Social capital and migration: Beyond ethnic economies. Ethnicities. 3(1)29-48. doi: 10.1177/1468796803003001785

ABSTRACT Intercultural traffic and mingling have been vital to economic inno-vation past and present – witness the role of travellers, migrants and diasporas as cultural brokers. While intercultural exchange is a prominent theme in cultural studies, studies of ethnicity have often been more occupied by group boundaries and antagonisms than by cross-group relations. In discussions of social capital, a central notion has been the ethnic economy. Here this notion is examined and rejected because it refers to national origin rather than ethnicity, and diverts atten-tion from social and economic relations across cultural differences and boundaries. While immigrant groups may play a large part in national and transnational enter-prise – formal and informal – this is not conceivable without considerable and exten-sive cross-cultural relations. This article also considers cross-cultural and interethnic enterprise from a long-term perspective and with a view to policy. The shift of emphasis to cross-cultural enterprise means taking into account the various types of social capital – bonding, bridging and linking social capital – within and across cultural boundaries. KEYWORDS capitalism cross-cultural enterprise grassroots interethnic relations multiculturalism transnational How does social capital relate to cultural difference? Considering the importance of cross-cultural trade and economic relations, historically and now (cf. Griffin, 1996, 2000), one would expect this to be a salient issue, but it hardly figures in the literature. The conventional assumption is that social capital is culturally bounded. In most literature this is precisely taken as the strength (particularist loyal-ties, lower transaction costs and so on) and the weakness of social capital (group exclusiveness). There are two major strands in the literature. In one