) shed light on an additional effect of national economic development on the propensity for citizens’
engagement in transnational social activities: Involvement in transnational
social activities is dependent on an individual’s socioeconomic status to a
significantly larger extent in more affluent countries. In other words, national
economic development is not only associated with a higher propensity of the
ordinary citizen to engage in transnational activities but also with the greater
significance of vertical stratification in understanding the unequal distribution of TSP among the population.
Studies on Transnational Human Capital The second type of research investigates the extent to which TSP are used for the purpose of distinction with the
aim of securing social reproduction. Based on a Bourdieusian framework,
this strand of research considers the accumulation of TSP as a means to
acquire transnational human capital.
Transnational human capital refers to the amount of knowledge and
personal skills that enables a person to operate in different fields beyond
the nation-state (Gerhards & Hans, 2013, p. 100). This may include proficiency in foreign languages, knowledge of other countries, or intercultural
competencies (Gerhards, Hans, & Carlson, 2016). These skills are considered

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as capital, as they constitute resources enabling an individual to act and
interact in fields beyond the nation-state, thus providing a potential benefit.
This capital can be acquired through TSP or international academic qualifications. Gerhards et al. (2016) argued that the acquisition of transnational
human capital has recently been gaining in relevance due to the devaluation
of educational degrees resulting from educational expansion. Accordingly,
the acquisition of transnational human capital has become a means for the
(upper) middle classes to secure their status. The possession of transnational
human capital thus not only provides an instrumental added value for
agency beyond one’s own nation-state but also builds symbolic capital of
social distinction (Gerhards et al., 2016, p. 5).
The access to transnational human capital has to be unequal in order to
function as a new status marker and thus as a component of stratification.
Accordingly, the unequal distribution of transnational human capital among
the overall population constitutes the main issue investigated so far by
quantitative social scientists. For instance, Weenink (2008) analyzed the
profile of parents in the Netherlands who show a strong inclination to
provide their children with transnational human capital. According to his
analysis, upper-middle-class parents were significantly more likely than
parents from lower social classes to rate the acquisition of transnational
human capital as important for their children. However, this relationship
between parents’ social classes and the perceived need to provide children
with transnational human capital can entirely be explained by the facts
that upper-middle-class parents are engaged more frequently in TSP and
hold higher ambitions regarding the school work and achievements of their
children. The link between parental social class and children’s acquisition of
transnational human capital has been corroborated by a study by Gerhards
and Hans (2013), which showed that, among German adolescents, embarking on a high school exchange is largely dependent on parental economic
resources.
In a similar vein, studies on German university students highlight the
fact that the acquisition of transnational human capital through participation in student exchange programmes is significantly stratified along
socioeconomic lines (Finger, 2011). By contrast, a survey among students
from six EU countries showed that students’ socioeconomic status only
played a marginal role in explaining their decision to spend a period of
time studying abroad (Van Mol & Timmerman, 2014). The authors related
this finding to the social selectivity in access to tertiary education in most
EU countries. Following their argument, the national context is likely to
be a strong determinant in the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital through participation in educational exchange
programmes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND COSMOPOLITAN ATTITUDES

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Another strand of cutting-edge research focuses on the association between
TSP and various forms of attitudes and senses of belonging. This line of
research tends to use Deutsch’s abovementioned transactionalist theory
(Deutsch, 1957) as its framework. This theory states that (ongoing) transnational interactions give rise to a feeling of collective identity, trust, mutual
consideration, and cooperative action between members from distinct
nation-states (Kuhn, 2015). Two different mechanisms are likely to be at play
here. First, following the common ingroup identity theory (see for instance
Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), positive contacts
and interactions with members of an out-group blur group boundaries and
can contribute to the development of a common in-group identity. Hence,
citizens who regularly interact with citizens from other nation-states are
more likely to perceive these citizens as belonging to the same in-group
or community. TSP are thus expected to lower intergroup boundaries
and to raise the awareness of transnational interdependence. The second
mechanism is based on a utilitarian perspective. Accordingly, individuals
with a high volume of TSP are the ones who must take advantage of the
facilities provided by the transnationalization of everyday life. Since they
directly experience the benefit of transnationalization, they are more likely
to endorse open attitudes toward transnationalization.
Deutsch’s transactionalist theory has been successfully applied to a variety
of attitudes and senses of belonging related to the opening of national
borders: TSP have repeatedly been shown to be significantly and positively
related to a sense of identity as European (Recchi, 2015) and as a citizen
of the world (Helbling & Teney, 2015), to attitudes toward immigrants
(Mau, Mewes, & Zimmermann, 2008), EU support (Kuhn, 2015), attachment
to other countries (Deutschmann, Delhey, Verbalyte, & Aplowski, 2018),
readiness to allocate authority to supranational political entities (Mau et al.,
2008), or moral cosmopolitanism (i.e., a moral obligation to help citizens
from other countries who are in extremely difficult situations through no
fault of their own) (Helbling & Teney, 2015). These studies are, however,
all based on cross-sectional data, leaving the causal mechanism behind the
association between TSP and this set of attitudes unexplored.
MEASUREMENT REFINEMENT
TSP can take various forms, ranging from studying and working abroad to
undertaking city trips and having regular contacts with friends, relatives, or
acquaintances abroad. Distinguishing between these various forms of TSP is
important since they might be related in different ways to a range of attitudes
and values or to sociodemographic characteristics. A helpful contribution

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to this task of measurement refinement is Recchi’s (2014) article in which
he introduced four dimensions relevant for classifying the TSP of the overall population in a comprehensive way. First, a physical dimension enables a
differentiation between virtual and physical border-crossing practices (e.g.,
contacts with friends abroad through social media vs visiting these friends).
Second, a spatial dimension might be a further pertinent distinction: Does the
TSP involve the crossing of continental borders or does it happen between
neighboring countries? Third, the duration of the transnational social practice
might be of relevance. The last dimension refers to the distinction between
personal and impersonal TSP (e.g., contact with loved ones living abroad vs.
interacting with foreigners on the internet).
These four dimensions are not exhaustive (one could think, for instance,
of the frequency or purpose of TSP as further dimensions). Nevertheless, differentiating according to (at least some of) these dimensions is an important
research avenue in order to refine our knowledge of TSP and their association
with other phenomena. For instance, Teney, Hanquinet, and Bürkin (2016)
pointed to the diverging relationships of virtual and physical TSP among
immigrants with their identification as European. Another example highlighting the importance of refining the measurement of TSP is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, Graf, and Richter (2014): In their analysis of European
cross-national surveys, they distinguish between social practices carried out
within the nation-state, within Europe, and beyond Europe. By taking the
geographical scope of TSP into account, they are able to assess the relevance
of the European reference frame compared to the national and global reference frames for the (transnational) social practices of Europeans (Delhey
et al., 2014, p. 360).
OUTLOOK: KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
We conclude this short and selective essay with an outlook highlighting
promising research avenues regarding the content and the methodological
approaches for studying TSP.
CONTENT-RELATED ISSUES
Two promising research issues could advance our understanding of transnational human capital and contextualize the role of TSP in the broader
sociopolitical space. First, as highlighted in the previous section, most existing studies have focused on the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital. However, with the exception of studies on
returns from foreign language proficiency, research on potential inequalities
resulting from the (non)possession of transnational human capital is still

