Transnationalism as communicative action

Chapter 9

Transnationalism as communicative action Putting Habermas to work in migration studies Thomas Lacroix, Transnationalism as communicative action. Putting Habermas to work in migration studies, in Mark Murphy, Habermas and Social Research: Between Theory and Method, (pp. 141-155). Abingdon : Routledge (Advances in Sociology)

Habermas’ theory of communicative action (1984, 1987) is a seldom-found reference in migration studies, let alone in transnational studies. Transnationalism is a relatively recent but fairly well established strand of research focusing on the ties and practices that migrants maintain beyond the borders of their settlement country, including with their origin country. My own research focused on remittances and the development projects that migrant groups undertake for the benefit of their place of origin. Hometown organisations are a widespread form of organising among immigrants all around the world. Their primary function is to provide support to hometowners in their place of arrival. A flurry of recent works document the developmentalist turn of these collectives. While philanthropic initiatives are nothing new (Fujianese living abroad were already paving the roads of Fujian in the nineteenth century; Italians living in France were refurbishing the churches of Lombardy after the First World War . . .) one observes a marked increase in development initiatives among different immigrant groups in the world since the early nineties. Irrigation systems have been set up in the Kayes region of Mali, water systems in Zacatecas (Mexico), crematoriums in Cameroon, villages have been electrified in Morocco thanks to the support of expatriates. Countless examples of such initiatives have been recorded throughout the world. The first aim of my work is to uncover the reason why one observes such a development at roughly the same period among groups that have no relation whatsoever.1 However, this mobilisation is not a universal phenomenon and some groups may be more involved than others, even though they may share relatively similar characteristics. The three investigated case studies, Indian Punjabis in the UK on the one hand, Moroccan and Algerian Berbers in France on the other, clearly display outstanding discrepancies. A survey of Punjabi villages showed that emigrants donated 296 million dollars to charitable and development projects between 2005 and 2010 (Chanda and Ghosh, 2013). Likewise, Southern Morocco attracts the bulk of collective remittances in Morocco (Lacroix and Dumont, 2015). The area has been entirely electrified thanks to hometown organisations and NGOs between 1995 and 2005. Conversely, evidence shows that Kabylia, the largest emigration area in Algeria, has not enjoyed a similar



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remittance-supported development dynamics. This observation provides the second question that has driven my research: why do some groups choose to engage in such long distance, time-consuming and costly endeavours while others do not? With this in mind, I have adapted Habermas’ theory for the study of a distinctive form of social group: those who share their lives between several countries. The second part of this chapter unfolds a structure agency approach I forged for this purpose. The theory of communicative action provides the possibility to think of these transnational engagements as a communicative behaviour through which actors express and give meaning to the multiplicity of their social embedding. This theory is associated with three other conceptual packages: Heidegger’s Dasein (Heidegger, 2008); a conception of social actors as a bundle of identities (Lahire, 1998) and associated roles (Mead, 1967); a concept of social institutions structuring the deliberative process that makes communicative action possible. In the third part, methodological and analytical implications of these theoretical considerations will be presented. The conclusion comes back to Habermas’ theory and shows how its operationalisation challenges or expands the tenets of this theory in new directions. But before addressing the different aspects of my use of Habermas, I will explain why I found his approach more appropriate than the usual ‘champions’ in this category, namely Giddens’ structuration theory and Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The problem of collective action in a globalised world In 2008, I was invited by the French Embassy to give a series of talks in Berlin. At this time, I was showing a growing interest in the theory of communicative action and I seized this opportunity to see what use German migration scholars were making of Habermas. Unfortunately, the French young researcher eager to learn more about German social theory only met German academics versed in French sociology. ‘Why don’t you use Bourdieu?’ was, in substance, the response I received. Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1994), Giddens’ ‘structuration theory’ (Giddens, 1984) and, to a lesser extent Archer’s ‘Morphogenetics’ (Archer, 1995) are commonly summoned up to elicit why migrants go where they go. Most of the works relying on a ‘structure and agency’ approach seek to explain the constitution and evolution of migration corridors (Goss and Lindquist, 1995; Morawska, 2001; Bakewell, 2010; Oliver and O’Reilly, 2010). To my knowledge, such an approach has never been used to address post-migration phenomena such as the sending of remittances or the undertaking of development projects. Classical ‘structure and agency’ approaches, which have been forged to address societal processes within the confines of nation-states, need to be refined to grasp the specificities of transnational cross-border dynamics. As pointed out



