Social Spacing, Organizational Development and Network Utility of Chinese Business Organizations in Cambodia

Abstract

Chain migration has been one of the most explanatory paradigms in explaining transnational ethnic population movement while economic push-pull serves as the driving force to run the wheel. Thus geo-spatial kinship has been used to consolidate the trust and altruistic relations in such a system. However, the problem is that, does this neoliberal migration pattern just be formed and performed from very beginning of the migration flow as it assumes? How does it evolve and how does it get to mature into its present dynamic structure? To answer, this paper uses author’s fieldwork data from Cambodia’s ethnic Chinese community as the case to establish an ethnic network system of social spacing, organizational life cycle and ethnic network utility based on the case of Chinese communities in Cambodia. The correlation between ethnic social spaces and social organizations is concluded to explain how various identity variations are utilized in the five different stages of an ethnically organized life cycle. It tracks back how diaspora communities and ethnic networks begin the process of self-organization among members starting at early stage of informal interest groups and transforming into substantialized, normalized, formalized and legalized registered ethnic organizations that have access to government resources, transnational networks, and the local ethnic community.