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in its infancy (but see Diez Medrano, 2016). Future studies could tackle
the following research questions: What kind of returns does transnational
human capital yield in different fields of work and institutional settings?
Do different types of transnational human capital (such as foreign language
proficiency, intercultural competencies) yield similar returns? Do the returns
of transnational human capital differ across social groups and national
contexts?
Second, future studies could assess the role of TSP in the growing
sociopolitical polarization regarding issues of open borders, immigration,
and globalization. This research avenue builds on the abovementioned
conclusive findings of a positive association between TSP and a broad
range of attitudes on transnationalization and cosmopolitanism. TSP might
constitute one of the behavioral components structuring the sociopolitical
space according to the globalization cleavage in most Western societies.
According to the globalization cleavage literature (Kriesi et al., 2008),
globalization pressures lead to the polarization of citizens into groups of
winners and losers who support antagonistic positions on a variety of
transnationalization issues: Globalization’s losers tend to endorse positions
favouring more national closure, while winners tend to support positions
favouring more transnational integration and denationalization. Studies on
this globalization cleavage have so far shown that sociodemographic characteristics such as the socioeconomic position or educational level (Kriesi et al.,
2008) and collective identities (Teney, Lacewell, & de Wilde, 2014) structure
this societal conflict among the population. The (non)involvement in TSP
likely constitutes (one of) the behavioral component(s) structuring the
overall population along this globalization cleavage (Helbling & Teney, 2015
for a first attempt to assess it). Investigating this open empirical research
question would help to link the study of TSP to the broader debate on
political cleavages in the age of transnationalization.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Quantitative research on TSP has, so far, a heavy Eurocentric bias. The topic
started to receive attention from quantitative social scientists who were
foremost interested in understanding the process of transnationalization
within the European population. While European integration has undeniably greatly facilitated the involvement of the ordinary citizen in TSP
in Europe, TSP are evidently not an exclusively European phenomenon.
Studying TSP in non-European contexts would, therefore, enable scholars
to not only move beyond this Eurocentric perspective but also to assess the
extent to which TSP as a mass phenomenon is a European exceptionalism
due to European institutional integration (Deutschmann, 2017). Doing so

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will also require us to develop new conceptual and methodological tools
and to think about whether and how TSP (and its attitudinal correlates)
can be compared across global regions that vary drastically in geographic
size and are culturally diverse (which may go hand in hand with different
response patterns in survey situations). Only by finding convincing answers
to these problems can research on TSP be brought to the next stage and
become a truly globalized field of study.
Second, most past studies on TSP have relied on the quantitative analysis
of survey material using conventional regression modeling techniques. An
important innovation may be alternative data sources and, correspondingly,
more sophisticated analytical techniques. This may include network data
on actual interactions across specific national borders, obtained either from
administrative processes such as the registration of tourists or digital traces
obtained via tracking devices such as smartphones. An important aspect
of this is the possibility of precise geo-tagging which may lead to more
fine-grained analyses and may thus contribute to overcoming some of the
methodological nationalism that still haunts the field (while at the same time
raising new ethical questions). Furthermore, fully-fledged network analyses
that take the actual relational structures of TSP into account may uncover
connections that the methodological individualism of survey data cannot
(Deutschmann et al., 2018). Geographically weighted regression modeling
may be another technique that could contribute to refined assessments
(Teney, 2012). Finally, the potential future availability of high-quality longitudinal (panel) data may help shed light on the causal mechanisms behind
the relation between TSP and cross-border sense of community that have so
far been disregarded (see the earlier discussion). Natural experiments are
another innovation that may allow us to address the question of causality.
While they have become increasingly popular in other sociological fields,
they have, to the best of our knowledge, not been used in research on TSP
yet. Overall, these new paths may contribute to advancing the emerging
field of quantitative research on TSP and secure its relevancy in the decades
to come.
REFERENCES
Calhoun, C. (2002). The class consciousness of frequent travelers: Toward a critique
of actually existing cosmopolitanism. South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 869–897.
Delhey, J., Deutschmann, E., & Cirlanaru, K. (2015). Between ‘class project’ and
individualization: The stratification of Europeans’ transnational activities. International Sociology, 30(3), 269–293.
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the Determinants of Intra-European Student Mobility. Population, Space and Place,
20(5), 465–479. doi:10.1002/psp.1833.
Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. London, NY: Routledge.
Weenink, D. (2008). Cosmopolitanism as a form of capital: parents preparing
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0038038508096935.

Céline Teney leads a junior research group at the University of Bremen
which investigates the transnationalization of society, politics, and the
economy. She completed her PhD thesis in 2009 at the Université libre de
Bruxelles and worked as a senior researcher at the Berlin Social Science
Center. In 2016, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for
promising early-stage researchers by the German Research Foundation. Her

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research interests encompass immigration, the European Union, political
sociology, and quantitative methodology. She has recently been working on
the intra-EU migration of highly skilled workers.
Emanuel Deutschmann is a postdoctoral research associate at the Robert
Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, where he works on the Global Mobilities Project at the Migration
Policy Centre. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Bremen International
Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), an MSc in Sociology from
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a BSc in Social Sciences from
the University of Cologne. In 2015, he was a visiting researcher at the Global
Systemic Risk research community at Princeton University. His research
interests cover social networks, transnational mobility and communication,
regional integration, and globalization. His recent publications include
“The Spatial Structure of Transnational Human Activity,” published in
Social Science Research and “The Power of Contact Europe as a Network of
Transnational Attachment,” published in the European Journal of Political
Research.
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Transnational Social Practices: A
Quantitative Perspective
CÉLINE TENEY and EMANUEL DEUTSCHMANN

Abstract

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Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing
exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP
have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal
foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand
of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions.
We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the
relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and
“globals,” the need to go beyond the field’s current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical
advances in research on TSP, including network-analytic approaches and geo-tagged
digital-trace data.

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INTRODUCTION
Transnational practices refer to sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges
among nonstate actors based across national borders (Vertovec, 2009, p. 3).
The sociological approach to this topic covers mainly transnational practices
between individuals (hereafter transnational social practices, TSP), which has
also been referred to as the social dimension of transnationalization. Since
the early 2000s, this social dimension of transnationalization has received
a great deal of attention from scholars in the field of migration research.
Following an ethnographic approach, these scholars have been investigating the way particular migrant groups cross national borders in their everyday life (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007): owing to their assumed cross-national
everyday experience, migrants have indeed been embodying the ideal types
of transnational agents. By contrast, quantitative sociologists only started
to tackle the issue of TSP systematically in the last decade (despite earlier
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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roots in the field of international relations, see below). The new aim of this
emerging strand of research was to quantify and assess the relative importance of TSP among the overall population. Hence, within this quantitative
perspective, the research focus shifted from TSP in the everyday life of the
ideal types of transnational agents to TSP in the everyday life of the ordinary citizen. This quantitative perspective on TSP constitutes the topic of our
contribution.
The quantitative analysis of TSP among the general population can not
only make a significant contribution to the international academic debate but
may also have important societal implications. The overarching scientific
contribution of this research strand is to shed light on the human face
of transnationalization. While the political and economic dimensions of
transnationalization have already received plenty of attention from social
scientists (for instance in the fields of international relations or political
economy), the social dimension of transnationalization still remains understudied. The societal implications of TSP within the overall population
are manifold, but we will restrict the discussion to three implications
which are particularly relevant for the current societal development of
(Western) countries in a transnationalizing world. First, TSP are assumed
to go hand in hand with cosmopolitan attitudes, which we understand as
openness and attentiveness to the world outside one’s own community.
TSP may thus strengthen the public commitment not only to respect the
status of every human being as ultimate units of moral concern (moral
cosmopolitanism) but also to an institutionalized global order of the rule
of law and justice (legal cosmopolitanism) (Pogge, 1992). However, TSP
might also have downsides for social cohesion, which leads us to two
further implications: Some scholars argue that TSP constitute an emerging
dimension of social stratification. For instance, the accumulation of TSP
can act as a new status marker and thus become a novel form of social
distinction mainly among the upper middle classes. Furthermore, the
uneven distribution of transnational practices among the population might
contribute to the growing sociopolitical polarization of citizens into groups
of winners and losers who support antagonistic positions in respect of
the opening up of national borders: Globalization’s losers are citizens
who view the opening of national borders as a threat to their chances in
life, while globalization’s winners perceive opportunities in the opening
of national borders (Kriesi et al., 2008). Hence, the (non)involvement in
TSP might constitute a central behavioral component underpinning this
polarization.
In the following, we will develop these implications in more detail. But
we will first begin this contribution by briefly describing the foundational
quantitative studies of TSP. Then, we will present a subjective selection of