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by the sociologist Bernard Lahire or the philosopher Chantal Jacquet (Jaquet, 2014), this set of theories tends to bind actors to a unidimensional group referential, of which they adopt the codes and representations. This may hold true for societies where there is a strong overlap between economic, political, cultural (religious) and social worlds. But societies reshaped by contemporary globalisation are characterised by the collapse of overarching institutions, individuation and the growing disconnection between societal structures. What they fail to get is the multiplicity of social embedding of actors in disjointed social milieus, the plurality of regimes of truth produced by various spheres of life and thereby the combination of social identities that characterises each individual. This is particularly true for migrants who share their life between two or more states. As a result, approaches to migration dynamics relying on a classical structure and agency framework tend to focus on migrants in relation to their group of co-nationals and obscure the broader processes of diversification due to their uneven and diverse integration pathways into the host society. The class stratification of migrant groups linked to the segmented assimilation dynamics (Portes et al., 2005) in settling societies is conducive to the disaggregation of collective habitus, the disappearance of a shared sense of belonging and solidarities. And this gradual evolution is further reinforced by social transformation at play in departure areas, where modes of being and belonging that prevailed at times of emigration have been fully reprocessed. The problem of transnationalism in a context of social transformation is two-fold: how can one account for the maintaining of cross-border relations and practices despite the disappearance of the initial conditions that had prevailed at the time of the initiation of transnational bonds? And can one acknowledge this pluralisation of migrants’ social condition within the evolution of immigrant transnationalism? The theory of communicative action, like its above-mentioned competitors, has not been specifically tailored to analyse actors embedded into multiple social arenas. This is the reason why I propose to complement it with a reformulated version of the ‘plural man’ theory (see next section). And yet, this theory has, to my mind, a definite edge in comparison with the ‘structuration’ and ‘practice’ theories. And this is for three reasons. First, action in common ‘structure and agency’ approaches is but an outcome or a factor in the fabric of society, a logical hyphen between actors and their context. Action is to be explained by the social and cultural embedding of actors with regard to the possibilities and constraints offered by their environment. In consequence, actors are always already approached in relation to a given social context. Structuration and practice theories suppose an analytical predetermination of the social embedding of actors. But it glosses over the complex social life of individuals who are not only members of a migrant grouping, but may also show alternative interests in various professional or political milieus. The relevance of ‘structuration’ may hold for close-knit communities, but is likely to fail for more complex case studies. In contradistinction, Habermas’ approach grants to human action a thickness that opens novel methodological possibilities.



