Data sources and domains of social remittances

The three main sources for this chapter are set out in table 4.2. The first, the Human Capital in Poland data set, is an exceptionally large study, which ‘made it possible to keep track of the situation on the Polish labour market, monitor supply and demand for competencies as well as the sys-tem of education and trainings market in Poland in the years 2010–2015’.¹ Because this is a large data set, including both former migrants and stay-ers, it is suitable for calculating whether migration has any impact on skills and competencies as comparing Poles who have never migrated.

The project Occupational Careers of Post-Accession Migrants formed the basis for Grabowska-Lusińska (2012) and the revised, expanded ver-sion in English, Movers and Stayers: Social Mobility, Migration and Skills (Grabowska 2016). This project combined quantitative analysis of data on labour market sequences for migrants and non-migrants participating in ethno-surveys conducted by CMR, with in-depth biographical

inter-views of 18 return migrants. Finally, Cultural Diffusion through Social Remit-tances between Poland and UK was a large qualitative project conducted by myself with Michał Garapich, Ewa Jaźwińska and Agnieszka Radzi-winowiczówna. We interviewed residents of three Polish towns, as well as their contacts in the United Kingdom, adopting the sociological prac-tice of adaptive theory formation suggested by Layder (1998), with no preconceptions about the nature of social remittances which might be discovered. This enabled us to avoid the conventional cost-benefit fram-ing of migration impacts and to discover the small, otherwise invisible changes actually happening in the lives of individual Poles and their direct milieux. The findings of this project, whose methodology is described in detail in Grabowska and Garapich (2016) and Grabowska, Garapich, et al.

(2017), constitute the main source for this chapter.

The data derived from the sources presented in table 4.2 provide the opportunity to study social remittances in various domains of social life (see also table 4.1) and their channels of diffusion. Three general domains are distinguished: workplaces, providing social remittances in the form Table 4.2 Data sources for chapter 4

Name of the data source Period Methodology Human Capital in Poland

[Bilans Kapitału Ludzkiego, BKL]

2010–16 Representative survey for various labour market groups and topics;

n (worked abroad) = 4,040;

n (not worked abroad) = 67,163.

Occupational careers of post-accession migrants (grant funded by Ministry of Higher Education in Poland)

2009–11 Secondary analysis of ethno- surveys of Centre of Migration Research 1996–2007 (household migrants to Poland; n = 18.

Cultural diffusion through transnational links in the UK;

n = 124 individuals (121 in-depth interviews).

Source: Own elaboration

THE IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON POLAND 74

of skills and new ideas about working practices and conditions; local communities and neighbourhoods; and family, peers and friendship groups. In each domain it is possible to identify specific types of social remitting, which relate to both attitudes and resources. In each domain, some remittances relate specifically to that domain (e.g. specific work or parenting practices), but others are simply acquired and transferred within that domain (e.g. ideas about race or religion). It is important to note that the three domains are not exclusive, but intersect. They have been distinguished from one another here to enhance the clarity of argument.

The family domain is not addressed in detail in this chapter, since it is covered in Krystyna Slany’s chapter in this volume (chapter 6). It is worth noting that, for social remitting to happen between family mem-bers and friends, both stayers and migrants need to be active in this pro-cess, although these transmissions sometimes favour migrants, as they are felt to ‘know better’ with their ‘experience of the world’. In the domain of family and peers, social remittances uncovered in the Cultural Diffusion project related mostly to the transfers of attitudes towards diversity, prac-tices of everyday family logistics, pracprac-tices of raising children, division of household labour, and gender roles and those relating to family rituals and ceremonies. Everyday logistics overlap with relations with children (teach-ing children to perform household tasks and develop(teach-ing children’s inde-pendence), relations with children overlap with gender roles (conscious parenting), gender roles overlap with everyday logistics (division of house-hold labour in a househouse-hold). As a result, the process of ‘doing family’ is revealed to be a multi-layered process of social remitting (Buler, Sar-nowska and Grabowska 2016). Peer groups are insufficiently researched in social remittances scholarship, although they are the focus of my cur-rent research project (for preliminary results, see Grabowska, Pustułka, et al. 2017).²

Migrants’ immediate family and close circle of friends are important because they are the initial recipients of the social remittances migrants bring from abroad. However, this is a relatively narrow audience. Work-places in Poland offer much greater opportunity for diffusion, particularly if they allow potential diffusers to have contact with a broad range of people. Moreover, workplaces are especially important sites for acquiring social remittances in the receiving country. Bearing in mind that post- accession migrants from Poland went and still go abroad predominately for work and spend the majority of their time in workplaces, personal contact with other people at work seems to be the most important channel for diffusion.

4. Domain 1: The workplace as a domain for acquiring