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what we consider to be the cutting-edge research in this field. Lastly, we
will conclude by highlighting some key issues for future research on this
topic.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH

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Precursory studies on TSP (which did not yet use this term) can be found
in the field of international relations from the 1950s onwards. Building on the transactionalist paradigm of Deutsch (1957), they examined
aggregated flows of people and their messages between countries as
indicators of cross-national integration. Nye (1968), for instance, proposed
to look at air passengers and students in neighboring countries as indicators of regional social integration. Puchala (1970) looked empirically
at cross-border tourism, student exchange, migration, and mail flows.
Typically, the number of country pairs examined in these early studies is
still rather low, individual-level data is missing, and analyses of sociologically
relevant questions (such as the social stratification of these practices) are
still rare.
One of the pioneering sociological studies of TSP among the general population is the one carried out by Steffen Mau based on a survey conducted in
2006 measuring the German population’s cross-border linkages and experiences (Mau, 2010). Mau’s study pointed to three main findings that have been
structuring the empirical debate on TSP ever since. First, TSP had become
a mass phenomenon—at least within the German population: about half of
the Germans surveyed stated they had physically crossed a national border
at least once during the year preceding the survey and that they regularly
communicate privately with persons living abroad. Second, these TSP tend
to be unevenly distributed within the population: Involvement in transnational social activities increases with the level of education and with the level
of urbanization of the place of residence but decreases with age. Lastly, being
involved in TSP is significantly associated with cosmopolitan attitudes, such
as openness toward foreigners or readiness to allocate more political authority to the supranational level.
Parallel to Mau’s national study, cross-national studies on the TSP of
the European population emerged in the mid-2000s. With these studies,
scholars intended to map TSP throughout Europe and to investigate the
segment of the European population most likely to demonstrate high levels
of involvement in TSP. These studies were all based on specific waves of
the Eurobarometer survey1 containing several items on TSP. Two particularly influential studies paved the way for the cross-national comparative
1. The Eurobarometer survey is a cross-sectional survey covering the population of all EU member
states which takes place several times a year and is commissioned by the European Commission.

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research strand on TSP. First, Fligstein’s (2008) book Euroclash with its—at
the time—provocative thesis has become a classical work in the field of
European integration and political sociology. In this book, Fligstein showed
that only the most privileged social strata (i.e., highly educated young
Europeans occupying white-collar jobs) identify as European and make use
of its rights to free movement by regularly crossing national borders within
the EU. Thus, TSP and European identification follow a social class line.
Fligstein argued that the segment of the European population that benefitted
materially and socially from the EU, which he considered as prerequisites
for consistent and lasting support of the EU, is not broad enough to promote
a Europe-wide political integration project in a sustainable way. The second
influential study based on Eurobarometer data is the one by Diez Medrano
(2010). On the one hand, Diez Medrano made the same diagnosis as Fligstein
regarding the social class divide in TSP, pointing to a significant positive
association between having friends abroad and the occupational status and
educational level. On the other hand, by investigating the increase between
1985 and 2007 in the proportion of Europeans who traveled abroad at least
once a year, he showed that it was mainly citizens with a lower level of
education who took advantage of the democratization of travel means over
the past two decades.
Lastly, from the mid-2000s onwards, several international research consortia carried out ad-hoc quantitative data collection on TSP among Europeans
across various EU member states. The overall research agenda of these
consortia was to develop a sociology of the European Union (Favell &
Guiraudon, 2011). Of particular interest for the topic of this contribution is
the fact that these ad-hoc data collections helped overcome the limitations
of the Eurobarometer survey data, either by focusing on the trajectories and
everyday lives of intra-EU immigrants (e.g., the PIONEUR project, Recchi &
Favell, 2009), by providing more detailed and more encompassing measures
of TSP among the general European population (e.g., the EUCROSS project,
Recchi, 2014), or by linking it to many other aspects of society-building
beyond the nation-state, like intra-European solidarity, collective memories,
and inequality (e.g., the Horizontal Europeanization project, Heidenreich
et al., 2012).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
The studies discussed so far helped to launch a new research strand in
quantitative sociology by providing the foundation for measuring TSP with
quantitative analytical tools and by introducing puzzling research questions such as the link between TSP and social inequality or cosmopolitan
attitudes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
The idea that TSP are vertically stratified was introduced into the social
sciences debate well before the rise of quantitative studies on TSP. For
instance, Sklair (2001) discussed the rise of a “transnational capitalist class,”
while Calhoun (2002) criticized cosmopolitanism as the class consciousness
of the frequent travellers, “easily entering and exiting polities and social
relations around the world, armed with visa-friendly passports and credit
cards” (p. 872). The analysis of representative quantitative data on TSP has
nevertheless enabled a more thorough assessment of the stratification of TSP
within the overall population.
We would like to introduce two different types of studies on the stratification of TSP in particular: (i) studies on the unequal distribution of TSP among
the European population and (ii) studies investigating the accumulation of
TSP as a form of transnational human capital.