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Because people’s activities have a communicative value, their analysis provides a window on what they want to do, the understanding of the world they endorse (what Habermas calls ‘lifeworld’) and, ultimately, who they are. Actors can thereby be approached ex-post, through their activities, and not ex-ante through their belonging. In turn, the multiplicity of levels of meanings imbuing a given action provides a logical thread towards the complexity of the social world of individuals. In effect, communicative action is for people a way of expressing a stand with regard to a plurality of regimes of truth. They are driven by the choices they assume or the compromise they seek to negotiate. As shown below, the development projects undertaken by emigrants for the benefit of their place of origin are composite actions whose meanings reflect the complex positioning of expatriate villagers. The second strength of Habermas’ approach is to provide a tool for understanding action coordination. Habermas’ critique, geared towards Max Weber, whose focus on instrumental rationality fails to adequately grasp the role of collectives in action theory, also applies to extant ‘structure and agency’ theories. Indeed, instrumental rationality subsumes motives for action to individual interests (the accumulation of symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s terms) but fails to explain the intervention of alter in the course of action. The concept of communicational rationality proposed by Habermas fills this gap. The concept puts forth the relational dynamics of rationalisation processes. An action is deemed rational when an external observer validates its conformity with a collective understanding of the world. In consequence, rationality is not an internal calculation by individuals of a balance between their ultimate ends and available means, but the external evaluation of a stand taken by actors through their engagements. Henceforth, communicative actions feed into the (re-)production of a collective web of symbols, know-how and ideas that give shape to an intersubjective lifeworld and beyond, to collective belonging and to the possibility of action coordination. Communicative rationality is the bridge between people’s specific positioning and group cohesion. The study of migrants’ transnational engagement poses two challenges that can be tackled by communicative action. In the first place, this issue brings to the fore in sharp terms the multiplicity of actors’ social embedding and the plurality of expectations they need to respond to. The focus on action as a communicational engagement provides the possibility to read this complexity of migrants’ positioning. But this first observation brings forth another one: if actors are confronted by a multiplicity of oftentimes contradictory expectations, how can the very fact of acting be possible? The solution to this conundrum is provided by the concept of communicational rationality. The assessment of the conformation between actors’ doings and the perceived functioning of the world is not a personal endeavour but a collective process that reactualises a collective lifeworld. The following section discloses the conceptual and methodological tools I have designed to operationalise these theoretical tenets.



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The theoretical and methodological framework If the theory of communicative action provides helpful pathways, it does not suffice to remove all difficulties. For this reason, Habermas’ framework is to be complemented by a web of concepts borrowed from other authors or purposely forged to inform a relevant conception of actors and action. As shown above, the theory of communicative action applied to the study of transnational phenomena is understood in relation to a conception of human actors as plural beings. People’s identity is made up of a multiplicity of poles that reflect the various processes of socialisation they went through during the course of their lives. Actors are ‘plural men’ (/women) to take Bernard Lahire’s term. Their behaviours bear the mark of their gender and age status, their professional and social milieu or their political and associational engagements. Through their multiple socialisations, people acquire a set of skills, dispositions and moral codes that enable them to respond to the constraints of their social and physical environment. People’s habitus, to take Bourdieu’s term, is composite. This multiplicity of embedding informs people’s lifeworld and their position in the world. Identity is a narrative they forge to invent a continuity beyond their composite social life. It fosters a feeling of uniqueness and individuality (Corcuff, 1999). Individuation stems from an effort to grapple with the complexity of human existence. More fundamentally, my reading of communicative action is tied to Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein: acting is, for individuals, taking a stand on their own being in the world. Both Habermas and Heidegger give to everyday action a central place and a strong communicative value in their respective analysis. Beyond this proximity, this focus on ‘Dasein’ informs the key role of temporality and spatiality in actors’ engagement. Each engagement is situated in time and space. It is underpinned by a life project, is primarily geared towards the present social environment but implicitly refers to other contexts and prior forms of socialisation (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Actors’ engagements are for them a means to locate into a spatial and temporal individual and collective trajectory. They are loaded with a conception of what they think they should do, but also with a collective and personal memory retranslated in relation to the present situation. Emergence, convergence, social institutions: operationalising the theory of communicative action This brief overview points to what I am looking for when analysing migrants’ development projects as communicative behaviours: the complexity of their identity structures, the stand they take with regard to their being expatriate villagers and the moral expectation they associate with it, but also the spatiality and temporality that underwrite their social engagements. I will now define the four concepts that enable me to operationalise this framework.



