Conference - June 22-23, 2018

Homeland-Diaspora Relations in Flux

Greece and Greeks abroad at times of Crisis

St Antony's College, University of Oxford.

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Presenting paper

Migrants mean remittances! Perhaps not anymore!

Migration has more often than not been associated with remittances. In fact, the literature abounds of accounts of migrants regularly sending out money back home to support family members or other dependents, and this applies to earlier waves of emigration from Greece too. Accordingly, an early expectation when researching or/and studying what has been tagged as the New Greek migration (associated with the economic crisis that erupted in Greece since late-2009), has been that in this instance too new Greek migrants would regularly be dispatching money back home. However, from information gathered in a survey I undertook on the basis of a semi-structured questionnaire of 230 Greek emigrants in employment at the time they were interviewed, it surfaced that most respondents were just not remitting money back home! This divergence from the norm is the problem I intend to explore. Taking this finding as the starting point I attempt to relate it to other social-economic features of the particular migrant sample, the motives they have given for migrating and their circumstances abroad. On that basis I make an attempt to indentify linkages, and explore the reasons underlying this unusual for migrants behavior to arrive at an explanation.

Author bio

Sokratis Koniordos (BA, Deree, BA Panteion, MA Kent, PhD LSE) is Full Professor at the University of Crete. Has also taught at the following universities: Middlesex, Quest-Nanterre-Paris 8, Cyprus, Milan-Bicocca, Open, Thessaloniki, and HOU. Main research interests include: economic sociology, work, migration, modernity, civil society, values. Currently he is Chair of the National Associations Council, European Sociological Association, Editor of Greek Sociological Review, and PI of the WVS-wave 7 for Greece. Koniordos’ has published 18 volumes; for instance, The Handbook of European Sociology, New York and London, Routledge, 2014 (with A. A. Kyrtsis); Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society, London: Routledge, 2010 (with P. Baert, G. Procacci and C. Ruzza); Towards a Sociology of Artisans: Continuity and Discontinuities in Comparative Perspectives, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Also, he has authored several research papers, for example: “An Overview of Greece’s ‘Brain Drain’ and the Crisis: Morphology and Beyond”, in Ch. Giousmpasoglou, et al. (eds), Brain Drain in Higher Education: the case of the Southern European Countries and Ireland, (2017), New York, Nova Publishing, pp. 17-70. “Living on Borrowed Money: On the Social Context and Responses of the Current Greek Crisis”, (2011), Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter, 12 (3): 48-57. “Social Capital Contested” (2008), International Review of Sociology, 18(2): 317-337.
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