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Studies on the Unequal Distribution of Transnational Social Practices among
the Population Several scholars aimed to refine or challenge Fligstein (2008)
diagnosis that the involvement in TSP follows a class dividing line. An
example of a study refining Fligstein’s findings is that of Kuhn (2015),
which corroborates Fligstein’s diagnosis by analyzing a larger number of
TSP with a special wave of Eurobarometer data. According to Kuhn, the
Europeans most involved in TSP are predominantly highly educated, young
and working in higher status occupations. She argues that highly educated
citizens have greater opportunities to interact across countries, better skills
(such as language skills or intercultural communication) and more financial
resources for getting involved in TSP. Similar mechanisms are likely to be
at play for the association between higher occupational status and TSP.
Regarding the role of age, the fact that young citizens tend to be transnationally more active is likely due to both cohort and age effects. The younger
generations were socialized in times in which transnational activities such as
traveling abroad were highly democratized and perceived as normal—the
so-called transnationalization of everyday life. Besides this cohort effect,
younger citizens tend to have fewer responsibilities and constraints in their
private and professional lives, which make the involvement in TSP easier
for them than for older citizens.
An example of a study challenging Fligstein’s diagnosis is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, and Cirlanaru (2015). They argued that interpreting
the unequal distribution of TSP solely in terms of vertical stratification
is too narrow: While differences in the involvement in TSP according to
education and occupational status indicate a vertical stratification, differences related to age or migration background should be understood as

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horizontal forms of stratification or heterogeneities. In their analysis, they
assessed the power of vertical inequality (i.e., operationalized among other
things with the occupational status, education and self-placement in society)
and of heterogeneities (measured by the migration background, gender,
age, and the urbanization level of the place of residence) in predicting the
volume of transnational activities of citizens across EU member states.
While their analysis confirmed the relevance of vertical inequality, they
also relativized its prominence as horizontal heterogeneities do play a
similarly important role in predicting Europeans’ volume of transnational
activities.
Besides these studies focusing on the unequal distribution of TSP at the
micro level, other scholars investigated the remarkable between-country heterogeneity in the propensity for transnational social activities. Based again on
Eurobarometer data, Mau and Mewes (2012) investigated country differences
in the probability that citizens have visited another country and have socialized with people from other countries in the year preceding the survey. They
found that cross-national disparities in the population’s propensity for TSP
can be explained above all by economic and political macro factors: Citizens
are more likely to be engaged in transnational social activities in countries
with a high level of economic development and political integration (Kuhn,
2015 for a replication of the findings).
The abovementioned study of Delhey et al. (2015) shed light on an additional effect of national economic development on the propensity for citizens’
engagement in transnational social activities: Involvement in transnational
social activities is dependent on an individual’s socioeconomic status to a
significantly larger extent in more affluent countries. In other words, national
economic development is not only associated with a higher propensity of the
ordinary citizen to engage in transnational activities but also with the greater
significance of vertical stratification in understanding the unequal distribution of TSP among the population.
Studies on Transnational Human Capital The second type of research investigates the extent to which TSP are used for the purpose of distinction with the
aim of securing social reproduction. Based on a Bourdieusian framework,
this strand of research considers the accumulation of TSP as a means to
acquire transnational human capital.
Transnational human capital refers to the amount of knowledge and
personal skills that enables a person to operate in different fields beyond
the nation-state (Gerhards & Hans, 2013, p. 100). This may include proficiency in foreign languages, knowledge of other countries, or intercultural
competencies (Gerhards, Hans, & Carlson, 2016). These skills are considered

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as capital, as they constitute resources enabling an individual to act and
interact in fields beyond the nation-state, thus providing a potential benefit.
This capital can be acquired through TSP or international academic qualifications. Gerhards et al. (2016) argued that the acquisition of transnational
human capital has recently been gaining in relevance due to the devaluation
of educational degrees resulting from educational expansion. Accordingly,
the acquisition of transnational human capital has become a means for the
(upper) middle classes to secure their status. The possession of transnational
human capital thus not only provides an instrumental added value for
agency beyond one’s own nation-state but also builds symbolic capital of
social distinction (Gerhards et al., 2016, p. 5).
The access to transnational human capital has to be unequal in order to
function as a new status marker and thus as a component of stratification.
Accordingly, the unequal distribution of transnational human capital among
the overall population constitutes the main issue investigated so far by
quantitative social scientists. For instance, Weenink (2008) analyzed the
profile of parents in the Netherlands who show a strong inclination to
provide their children with transnational human capital. According to his
analysis, upper-middle-class parents were significantly more likely than
parents from lower social classes to rate the acquisition of transnational
human capital as important for their children. However, this relationship
between parents’ social classes and the perceived need to provide children
with transnational human capital can entirely be explained by the facts
that upper-middle-class parents are engaged more frequently in TSP and
hold higher ambitions regarding the school work and achievements of their
children. The link between parental social class and children’s acquisition of
transnational human capital has been corroborated by a study by Gerhards
and Hans (2013), which showed that, among German adolescents, embarking on a high school exchange is largely dependent on parental economic
resources.
In a similar vein, studies on German university students highlight the
fact that the acquisition of transnational human capital through participation in student exchange programmes is significantly stratified along
socioeconomic lines (Finger, 2011). By contrast, a survey among students
from six EU countries showed that students’ socioeconomic status only
played a marginal role in explaining their decision to spend a period of
time studying abroad (Van Mol & Timmerman, 2014). The authors related
this finding to the social selectivity in access to tertiary education in most
EU countries. Following their argument, the national context is likely to
be a strong determinant in the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital through participation in educational exchange
programmes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND COSMOPOLITAN ATTITUDES

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Another strand of cutting-edge research focuses on the association between
TSP and various forms of attitudes and senses of belonging. This line of
research tends to use Deutsch’s abovementioned transactionalist theory
(Deutsch, 1957) as its framework. This theory states that (ongoing) transnational interactions give rise to a feeling of collective identity, trust, mutual
consideration, and cooperative action between members from distinct
nation-states (Kuhn, 2015). Two different mechanisms are likely to be at play
here. First, following the common ingroup identity theory (see for instance
Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), positive contacts
and interactions with members of an out-group blur group boundaries and
can contribute to the development of a common in-group identity. Hence,
citizens who regularly interact with citizens from other nation-states are
more likely to perceive these citizens as belonging to the same in-group
or community. TSP are thus expected to lower intergroup boundaries
and to raise the awareness of transnational interdependence. The second
mechanism is based on a utilitarian perspective. Accordingly, individuals
with a high volume of TSP are the ones who must take advantage of the
facilities provided by the transnationalization of everyday life. Since they
directly experience the benefit of transnationalization, they are more likely
to endorse open attitudes toward transnationalization.
Deutsch’s transactionalist theory has been successfully applied to a variety
of attitudes and senses of belonging related to the opening of national
borders: TSP have repeatedly been shown to be significantly and positively
related to a sense of identity as European (Recchi, 2015) and as a citizen
of the world (Helbling & Teney, 2015), to attitudes toward immigrants
(Mau, Mewes, & Zimmermann, 2008), EU support (Kuhn, 2015), attachment
to other countries (Deutschmann, Delhey, Verbalyte, & Aplowski, 2018),
readiness to allocate authority to supranational political entities (Mau et al.,
2008), or moral cosmopolitanism (i.e., a moral obligation to help citizens
from other countries who are in extremely difficult situations through no
fault of their own) (Helbling & Teney, 2015). These studies are, however,
all based on cross-sectional data, leaving the causal mechanism behind the
association between TSP and this set of attitudes unexplored.
MEASUREMENT REFINEMENT
TSP can take various forms, ranging from studying and working abroad to
undertaking city trips and having regular contacts with friends, relatives, or
acquaintances abroad. Distinguishing between these various forms of TSP is
important since they might be related in different ways to a range of attitudes
and values or to sociodemographic characteristics. A helpful contribution