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Emergence. The concept of emergence refers to the production of behaviours that cannot be accounted for by the reproduction of past routines. Collective remittances offer an example of emergence. Their multiplication in different parts of the world testifies to the changing role of hometown networks within the context of globalisation. My contention is that emergence is itself an outcome of the multipolarisation of actors’ identity. Due to their multiple embedding, actors are confronted by a diversity of constraints and expectations that may be at odds with each other. This entails a process of distanciation and a capacity to adapt ideas, claims, skills or modes of being from one context to the other. Against this background, actors endorse innovative behaviours to adjust to their environment. Emergent behaviours can be defined as new patterns of actions undertaken by actors in order to cope with the contradictions posed by their social embedding. Convergence/divergence. But a given action, as creative as it can be, will never have far-reaching effects if it is not endorsed by a number of people large enough to have structural effects. The concept points to the processing of social change through the dissemination of innovative engagements. The coordination of innovative action, i.e. convergence, is a crucial step that is ignored by common ‘structure and agency’ approaches. As shown above, the theory of communicative action provides an explanation of this phenomenon through the concept of communicative rationality: an action is possible when it is deemed rational, i.e. it conforms to a shared understanding of the world. Conversely, an action which does not receive this collective validation is deemed divergent. Divergence is context-dependent. An action which is deemed as irrelevant in a given context can be acknowledged in another one. Divergence is part and parcel of a broader dynamic of social change when it hides a process of convergence in another social context. Social institution. The concept of social institutions is generally perceived either through the functions they achieve or as relatively stable patterns of social structuration that drive human activities. They are generally addressed as black boxes that give shape to the patterning of collective behaviours. Moving away from common approaches, I understand social institutions as places of central importance in communicative dynamics. In this regard, social institutions are understood as arenas in which emergent behaviours are forged and validated by the collective. They are the locus of exercise of communicative rationality. These dynamics can be addressed at two levels: at the individual level, people seek approval of their innovative behaviours in order to overcome the contradictions of their personal embedding; at the collective level, people endorse emergent behaviours in order to reinvent the membership to the group beyond the growing disparities between members. The concept has both a heuristic and methodological value. It provides a tool to understand the passage from emergence to convergence, and a place of observation of communicative dynamics and social elaboration. The three archetypical (but not exclusive) forms of social institution are families, associations and



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enterprises. They represent three key institutions of the main structural levels of a society: (1) the sphere of interpersonal relations, (2) economy and (3) polity/civil society. They are not modes of social patterning that are written in stone, but, on the contrary, places that make possible the rationalisation of social innovation. This approach accounts for the remodelling of group belonging and collective values beyond individuation. Mixed method approach But social institutions also provide a meso-level of analysis between individuals and their wider social, political, cultural and economic contexts. It provides the possibility to grasp the influence of policies or other context dynamics on people’s behaviours. Hometown organisations, understood as a migrant social institution, provide the methodological terrain for the study of hometown transnationalism. From a methodological point of view, this theoretical framework is likely to be supported by both quantitative and qualitative investigations. My personal research dwells on a combination of methods. In order to highlight the drivers explaining the surge in collective remittances over the past two decades, I resorted to a comparative approach. As mentioned in the introuction, the three investigated groups do not display the same pattern of engagement. Following Mead’s law of comparison, I compared two groups with a relatively close immigration and settlement history but which display discrepant forms and level of engagement (Moroccan and Algerian Berbers) and two groups with different migration profiles but with a high level of engagement in transnational development (Moroccan Berbers and Indian Punjabis). The collection of data was supported by both qualitative and quantitative investigations. I carried out over a hundred interviews with leaders and members of hometown organisations, carried out field investigations in London and the Midlands, in the Paris area and Southern France, but also in Southern Morocco and Punjab. The fieldwork included observations of meetings, participation in money collection festivals, visits to development projects and analysis of video documents produced by migrants and myself and of course interviews with policymakers and NGO officials working with hometown organisations. But this qualitative approach was complemented by a quantitative study of associations and their members. I marshalled a dataset of North African and Indian associations in France and the UK thanks to available national and institutional databases. It includes information about 1,600 Moroccan, 1,200 Algerian and 1,200 Indian associations: their date and city of creation, local and cross-border activities. This quantitative assessment of the three investigated associational fields was complemented by the analysis of the INED2 dataset ‘Trajectoires et Origines’. The survey is primarily focused on immigrant integration, but it includes a large body of questions on transnational practices, including on associational and philanthropic activities. The analysis was carried out in France only and therefore excludes Indians in the UK. But it provides first-hand information on the profiles of North African volunteers.



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This combination of methods proved to be helpful in unravelling the different aspects of the communicative processes at play behind the sending of collective remittances. Field investigations enabled me to uncover the mechanisms of emergence and convergence, i.e. the motivations of hometowners, the identity and communicative dynamics that undergird their engagement, the negotiations with villagers, other migrants and stakeholders. The quantitative work provides the possibility to assess the convergence of development engagement at a broader level. The snowball approach to field investigation risks a focus on dynamics that, in fact, are far from being representative of migrants’ activities at large. And this is all the more so when informers and stakeholders tend to point researchers towards the most successful organisations and endeavours that do not necessarily mirror the reality of volunteering. The second contribution of the quantitative approach is to embed investigated dynamics into their wider structural background. It delineates the profile of actors, their social or professional embedding, and beyond, points to the importance of identity multipolarisation. The two sets of methods proved to be complementary in many regards. For example, field investigations highlighted the key role of some categories of actors (i.e. political activists and unionists) that were numerically too low to be statistically visible among immigrant volunteers. Conversely, the dataset provided an image of immigrant civil societies that explained the discrepant access to financial and technical resources available for the three investigated groups. The following section highlights some of the key findings of this research. Key findings The research highlights the common structural features that underwrite transnational engagements and collective remittances. Transnationalism appears as an emergent process through which expatriates strive to make sense of their dual embedding in host and home societies. The decision to migrate is submitted to an array of constraints and obligations. For emigrants, the departure to foreign lands is primarily a quest for self-achievement, the desire to become a fullyfledged actor beyond the determinisms of their social and economic embedding. But family members see in migration an opportunity to receive extra revenue. Emigrants are required to comply with the expectations attached to their condition and chief among them is the sending of remittances. Likewise, emigrants leave as villagers and remain villagers once abroad. The network dynamics of migration reconstitute them in the place of arrival as groups of hometowners. They reproduce in the place of arrival a close-knit web of assistance for those who arrive, but also make sure emigrants will keep on participating in their collective duties: the sending of money to the family, the financial or personal participation in collective events at home and abroad (weddings, village festivals . . .) and their contribution to collective projects (refurbishment of religious or public buildings, maintaining of collective agricultural infrastructures, etc.).



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The migration process occurs against the backdrop of a village lifeworld that informs the meaning of migration and the status of emigrants. This is a moral– practical framework that finds its origins in a period that precedes colonisation and the appearance of international mobility. The migration act and the status of the village expatriate are fraught with an array of positive and negative prejudices. If their capacity to experience foreign countries (and access to foreign monies) is envied, they also face the corruptive influence of western lifestyles. If they fail to respond to community pressure, they are readily accused of selfishness, of being westernised and oblivious to their roots. Migration is thereby framed by a moral geography in which the village is perceived as a moral centrality while destination settings are seen as places of corruption. Hometowners’ transnational engagements, including development projects, are always already part of a negotiation in which migrants seek to challenge the deep ambivalence of their status of expatriate while village members seek to make sure that the latter will carry on fulfilling their duties. This moral economy is further complicated by the bipolarisation of migrants’ life and their socialisation in the place of arrival. Their endorsement of new roles in the place of work or their household, their incorporation of class referentials, their inscription into political movements are among the elements that gradually break apart the initial homogeneity of the group of hometowners. Their engagement into development is to be understood against the background of centripetal identity dynamics. Development projects are loaded with multiple layers of meanings. For villagers, they are a renewal of the allegiance migrants devote to their home place. But for expatriate hometowners, they are a way of expressing the multipolarity of their condition. Projects introduce in the village elements of their everyday experience in the place of settlement. The connection of village houses to the water or electricity grid, the improvement of education or health services open the possibility for emigrants to give exposure to their living conditions in the place of arrival, and beyond, to renegotiate the moral geography that underwrites their status. Another central motive for hometown transnationalism highlighted by the study is the central importance of temporality in transnational dynamics. This dimension is salient in two regards. In the first place, temporality is marked by the gradual insertion of emigrants in their place of origin and the ensuing evolution of collective engagements. They first focus on the place of arrival and the settlement needs of the population. But, as their integration secures their economic, legal and social position, they may devote more time and resources to cross-border concerns. The transnational practices of hometown organisations thereby become more elaborated, shifting from occasional financial contributions to economic or infrastructure projects. In the second place, the temporal dimension of hometown transnationalism is salient through the building of a collective memory. Collective remittances are for hometowners a way of reconnecting with a long-term history of the sending community. This is apparent in the vocabulary they use to talk about their mobilisation. They constantly rely on concepts drawn