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to this task of measurement refinement is Recchi’s (2014) article in which
he introduced four dimensions relevant for classifying the TSP of the overall population in a comprehensive way. First, a physical dimension enables a
differentiation between virtual and physical border-crossing practices (e.g.,
contacts with friends abroad through social media vs visiting these friends).
Second, a spatial dimension might be a further pertinent distinction: Does the
TSP involve the crossing of continental borders or does it happen between
neighboring countries? Third, the duration of the transnational social practice
might be of relevance. The last dimension refers to the distinction between
personal and impersonal TSP (e.g., contact with loved ones living abroad vs.
interacting with foreigners on the internet).
These four dimensions are not exhaustive (one could think, for instance,
of the frequency or purpose of TSP as further dimensions). Nevertheless, differentiating according to (at least some of) these dimensions is an important
research avenue in order to refine our knowledge of TSP and their association
with other phenomena. For instance, Teney, Hanquinet, and Bürkin (2016)
pointed to the diverging relationships of virtual and physical TSP among
immigrants with their identification as European. Another example highlighting the importance of refining the measurement of TSP is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, Graf, and Richter (2014): In their analysis of European
cross-national surveys, they distinguish between social practices carried out
within the nation-state, within Europe, and beyond Europe. By taking the
geographical scope of TSP into account, they are able to assess the relevance
of the European reference frame compared to the national and global reference frames for the (transnational) social practices of Europeans (Delhey
et al., 2014, p. 360).
OUTLOOK: KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
We conclude this short and selective essay with an outlook highlighting
promising research avenues regarding the content and the methodological
approaches for studying TSP.
CONTENT-RELATED ISSUES
Two promising research issues could advance our understanding of transnational human capital and contextualize the role of TSP in the broader
sociopolitical space. First, as highlighted in the previous section, most existing studies have focused on the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital. However, with the exception of studies on
returns from foreign language proficiency, research on potential inequalities
resulting from the (non)possession of transnational human capital is still

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in its infancy (but see Diez Medrano, 2016). Future studies could tackle
the following research questions: What kind of returns does transnational
human capital yield in different fields of work and institutional settings?
Do different types of transnational human capital (such as foreign language
proficiency, intercultural competencies) yield similar returns? Do the returns
of transnational human capital differ across social groups and national
contexts?
Second, future studies could assess the role of TSP in the growing
sociopolitical polarization regarding issues of open borders, immigration,
and globalization. This research avenue builds on the abovementioned
conclusive findings of a positive association between TSP and a broad
range of attitudes on transnationalization and cosmopolitanism. TSP might
constitute one of the behavioral components structuring the sociopolitical
space according to the globalization cleavage in most Western societies.
According to the globalization cleavage literature (Kriesi et al., 2008),
globalization pressures lead to the polarization of citizens into groups of
winners and losers who support antagonistic positions on a variety of
transnationalization issues: Globalization’s losers tend to endorse positions
favouring more national closure, while winners tend to support positions
favouring more transnational integration and denationalization. Studies on
this globalization cleavage have so far shown that sociodemographic characteristics such as the socioeconomic position or educational level (Kriesi et al.,
2008) and collective identities (Teney, Lacewell, & de Wilde, 2014) structure
this societal conflict among the population. The (non)involvement in TSP
likely constitutes (one of) the behavioral component(s) structuring the
overall population along this globalization cleavage (Helbling & Teney, 2015
for a first attempt to assess it). Investigating this open empirical research
question would help to link the study of TSP to the broader debate on
political cleavages in the age of transnationalization.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Quantitative research on TSP has, so far, a heavy Eurocentric bias. The topic
started to receive attention from quantitative social scientists who were
foremost interested in understanding the process of transnationalization
within the European population. While European integration has undeniably greatly facilitated the involvement of the ordinary citizen in TSP
in Europe, TSP are evidently not an exclusively European phenomenon.
Studying TSP in non-European contexts would, therefore, enable scholars
to not only move beyond this Eurocentric perspective but also to assess the
extent to which TSP as a mass phenomenon is a European exceptionalism
due to European institutional integration (Deutschmann, 2017). Doing so

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will also require us to develop new conceptual and methodological tools
and to think about whether and how TSP (and its attitudinal correlates)
can be compared across global regions that vary drastically in geographic
size and are culturally diverse (which may go hand in hand with different
response patterns in survey situations). Only by finding convincing answers
to these problems can research on TSP be brought to the next stage and
become a truly globalized field of study.
Second, most past studies on TSP have relied on the quantitative analysis
of survey material using conventional regression modeling techniques. An
important innovation may be alternative data sources and, correspondingly,
more sophisticated analytical techniques. This may include network data
on actual interactions across specific national borders, obtained either from
administrative processes such as the registration of tourists or digital traces
obtained via tracking devices such as smartphones. An important aspect
of this is the possibility of precise geo-tagging which may lead to more
fine-grained analyses and may thus contribute to overcoming some of the
methodological nationalism that still haunts the field (while at the same time
raising new ethical questions). Furthermore, fully-fledged network analyses
that take the actual relational structures of TSP into account may uncover
connections that the methodological individualism of survey data cannot
(Deutschmann et al., 2018). Geographically weighted regression modeling
may be another technique that could contribute to refined assessments
(Teney, 2012). Finally, the potential future availability of high-quality longitudinal (panel) data may help shed light on the causal mechanisms behind
the relation between TSP and cross-border sense of community that have so
far been disregarded (see the earlier discussion). Natural experiments are
another innovation that may allow us to address the question of causality.
While they have become increasingly popular in other sociological fields,
they have, to the best of our knowledge, not been used in research on TSP
yet. Overall, these new paths may contribute to advancing the emerging
field of quantitative research on TSP and secure its relevancy in the decades
to come.
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Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. London, NY: Routledge.
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0038038508096935.

Céline Teney leads a junior research group at the University of Bremen
which investigates the transnationalization of society, politics, and the
economy. She completed her PhD thesis in 2009 at the Université libre de
Bruxelles and worked as a senior researcher at the Berlin Social Science
Center. In 2016, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for
promising early-stage researchers by the German Research Foundation. Her

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research interests encompass immigration, the European Union, political
sociology, and quantitative methodology. She has recently been working on
the intra-EU migration of highly skilled workers.
Emanuel Deutschmann is a postdoctoral research associate at the Robert
Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, where he works on the Global Mobilities Project at the Migration
Policy Centre. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Bremen International
Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), an MSc in Sociology from
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a BSc in Social Sciences from
the University of Cologne. In 2015, he was a visiting researcher at the Global
Systemic Risk research community at Princeton University. His research
interests cover social networks, transnational mobility and communication,
regional integration, and globalization. His recent publications include
“The Spatial Structure of Transnational Human Activity,” published in
Social Science Research and “The Power of Contact Europe as a Network of
Transnational Attachment,” published in the European Journal of Political
Research.
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Transnational Social Practices: A
Quantitative Perspective
CÉLINE TENEY and EMANUEL DEUTSCHMANN

Abstract

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Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing
exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP
have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal
foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand
of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions.
We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the
relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and
“globals,” the need to go beyond the field’s current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical
advances in research on TSP, including network-analytic approaches and geo-tagged
digital-trace data.