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upon the customary norms that used to regulate the village collective and spiritual life. An example is the term Tiwizi, which refers to the collective duties that villagers are to partake in: the maintaining of irrigation systems, collective building or collective festivals . . . A large number of Berber hometown organisations are called or include this term in their denomination. The word now refers to the collective engagements of expatriates in development projects. Among Indian Punjabis, the term seva, a religious concept for ‘a gift with no expectation of return’, is also widely used. The redefinition of customary terms in the framework of development is a way for emigrants to legitimate their action, but also to connect with the sending country’s culture and history. At the same, time, the new meanings given to these words, their transposition from religious or traditional registers to one of development and modernity, heralds the duality of their lifeworld. Heterogeneity of hometown groups The study further elicits the motives of engagements of four specific categories of hometowners. It shows that patterns of participation in development projects vary from one person to the other. Wealthy people use their capital to take the lead of projects. Their contribution is part of a class distinction strategy. They insist on responding to the needs of the village population in order to tacitly contrast their wealth with the poverty of villagers. Their participation is akin to philanthropy, in line with the definition that Simmel gives to this notion, that is to say a way of designating ‘poors’ in order to assert one’s upper-class position (Simmel, 2005). Wealthy philanthropists are more present among Indian Punjabis. Projects of expatriates in Punjab such as hospitals, cultural, sport or health centres, schools, are adorned with the name of donors in the hall. Plaques list names and, interestingly, the place where these philanthropists come from. Plaques aren’t only lists, but also maps of the hometown diaspora, often straddling several continents. Political activists and unionists find in development projects a way of converting their know-how with regard to collective mobilisation on transnational terrain. They often play a key role in hometown organisations, owing to their political inclinations, but also to their capacity to connect with local or national authorities and civil society organisations. They are able to translate the aims and needs of villagers and hometowners into palatable terms for bureaucrats and NGOs. Moroccans in France do not have the financial capacity of Punjabis in the UK, but their volunteer sector, which dates back to post-independence times, is the crucible of skilful activists. Some of these formed NGOs which bridged hometown organisations and national and international funding bodies. For instance, a former CFDT activist created in the late eighties an association called Migrations et Développement in Marseilles. This association was initially founded to electrify the leader’s village. But it served as an intermediary for the French Foreign Office, the European Union and other institutions during the



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nineties. It supported over 200 projects of different hometown groups, thereby making it a key actor in the development dynamics in Southern Morocco. For these activists, their participation in transnational projects is a way of finding a new terrain of civic engagement. But it is also for them a means to reconcile their village origin in the sending country with their past as activists in the arrival country. Until then, both aspects of their life were largely disconnected. Youngsters and retirees form the last two salient categories of hometowners. In many regards, they form two opposite groups. Retired people often bring to hometown groups a surge of dynamism. They have more time to dedicate to collective affairs. Their mobility between the sending and receiving places enables them to circulate information and resources between villagers and hometowners. And they are in a position to monitor the undertaking of projects. Through their participation, they retrieve a legitimate place in the village without cutting off their status of expatriate. Retired hometowners tend to justify their involvement as a form of customary duty, a fidelity to traditional village norms of Seva or Tiwizi. As opposed to their elders, the relationship with the village is for youngsters of a less personal nature. Most of them were in fact born in the sending country and grew up in Europe (the so-called 1.5 generation).3 They are in their twenties or thirties, at an age when they seek to reconnect with their family trajectory, and this is accompanied by the prospect of establishing a household for themselves. Their focus of interest is primarily the place where they live. Collective remittances give meaning to their migratory past with a view to finding a legitimate ground to their future in Europe. Beyond these differences, youngsters and elders share the same concern for transmission to the next generation. Development projects provide them with the possibility to show to their children the village life under a more attractive and modern light. The analysis of their motivations reveals the primary importance of temporality, the need to renew the meaning of their collective memory and the need to create a legitimate bond between a migratory past and the future of their children in the host society. These different categories, wealthy entrepreneurs, unionists, youngsters and retirees, find in development projects a platform for collective engagements. They often share little more than their common origin. Generational, class and political fault lines are a permanent threat to the cohesion of the group. In order to circumvent such disaggregation, hometown groups often bring to the fore the apolitical nature of their endeavour. They tend to avoid collaboration with local authorities and prefer to interact with an association or a charismatic villager during the undertaking of the project. This depoliticisation of development participation may seem at odds given the political background of some militants, and yet this appears as a strategy for hometown organisations to preserve the collective mobilisation. Depoliticisation, it can be said, is yet another outcome of the communicational rationalisation process at play within organisations, next to the reinvention of customary norms.



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Civil society and policy: the development turn of transnationalism in neoliberal globalisation Of course, the social morphology of hometown groups and its evolution is not the sole driver explaining the surge of collective remittances in recent years. The research analyses the bearing of the associational and policy environment on transnational processes. The quantitative analysis of the creation of migration associations shows discrepant pictures. Indeed, if the majority of Moroccan associations created in France are today homeland-oriented development organisations (including hometown organisations), this is far from being the case for Algerian ones. Since the early 2000s, development associations still form a minority with regard to the ones primarily concerned with sociocultural or civic issues in the host societies. Their transnational orientations, even if diverse in content, remain limited in volume. This difference is all the more noticeable in view of the fact that both associational fields have so far undergone relatively parallel histories of colonial and postcolonial activism. But the Moroccan volunteer sector has undergone a rapid mutation that has enabled it to divert public resources into development projects. In contrast, the decade-long civil conflict that affected the Algerian society during the nineties had a negative impact on the France-based volunteer sector. It was conducive to a fragmentation of the networks, pervaded by an enduring atmosphere of distrust. Indian associations display a mixed profile. Development NGOs are today the first category of association created among Indians in the UK, but they are not hometown organisations. The latter, even if field surveys in Punjab show that they are extremely dynamic, remain informal. Due to the financial resources they can muster internally, hometown networks do not feel the need to bother with the administrative intricacies of official registration. Hometown networks can count not only on the relative wealth of their members, but also on their outreach: collections are made among hometowners disseminated over several countries and continents, a mobilisation unseen among North Africans. This associational dynamic in which hometown transnationalism is embedded, hinges itself on its broader policy context. The act of sending country economies into global markets urged the states to find allies in foreign territories. Emigrants became key targets for two reasons: they are a primary source of foreign currency through their remittances, and they can become economic and political partners in their interactions with host countries. In consequence, Algeria, India and Morocco implemented policies meant to reform their relations with their expatriates and support their cross-border investments. Discourses about migration change and those who were perceived once as betrayers who were not willing to participate in the post-independence nation-building project became celebrated actors of national development. Ad-hoc public institutions (including ministries for nationals abroad) and programmes mushroomed. This sudden policy interest matters less for the resources it provides to volunteer organisations (the budgets, including those dedicated by destination states remain