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INTRODUCTION
Transnational practices refer to sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges
among nonstate actors based across national borders (Vertovec, 2009, p. 3).
The sociological approach to this topic covers mainly transnational practices
between individuals (hereafter transnational social practices, TSP), which has
also been referred to as the social dimension of transnationalization. Since
the early 2000s, this social dimension of transnationalization has received
a great deal of attention from scholars in the field of migration research.
Following an ethnographic approach, these scholars have been investigating the way particular migrant groups cross national borders in their everyday life (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007): owing to their assumed cross-national
everyday experience, migrants have indeed been embodying the ideal types
of transnational agents. By contrast, quantitative sociologists only started
to tackle the issue of TSP systematically in the last decade (despite earlier
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert A. Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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roots in the field of international relations, see below). The new aim of this
emerging strand of research was to quantify and assess the relative importance of TSP among the overall population. Hence, within this quantitative
perspective, the research focus shifted from TSP in the everyday life of the
ideal types of transnational agents to TSP in the everyday life of the ordinary citizen. This quantitative perspective on TSP constitutes the topic of our
contribution.
The quantitative analysis of TSP among the general population can not
only make a significant contribution to the international academic debate but
may also have important societal implications. The overarching scientific
contribution of this research strand is to shed light on the human face
of transnationalization. While the political and economic dimensions of
transnationalization have already received plenty of attention from social
scientists (for instance in the fields of international relations or political
economy), the social dimension of transnationalization still remains understudied. The societal implications of TSP within the overall population
are manifold, but we will restrict the discussion to three implications
which are particularly relevant for the current societal development of
(Western) countries in a transnationalizing world. First, TSP are assumed
to go hand in hand with cosmopolitan attitudes, which we understand as
openness and attentiveness to the world outside one’s own community.
TSP may thus strengthen the public commitment not only to respect the
status of every human being as ultimate units of moral concern (moral
cosmopolitanism) but also to an institutionalized global order of the rule
of law and justice (legal cosmopolitanism) (Pogge, 1992). However, TSP
might also have downsides for social cohesion, which leads us to two
further implications: Some scholars argue that TSP constitute an emerging
dimension of social stratification. For instance, the accumulation of TSP
can act as a new status marker and thus become a novel form of social
distinction mainly among the upper middle classes. Furthermore, the
uneven distribution of transnational practices among the population might
contribute to the growing sociopolitical polarization of citizens into groups
of winners and losers who support antagonistic positions in respect of
the opening up of national borders: Globalization’s losers are citizens
who view the opening of national borders as a threat to their chances in
life, while globalization’s winners perceive opportunities in the opening
of national borders (Kriesi et al., 2008). Hence, the (non)involvement in
TSP might constitute a central behavioral component underpinning this
polarization.
In the following, we will develop these implications in more detail. But
we will first begin this contribution by briefly describing the foundational
quantitative studies of TSP. Then, we will present a subjective selection of

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what we consider to be the cutting-edge research in this field. Lastly, we
will conclude by highlighting some key issues for future research on this
topic.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH

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Precursory studies on TSP (which did not yet use this term) can be found
in the field of international relations from the 1950s onwards. Building on the transactionalist paradigm of Deutsch (1957), they examined
aggregated flows of people and their messages between countries as
indicators of cross-national integration. Nye (1968), for instance, proposed
to look at air passengers and students in neighboring countries as indicators of regional social integration. Puchala (1970) looked empirically
at cross-border tourism, student exchange, migration, and mail flows.
Typically, the number of country pairs examined in these early studies is
still rather low, individual-level data is missing, and analyses of sociologically
relevant questions (such as the social stratification of these practices) are
still rare.
One of the pioneering sociological studies of TSP among the general population is the one carried out by Steffen Mau based on a survey conducted in
2006 measuring the German population’s cross-border linkages and experiences (Mau, 2010). Mau’s study pointed to three main findings that have been
structuring the empirical debate on TSP ever since. First, TSP had become
a mass phenomenon—at least within the German population: about half of
the Germans surveyed stated they had physically crossed a national border
at least once during the year preceding the survey and that they regularly
communicate privately with persons living abroad. Second, these TSP tend
to be unevenly distributed within the population: Involvement in transnational social activities increases with the level of education and with the level
of urbanization of the place of residence but decreases with age. Lastly, being
involved in TSP is significantly associated with cosmopolitan attitudes, such
as openness toward foreigners or readiness to allocate more political authority to the supranational level.
Parallel to Mau’s national study, cross-national studies on the TSP of
the European population emerged in the mid-2000s. With these studies,
scholars intended to map TSP throughout Europe and to investigate the
segment of the European population most likely to demonstrate high levels
of involvement in TSP. These studies were all based on specific waves of
the Eurobarometer survey1 containing several items on TSP. Two particularly influential studies paved the way for the cross-national comparative
1. The Eurobarometer survey is a cross-sectional survey covering the population of all EU member
states which takes place several times a year and is commissioned by the European Commission.

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research strand on TSP. First, Fligstein’s (2008) book Euroclash with its—at
the time—provocative thesis has become a classical work in the field of
European integration and political sociology. In this book, Fligstein showed
that only the most privileged social strata (i.e., highly educated young
Europeans occupying white-collar jobs) identify as European and make use
of its rights to free movement by regularly crossing national borders within
the EU. Thus, TSP and European identification follow a social class line.
Fligstein argued that the segment of the European population that benefitted
materially and socially from the EU, which he considered as prerequisites
for consistent and lasting support of the EU, is not broad enough to promote
a Europe-wide political integration project in a sustainable way. The second
influential study based on Eurobarometer data is the one by Diez Medrano
(2010). On the one hand, Diez Medrano made the same diagnosis as Fligstein
regarding the social class divide in TSP, pointing to a significant positive
association between having friends abroad and the occupational status and
educational level. On the other hand, by investigating the increase between
1985 and 2007 in the proportion of Europeans who traveled abroad at least
once a year, he showed that it was mainly citizens with a lower level of
education who took advantage of the democratization of travel means over
the past two decades.
Lastly, from the mid-2000s onwards, several international research consortia carried out ad-hoc quantitative data collection on TSP among Europeans
across various EU member states. The overall research agenda of these
consortia was to develop a sociology of the European Union (Favell &
Guiraudon, 2011). Of particular interest for the topic of this contribution is
the fact that these ad-hoc data collections helped overcome the limitations
of the Eurobarometer survey data, either by focusing on the trajectories and
everyday lives of intra-EU immigrants (e.g., the PIONEUR project, Recchi &
Favell, 2009), by providing more detailed and more encompassing measures
of TSP among the general European population (e.g., the EUCROSS project,
Recchi, 2014), or by linking it to many other aspects of society-building
beyond the nation-state, like intra-European solidarity, collective memories,
and inequality (e.g., the Horizontal Europeanization project, Heidenreich
et al., 2012).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
The studies discussed so far helped to launch a new research strand in
quantitative sociology by providing the foundation for measuring TSP with
quantitative analytical tools and by introducing puzzling research questions such as the link between TSP and social inequality or cosmopolitan
attitudes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
The idea that TSP are vertically stratified was introduced into the social
sciences debate well before the rise of quantitative studies on TSP. For
instance, Sklair (2001) discussed the rise of a “transnational capitalist class,”
while Calhoun (2002) criticized cosmopolitanism as the class consciousness
of the frequent travellers, “easily entering and exiting polities and social
relations around the world, armed with visa-friendly passports and credit
cards” (p. 872). The analysis of representative quantitative data on TSP has
nevertheless enabled a more thorough assessment of the stratification of TSP
within the overall population.
We would like to introduce two different types of studies on the stratification of TSP in particular: (i) studies on the unequal distribution of TSP among
the European population and (ii) studies investigating the accumulation of
TSP as a form of transnational human capital.

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Studies on the Unequal Distribution of Transnational Social Practices among
the Population Several scholars aimed to refine or challenge Fligstein (2008)
diagnosis that the involvement in TSP follows a class dividing line. An
example of a study refining Fligstein’s findings is that of Kuhn (2015),
which corroborates Fligstein’s diagnosis by analyzing a larger number of
TSP with a special wave of Eurobarometer data. According to Kuhn, the
Europeans most involved in TSP are predominantly highly educated, young
and working in higher status occupations. She argues that highly educated
citizens have greater opportunities to interact across countries, better skills
(such as language skills or intercultural communication) and more financial
resources for getting involved in TSP. Similar mechanisms are likely to be
at play for the association between higher occupational status and TSP.
Regarding the role of age, the fact that young citizens tend to be transnationally more active is likely due to both cohort and age effects. The younger
generations were socialized in times in which transnational activities such as
traveling abroad were highly democratized and perceived as normal—the
so-called transnationalization of everyday life. Besides this cohort effect,
younger citizens tend to have fewer responsibilities and constraints in their
private and professional lives, which make the involvement in TSP easier
for them than for older citizens.
An example of a study challenging Fligstein’s diagnosis is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, and Cirlanaru (2015). They argued that interpreting
the unequal distribution of TSP solely in terms of vertical stratification
is too narrow: While differences in the involvement in TSP according to
education and occupational status indicate a vertical stratification, differences related to age or migration background should be understood as

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horizontal forms of stratification or heterogeneities. In their analysis, they
assessed the power of vertical inequality (i.e., operationalized among other
things with the occupational status, education and self-placement in society)
and of heterogeneities (measured by the migration background, gender,
age, and the urbanization level of the place of residence) in predicting the
volume of transnational activities of citizens across EU member states.
While their analysis confirmed the relevance of vertical inequality, they
also relativized its prominence as horizontal heterogeneities do play a
similarly important role in predicting Europeans’ volume of transnational
activities.
Besides these studies focusing on the unequal distribution of TSP at the
micro level, other scholars investigated the remarkable between-country heterogeneity in the propensity for transnational social activities. Based again on
Eurobarometer data, Mau and Mewes (2012) investigated country differences
in the probability that citizens have visited another country and have socialized with people from other countries in the year preceding the survey. They
found that cross-national disparities in the population’s propensity for TSP
can be explained above all by economic and political macro factors: Citizens
are more likely to be engaged in transnational social activities in countries
with a high level of economic development and political integration (Kuhn,
2015 for a replication of the findings).
The abovementioned study of Delhey et al. (2015) shed light on an additional effect of national economic development on the propensity for citizens’
engagement in transnational social activities: Involvement in transnational
social activities is dependent on an individual’s socioeconomic status to a
significantly larger extent in more affluent countries. In other words, national
economic development is not only associated with a higher propensity of the
ordinary citizen to engage in transnational activities but also with the greater
significance of vertical stratification in understanding the unequal distribution of TSP among the population.
Studies on Transnational Human Capital The second type of research investigates the extent to which TSP are used for the purpose of distinction with the
aim of securing social reproduction. Based on a Bourdieusian framework,
this strand of research considers the accumulation of TSP as a means to
acquire transnational human capital.
Transnational human capital refers to the amount of knowledge and
personal skills that enables a person to operate in different fields beyond
the nation-state (Gerhards & Hans, 2013, p. 100). This may include proficiency in foreign languages, knowledge of other countries, or intercultural
competencies (Gerhards, Hans, & Carlson, 2016). These skills are considered

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as capital, as they constitute resources enabling an individual to act and
interact in fields beyond the nation-state, thus providing a potential benefit.
This capital can be acquired through TSP or international academic qualifications. Gerhards et al. (2016) argued that the acquisition of transnational
human capital has recently been gaining in relevance due to the devaluation
of educational degrees resulting from educational expansion. Accordingly,
the acquisition of transnational human capital has become a means for the
(upper) middle classes to secure their status. The possession of transnational
human capital thus not only provides an instrumental added value for
agency beyond one’s own nation-state but also builds symbolic capital of
social distinction (Gerhards et al., 2016, p. 5).
The access to transnational human capital has to be unequal in order to
function as a new status marker and thus as a component of stratification.
Accordingly, the unequal distribution of transnational human capital among
the overall population constitutes the main issue investigated so far by
quantitative social scientists. For instance, Weenink (2008) analyzed the
profile of parents in the Netherlands who show a strong inclination to
provide their children with transnational human capital. According to his
analysis, upper-middle-class parents were significantly more likely than
parents from lower social classes to rate the acquisition of transnational
human capital as important for their children. However, this relationship
between parents’ social classes and the perceived need to provide children
with transnational human capital can entirely be explained by the facts
that upper-middle-class parents are engaged more frequently in TSP and
hold higher ambitions regarding the school work and achievements of their
children. The link between parental social class and children’s acquisition of
transnational human capital has been corroborated by a study by Gerhards
and Hans (2013), which showed that, among German adolescents, embarking on a high school exchange is largely dependent on parental economic
resources.
In a similar vein, studies on German university students highlight the
fact that the acquisition of transnational human capital through participation in student exchange programmes is significantly stratified along
socioeconomic lines (Finger, 2011). By contrast, a survey among students
from six EU countries showed that students’ socioeconomic status only
played a marginal role in explaining their decision to spend a period of
time studying abroad (Van Mol & Timmerman, 2014). The authors related
this finding to the social selectivity in access to tertiary education in most
EU countries. Following their argument, the national context is likely to
be a strong determinant in the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital through participation in educational exchange
programmes.

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TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL PRACTICES AND COSMOPOLITAN ATTITUDES

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Another strand of cutting-edge research focuses on the association between
TSP and various forms of attitudes and senses of belonging. This line of
research tends to use Deutsch’s abovementioned transactionalist theory
(Deutsch, 1957) as its framework. This theory states that (ongoing) transnational interactions give rise to a feeling of collective identity, trust, mutual
consideration, and cooperative action between members from distinct
nation-states (Kuhn, 2015). Two different mechanisms are likely to be at play
here. First, following the common ingroup identity theory (see for instance
Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993), positive contacts
and interactions with members of an out-group blur group boundaries and
can contribute to the development of a common in-group identity. Hence,
citizens who regularly interact with citizens from other nation-states are
more likely to perceive these citizens as belonging to the same in-group
or community. TSP are thus expected to lower intergroup boundaries
and to raise the awareness of transnational interdependence. The second
mechanism is based on a utilitarian perspective. Accordingly, individuals
with a high volume of TSP are the ones who must take advantage of the
facilities provided by the transnationalization of everyday life. Since they
directly experience the benefit of transnationalization, they are more likely
to endorse open attitudes toward transnationalization.
Deutsch’s transactionalist theory has been successfully applied to a variety
of attitudes and senses of belonging related to the opening of national
borders: TSP have repeatedly been shown to be significantly and positively
related to a sense of identity as European (Recchi, 2015) and as a citizen
of the world (Helbling & Teney, 2015), to attitudes toward immigrants
(Mau, Mewes, & Zimmermann, 2008), EU support (Kuhn, 2015), attachment
to other countries (Deutschmann, Delhey, Verbalyte, & Aplowski, 2018),
readiness to allocate authority to supranational political entities (Mau et al.,
2008), or moral cosmopolitanism (i.e., a moral obligation to help citizens
from other countries who are in extremely difficult situations through no
fault of their own) (Helbling & Teney, 2015). These studies are, however,
all based on cross-sectional data, leaving the causal mechanism behind the
association between TSP and this set of attitudes unexplored.
MEASUREMENT REFINEMENT
TSP can take various forms, ranging from studying and working abroad to
undertaking city trips and having regular contacts with friends, relatives, or
acquaintances abroad. Distinguishing between these various forms of TSP is
important since they might be related in different ways to a range of attitudes
and values or to sociodemographic characteristics. A helpful contribution