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very low) than for the moral legitimacy it gives to development engagements. The neoliberal spirit that underpins the equation ‘a good emigrant is a development actor’ and imbues state discourses and actions, informs the migrants’ perception of their relations with the homeland. And this shift occurred in a context of neoliberal adjustment that was conducive to the establishment of a new governance of local development in sending areas. The withdrawal of the state and the subsequent delegation of development issues to local authorities and civil society actors opened a space for NGOs (including hometown organisations) to operate. This is particularly true in Morocco and India, but less in Algeria where the gas industry and the relative wealth of the state have limited the penetration of international organisations in the management of the domestic economy. The surge of collective remittances is an outcome of neoliberal inspired policies at the national and international levels. The deregulation of development management and codevelopment policies led public authorities to reconsider the role of emigrants. In turn, it created for expatriates new expectations (but also new resources) with regard to their relations with villagers. Following the thread from hometown organisations to broader policy context reveals another facet of hometown transnationalism: its sensitivity to neoliberal globalisation. Conclusion: revisiting the theory of communicative action Unfolding the meanings of collective remittances sheds a new light on hometown transnationalism. Under this lens, hometowners’ transnational engagements appear as an effort for actors to deal with the multipolarisation of their identity, and beyond, to redefine their collective identity of villager within the political, class and social heterogeneity of hometown networks. The collective appropriation of this emergent process is made possible through the depoliticisation of transnational engagements and the reinvention of customary concepts. These are key elements of communicative rationalisation processes that transformed this emergent dynamic into convergence. At the opposite end of agentic processes, one observes the broader restructuring of immigrant volunteering against the backdrop of neoliberal policy-making. The theory of communicative action appears as a powerful instrument to unravel the sheer complexity of human agency in a multi-stranded world. But comparing Habermas’ theory with field investigations has led me to adjust (and even distort) the initial theoretical framework. My use of the theory moves communicative action away from verbal communication and speech action. By contrast, I see any form of action as communicative. Human agency, moulded by communicative rationality, bears the mark of the actors’ lifeworld. It says something about who people think they are in the world, even if this process is partly implicit and unconscious. In other words, this approach expands on Habermas’ theory to address the communicative dimension of non-verbal action.



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In doing so, I have re-welded the notion of social institution in order to conceptualise the framework in which the communicative dynamics of agency occur. Social institutions provide a more stable ground than the notion of network to examine collective dynamics. They are a locus of social interactions in which the status of individuals is predefined by internal rules of functioning. At the same time, they are places where individuals may rearticulate their membership with regard to their bounds outside of the social institution. The concept thereby provides the possibility to observe the tension between the centripetal force of collective belonging and the centrifugal trends of actors’ individuality. Social institutions act as a grassroots remedy against the disjuncture of the structural sectors of society. This social glue is deployed not only by civil society organisations, but also by families in the sphere of interpersonal relations and enterprises (through workers/employers negotiations) in the economic sphere. Finally, listening to what actions say about their perpetrators, one uncovers an utterly different conception of who actors are. Acting is not primarily a pursuit of interest, but a stand on a collective understanding of the world. The question of interest does not disappear, but becomes of secondary importance. From an explaining factor (explenans) that underpins people’s practices, it is relegated to something to be explained (explenandum), a situated construct that people endorse in the light of a broader understanding of the world. It is ultimately another conception of the subject that is uncovered by this approach. Moving away from a Cartesian conception of the subject who ponders the world and its possibilities from the confine of its cogito, this research suggests people’s identity and perceptions reflect the complexity of the world in which they are embedded. It poses the deep ambivalence of the human world as a position from which a person has to consider his/her own being. This approach associates Habermas’ theory with Mead’s conception of a segmented being, and beyond, with Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein. Acting is not solely a stand taken on the truth of the world, but on the truth of being in the world. Notes 1 The research is to be published in a forthcoming book: Hometown transnationalism. long distance villageness among Indian Punjabis and North African Berbers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (November 2015). 2 Institut National des Etudes Démographiques, http://teo.site.ined.fr/en/ (access date 15 July 2014). 3 The second generation born in the host country of their parents are relatively absent from hometown organisations. The normative framework that derives from the villageness of their parent is for them an abstract consideration coming from another time. References Archer, M. S. (1995) Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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