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to this task of measurement refinement is Recchi’s (2014) article in which
he introduced four dimensions relevant for classifying the TSP of the overall population in a comprehensive way. First, a physical dimension enables a
differentiation between virtual and physical border-crossing practices (e.g.,
contacts with friends abroad through social media vs visiting these friends).
Second, a spatial dimension might be a further pertinent distinction: Does the
TSP involve the crossing of continental borders or does it happen between
neighboring countries? Third, the duration of the transnational social practice
might be of relevance. The last dimension refers to the distinction between
personal and impersonal TSP (e.g., contact with loved ones living abroad vs.
interacting with foreigners on the internet).
These four dimensions are not exhaustive (one could think, for instance,
of the frequency or purpose of TSP as further dimensions). Nevertheless, differentiating according to (at least some of) these dimensions is an important
research avenue in order to refine our knowledge of TSP and their association
with other phenomena. For instance, Teney, Hanquinet, and Bürkin (2016)
pointed to the diverging relationships of virtual and physical TSP among
immigrants with their identification as European. Another example highlighting the importance of refining the measurement of TSP is provided by
Delhey, Deutschmann, Graf, and Richter (2014): In their analysis of European
cross-national surveys, they distinguish between social practices carried out
within the nation-state, within Europe, and beyond Europe. By taking the
geographical scope of TSP into account, they are able to assess the relevance
of the European reference frame compared to the national and global reference frames for the (transnational) social practices of Europeans (Delhey
et al., 2014, p. 360).
OUTLOOK: KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
We conclude this short and selective essay with an outlook highlighting
promising research avenues regarding the content and the methodological
approaches for studying TSP.
CONTENT-RELATED ISSUES
Two promising research issues could advance our understanding of transnational human capital and contextualize the role of TSP in the broader
sociopolitical space. First, as highlighted in the previous section, most existing studies have focused on the unequal opportunities available to acquire
transnational human capital. However, with the exception of studies on
returns from foreign language proficiency, research on potential inequalities
resulting from the (non)possession of transnational human capital is still

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in its infancy (but see Diez Medrano, 2016). Future studies could tackle
the following research questions: What kind of returns does transnational
human capital yield in different fields of work and institutional settings?
Do different types of transnational human capital (such as foreign language
proficiency, intercultural competencies) yield similar returns? Do the returns
of transnational human capital differ across social groups and national
contexts?
Second, future studies could assess the role of TSP in the growing
sociopolitical polarization regarding issues of open borders, immigration,
and globalization. This research avenue builds on the abovementioned
conclusive findings of a positive association between TSP and a broad
range of attitudes on transnationalization and cosmopolitanism. TSP might
constitute one of the behavioral components structuring the sociopolitical
space according to the globalization cleavage in most Western societies.
According to the globalization cleavage literature (Kriesi et al., 2008),
globalization pressures lead to the polarization of citizens into groups of
winners and losers who support antagonistic positions on a variety of
transnationalization issues: Globalization’s losers tend to endorse positions
favouring more national closure, while winners tend to support positions
favouring more transnational integration and denationalization. Studies on
this globalization cleavage have so far shown that sociodemographic characteristics such as the socioeconomic position or educational level (Kriesi et al.,
2008) and collective identities (Teney, Lacewell, & de Wilde, 2014) structure
this societal conflict among the population. The (non)involvement in TSP
likely constitutes (one of) the behavioral component(s) structuring the
overall population along this globalization cleavage (Helbling & Teney, 2015
for a first attempt to assess it). Investigating this open empirical research
question would help to link the study of TSP to the broader debate on
political cleavages in the age of transnationalization.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Quantitative research on TSP has, so far, a heavy Eurocentric bias. The topic
started to receive attention from quantitative social scientists who were
foremost interested in understanding the process of transnationalization
within the European population. While European integration has undeniably greatly facilitated the involvement of the ordinary citizen in TSP
in Europe, TSP are evidently not an exclusively European phenomenon.
Studying TSP in non-European contexts would, therefore, enable scholars
to not only move beyond this Eurocentric perspective but also to assess the
extent to which TSP as a mass phenomenon is a European exceptionalism
due to European institutional integration (Deutschmann, 2017). Doing so

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will also require us to develop new conceptual and methodological tools
and to think about whether and how TSP (and its attitudinal correlates)
can be compared across global regions that vary drastically in geographic
size and are culturally diverse (which may go hand in hand with different
response patterns in survey situations). Only by finding convincing answers
to these problems can research on TSP be brought to the next stage and
become a truly globalized field of study.
Second, most past studies on TSP have relied on the quantitative analysis
of survey material using conventional regression modeling techniques. An
important innovation may be alternative data sources and, correspondingly,
more sophisticated analytical techniques. This may include network data
on actual interactions across specific national borders, obtained either from
administrative processes such as the registration of tourists or digital traces
obtained via tracking devices such as smartphones. An important aspect
of this is the possibility of precise geo-tagging which may lead to more
fine-grained analyses and may thus contribute to overcoming some of the
methodological nationalism that still haunts the field (while at the same time
raising new ethical questions). Furthermore, fully-fledged network analyses
that take the actual relational structures of TSP into account may uncover
connections that the methodological individualism of survey data cannot
(Deutschmann et al., 2018). Geographically weighted regression modeling
may be another technique that could contribute to refined assessments
(Teney, 2012). Finally, the potential future availability of high-quality longitudinal (panel) data may help shed light on the causal mechanisms behind
the relation between TSP and cross-border sense of community that have so
far been disregarded (see the earlier discussion). Natural experiments are
another innovation that may allow us to address the question of causality.
While they have become increasingly popular in other sociological fields,
they have, to the best of our knowledge, not been used in research on TSP
yet. Overall, these new paths may contribute to advancing the emerging
field of quantitative research on TSP and secure its relevancy in the decades
to come.
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0038038508096935.

Céline Teney leads a junior research group at the University of Bremen
which investigates the transnationalization of society, politics, and the
economy. She completed her PhD thesis in 2009 at the Université libre de
Bruxelles and worked as a senior researcher at the Berlin Social Science
Center. In 2016, she was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for
promising early-stage researchers by the German Research Foundation. Her

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research interests encompass immigration, the European Union, political
sociology, and quantitative methodology. She has recently been working on
the intra-EU migration of highly skilled workers.
Emanuel Deutschmann is a postdoctoral research associate at the Robert
Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, where he works on the Global Mobilities Project at the Migration
Policy Centre. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Bremen International
Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), an MSc in Sociology from
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a BSc in Social Sciences from
the University of Cologne. In 2015, he was a visiting researcher at the Global
Systemic Risk research community at Princeton University. His research
interests cover social networks, transnational mobility and communication,
regional integration, and globalization. His recent publications include
“The Spatial Structure of Transnational Human Activity,” published in
Social Science Research and “The Power of Contact Europe as a Network of
Transnational Attachment,” published in the European Journal of Political
Research.
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